The new episode of the IDS Between the Lines podcast examines how the ‘giving’ industry of development can be an extractive industry as well, through the use of domestic workers and the lack of rights that these workers often have.
The podcast features an interview with Dinah Hannaford, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston, whose latest book: Aid and the Help: International Development and the Transnational Extraction of Care looks at the relationship between domestic workers and development agencies.
Development agencies across the world have policies on their websites that include equality, diversity and inclusivity when it comes to pay, pensions and hiring suitable candidates. But what happens to those domestic workers who are hired by international development staff to work in their homes. Do they have the same rights for the staff that they work for?
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Interviewed by IDS Research Fellow Deepta Chopra, Dinah Hannaford discusses her findings – with a particular focus on the aid industry in Senegal – and how workers employed by development agencies in expat contexts engage with the local workers who provide essential services such as cleaning.
Whilst a lot of gender work in recent years, including work from IDS, has looked at the rights for domestic workers in various contexts including balancing unpaid care work and paid work, little has been written about those workers who work for development agencies in expat contexts, for organisations such as the United Nations, Oxfam, Save the Children, or World Vision.
Listen to the podcast to learn more about the paid care work that domestic workers do, how this paid care work is devalued, even by aid workers who work in development organisations – and how this is linked to the broader devaluation of care as work.
About the author
Dinah Hannaford is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston. She is a cultural anthropologist whose work centers around the political economy of intimate life. As an experienced ethnographic field researcher with a strong linguistic foundation in French, Italian, and Wolof, Hannaford uses fine-grained ethnography to offer fresh insights into the conditions, challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. With an eye to questions of gender and power, her work provides a substantive contribution to crucial questions about mobility, technology, intimacy and inequality.
About the interviewer
Deepta Chopra is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. She is a feminist social scientist working on women’s empowerment and gendered politics of policy processes. Her research interests primarily focus on women’s struggles, the empowerment of women and girls, and its core links with their paid work and unpaid care work.
About this podcast
This podcast series explores ground-breaking ideas in development for positive social and environmental change. Each month we feature an interview with an expert in international development who will talk about their latest research and ideas. Episodes content could feature authors of new books, IDS research or interviews with special guest stars.
The discussions give an insight on the themes covered, exploring the challenges and discoveries, and why the issues matter for progressive and sustainable development globally.
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