This paper explores the cross-cultural production of knowledge within participatory development. Drawing on in-depth interviews, group discussions and participant observation with stakeholders in the first phase of the New Zealand Official Development Assistance (NZODA) participatory impact assessment pilot (PIAP), we explore how stakeholders participated and perceived their participation in the knowledge produced within the PIAP. This case study followed one stream of the stakeholders participating, which incorporated representatives from NZODA and their evaluation consultants, a New Zealand nongovernment organization (NGO) and their Indian partner NGO, the communities with which the Indian NGO works, and a facilitator of this pilot. The information generated illustrates how different frameworks and methodologies of participation enable and constrain the inclusion of culturally different expressions and constructions of power/knowledge, and how participatory development faces ongoing challenges to facilitate the inclusion of 'alternative' and 'indigenous' knowledges without their simultaneous subordination.
Debate surrounding spirituality has been gaining prominence within development studies. In contrast to the limited consideration previously given to this issue, recent research is articulating the way that practices of spirituality and development inform one another. Geographies of development must therefore also address these concerns. This is particularly important given the relevance of the spatial politics within this debate to aspects of contemporary human geography. I suggest an embodied geographical approach to be an important way of responding to these debates and the way that they intersect each other, as well as an appropriate place for addressing issues of spirituality within development geography. I discuss how an embodied approach might also address some of the underlying and enduring tensions for development theory and practice, which are, namely, the challenge of negotiating predetermined lacks in the context of multiple and complex relationships.
Based on participatory research with two community groups with a Christian spirituality, which are a Melanesian settlement and parish in Fiji and a women's church-based group in Tanzania, this article hopes to express particular embodied spaces of hope. The articulation of these spaces is drawn from our exploration of the interconnection between community development and Christian spirituality; both of which implicitly seek to engender and realize hope. The hopes expressed and the expressions of hopes realized within the communities, require an understanding of eschatology and embodied subjectivity within Christian spirituality to appreciate the embodied spaces of hope here articulated. Combining this theological contextualization of hope with the “visceral philosophy” of Irigaray and Deleuze provides a richer vision of these embodied spaces of hope. In particular, insight is given into the messianic character of both embodiment and hope and consequentially the way this messianic spatiality informs the character of the hoped for community development.
In 2014 women from around our Anglican Communion gathered to explore our lives of prayer under the conference banner “Anglican Women at Prayer: Weaving Our Bonds of Affection.” This article is an adaptation of the plenary address for that conference. Using reflections from my own prayer life and the lives of women who have been research partners with me in the Pacific and in Africa, I seek to articulate the sacred thread expressed through our shared stories and prayers. Through this lens I explore, in turn, each of the three central threads of the conference theme: weaving, being bound together, and affection. These reflections seek to prompt and inspire other women to explore and share the sacred thread within their own lives of prayer. In doing so we will increase the richness with which we continue to interweave our loving connection to each other and to the different parts of this world that we call our home.
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