This paper explores the generationing of education and development in five villages in Northern Sierra Leone. Understood as ‘fields’ governed by power dynamics, we consider how the interactive ‘fields’ of generation, education and development coalesce, re/structuring adult and child ‘being’ and ‘doing’. We explore the tensions that arise between transformation and preservation in the field in light of wider social, cultural and economic change, and the negotiation of the generational contract in contexts of high risk and inter-dependency.

In spite of widespread initiatives to improve access to education for girls, substantive concerns remain. While there is a rich and growing body of literature on gendered experiences of school in majority world contexts, absent is a focus on how this intersects with children's out of school lives. Further, research with children in rural communities is limited, including those who are in the earlier years of their schooling. This paper addresses these gaps, focusing on gendered dynamics in the everyday lives of children in five rural communities in Northern Sierra Leone. Drawing on Bourdieu, it explores the dialectical interplay between gendered and generational structures, understood as the gendered habitus, in a wider context of structural poverty, uneven and fragile post-colonial restructuring and development. This sets the groundwork for children's gendered dis/positioning, and ultimately capacity to engage with schooling.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development. This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

No abstract

This article explores contrasting social constructions of the ‘value of children’ in a rural village in Northern Sierra Leone. It investigates how the meanings of childhood, its temporal extension and children’s (present and future) roles are differently interpreted in the context of humanitarian intervention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and participatory research with children, it explores how child work and education are conceptualised by a range of different actors (local authorities, families and international NGOs). The analysis sheds light on the tensions which arise between children’s ‘present usefulness’ to family livelihoods through their work at home and their potential future utility through their ‘work’ at school. Taking two case study exemplars, it shows how international NGOs’ humanitarian constructions of African children as innocent victims, ‘emotionally priceless’ and rights bearing can be locally reconfigured and appropriated for economic gain. The article demonstrates marginalised children’s active role in blurring boundaries between emotional, monetary, global and local valuations of what children ‘should’ do and be. It also highlights how the ‘humanitarian value’ of childhood constitutes the bedrock upon which Sierra Leone’s alternative futures are being actively imagined and contested along ‘North–South’ transactions.

No abstract

This article explores the interplay between image and reality in the Thai seafood industry’s humanitarian engagements with migrant labour. Revisiting Aihwa Ong’s notion of ‘worlding’ and Peter Jackson’s discussion of the ‘Thai regime of images’, it examines the situated, informal interactions between migrant rights NGO s, fishing companies and state officials in the Thai port city of Samut Sakhon, on the outskirts of Bangkok. Through ethnographic case studies, this analysis illuminates the ‘invisible worldings’ that regulate spaces of migrant workforce from behind the scenes. As I show, migrant labour NGO s operate in a context-sensitive play of appearances and disappearances, humanitarian aid and migrant forced labour, and need to navigate local hierarchies of power in the service of Thailand’s international ‘image’ (phap-lak). It is argued that ‘invisible worldings’ sustain Thailand’s ongoing leadership in the fish trade and, concomitantly, the Thai military government’s cosmetic attempts to rebuild global reputation amid growing international scrutiny.

No abstract