Aidland in South Asia: humanitarian crisis and the contours of the global aid industry in the long 1970s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article uses the experiences of expatriate aid workers in South Asia to examine the contours of the global aid industry in the long 1970s. It begins by outlining the impact of the crisis on the aid sector, before using case studies of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from three Anglophone states – Britain, Canada (Québec excepted) and Ireland – to examine the spaces of social experience, spaces of knowledge circulation and imagined spaces of belonging and solidarity in which ideas of aid-giving were made. The article is framed through a concept that ethnographers call ‘Aidland’: the mix of volunteers, experts and aid professionals that make up the aid community. Taking this model as its starting point, the article makes three claims about the aid community that emerged in South Asia and what its story tells us about transnational activism in the long 1970s. The first is to see this as a moment of acceleration for the sector, in which its activities radically diversified while simultaneously carrying with them the baggage of what had come before. Second, and related, it argues that gwhile there were certain characteristics that were common to aid workers in every environment, we should be careful not to lose sight of the specific contextual factors and points of reference on which responses to humanitarian crises were based. Understanding that complexity, and its consequences, provides us with the basis for the final claim put forward here. By laying bare the processes through which ‘Aidland’ was constructed in South Asia, we can test how that community imagined and reinforced a particular (paternalistic) role for itself in the Third World.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".