The Ambivalence of Altruism: White Canadian Women in International Development in East Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates what remains of ‘the white man’s burden’ – or, in this case, the ‘white woman’s burden’ – and how it continues to structure the ethos and everyday lives of white women Canadian development workers living and working in East Africa. While those who decide to work overseas often do so with a desire to ‘do good,’ once arriving in the field development workers are often caught between these altruistic ideals and the (neo)colonial and racial inequalities that make up the foundation of the development industry. This dissertation extends earlier works to more fully and empirically understand the subject position of development workers and how development workers reaffirm, negotiate, and contest their position of white and economic privilege within global and localized racial hierarchies as they are encountered and enacted ‘on the ground.’ Bringing together the methodological and epistemological frameworks of transnational feminism and critical race and whiteness studies, I draw from primary data collected onsite from September-December 2015 and May-June 2016, including twenty-one semi-structured in-depth formal interviews with self-identified white women Canadian development workers living and working in Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda. I approach this inquiry through three primary research questions: (1) How are the subjectivities and lived encounters of white women Canadian development workers structured through (neo)colonial and racialized conceptions of ‘doing good’?; (2) How do these development workers simultaneously reinforce and seek to contest hegemonic development narratives?; and (3) How are the subjectivities of these development workers potentially (re)produced and (re)configured through encounters on the ground? Ultimately, I argue, the contemporary white man’s burden manifests in these women’s lives as a deeply profound yet fraught relationship to their sense of self and purpose in the world, an ambiguous positioning raising questions about the motif of ‘doing good’ and forcing a confrontation with the self as much as with the imagined Other.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.055 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".