Postdoctoral Researcher on The Bad Project: Knowledge and aid beyond the project economy
Faculty of Management & Business (MAB)
Tampere University
August 2022 – August 2026
About project:
If you have ever worked at the desk in an organization – any organization – chances are you have traded in grant application drafts, logframes and progress reports.These are some of the tools through which the money that pays our work is channeled, and our labour managed, across geographical locations, educational divides, and racialized and gendered hierarchies. They make up what we call, following sociologists of organizations and development studies scholars, the project economy: an economy in which we all produce projects, and then labour for them. The project economy seems to be everywhere, from unemployment policies in the Nordic countries, to reconstruction efforts in Haiti. Yet it remains mostly invisible.
Our research explores the inner workings of this economy and thinks with existing and imagined ways of organizing otherwise.
- Perhaps we should tell the stories of “bad projects” that were never implemented, or were left incomplete?
- Listen to what resources that went wasted, and people that had to live through “failures” have to say?
- Perhaps we should take seriously the administrative tools with which we respond to crises, and indeed rethink them, as we all face overlapping climate and health breakdowns?
These are among the questions that drive our work. Drawing on our extensive professional experience in the humanitarian NGO and academic sectors, we look at how the project economy silently shapes Western donors’ relations with the “Global South”, as well as how it determines the working lives of researchers, academic and not. Our “bad project” strives to go beyond the “solutionism”, performances of control, and government through precarity embedded in project economies.
Research Fellow
School of Geography
University of Leeds
June 2020 – April 2022
About project:
The ESRC funded project examined how financial and digital technologies are transforming refugee governance. Debit cards have radically changed humanitarian aid and post-disaster relief, allowing both providers and recipients greater flexibility in providing for basic needs. Tech start-ups and volunteer cartographers have produced a range of apps, maps and digital information hubs for refugees seeking local information. Financial and digital technologies allow people to move, live and work in new ways and yet there is little research asking how digital technologies and debit cards change relationships between humanitarian organisations, aid workers, refugees and recipients, new private sector actors and government agencies.
Affiliated Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Helsinki
Honorary Fellow
Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL)