“I know! I live here”: poor women and the work of empowerment

To trace the effects of empowerment programmes in the Global South, attention needs to be focused on the everyday practices of frontline staff, or fieldworkers, who convey empowerment ideas and practices at the grassroots. This is especially critical when fieldworkers work in the marginalised communities where they also live. Instead of looking outward towards a programme’s outcomes, this article turns inward to examine the impact of women fieldworkers’ dual experiences of development on their decisions and practices in the field. The ethnography of women fieldworkers in a government-led women’s empowerment programme for the poor in Delhi, India reveals the uneasy relationship of women’s empowerment to the larger contradictory development paradigm that they work within. Fieldworkers used their experiences as poor women to meet programme quotas, while also side-lining social change in favour of shielding clients from ineffective programme activities.     

Arabian Travellers, 1800–1950: An Analytical Bibliography

Western travelogue writing has long been a crucial source of information for scholars of the Arabian Peninsula, but nonetheless, this body of literature has not yet been studied comprehensively and systematically by a modern scholar. This article addresses that deficiency by collecting data on the nationality, routes travelled and intertextual citations of 91 authors active in Arabia from 1800 to 1950. The results of this study provide quantitative verification for several existing theories on Western travel writing in Arabia, including Edward Said’s claim that ‘Orientalism’ was predominantly an Anglo-French project, and observations by Said, James Canton and others that European travellers had intimate ties with European imperialism. At the same time, this study challenges some existing arguments about Western travel writing in Arabia, especially claims by Alaine Hutson and others about the inherent unreliability of this corpus of sources.     

The inhibiting factors that principal investigators experience in leading publicly funded research

Securing public funding to conduct research and leading it by being a principal investigator (PI) is seen as significant career development step. Such a role brings professional prestige but also new responsibilities beyond research leadership to research management. If public funding brings financial and infrastructure support, little is understood about the inhibiting factors that publicly funded PIs face given the research autonomy offered by publicly funded research. Our study finds that there are three key PI inhibiting factors (1) political and environmental, (2) institutional and (3) project based. Traditional knowledge, skills and technical know-how of publicly funded PIs are insufficient to deal with the increasing managerial demands and expectations i.e. growing external bureaucracy of public funding agencies. Public funding is no longer the ‘freest form of support’ as suggested by Chubin and Hackett (Peerless science: peer review and US science policy. Suny Press, New York, 1990) and the inhibiting factors experienced by publicly funded PIs limits their research autonomy. We also argue that PIs have little influence in overcoming these inhibiting factors despite their central role in conducting publicly funded research.