Design thinking

Since I started  betterplace.org, I have been looking for inspiring ideas in the field of social innovation. Naturally my thinking has been very much shaped by anthropology and thus I have followed with interest anything at the intersection between development and ethnography. Recently one of the useful (and fashionable) concepts has been design thinking.
Design thinking has [...]

Accountability in the aid industy

Earlier this week I attended an inspiring 2 day workshop at the Berlin Civil Society Center.

I wrote an overview about the workshop on my betterplace.org blog, but would like to share it also with Culture Matters readers, as it concerns the development industry about which anthropologists have quite a bit to say.
The topic was “Exploring Mutual [...]

New blog: MqVU

A group of us — anthropology PhD students and faculty — working on China’s development projects, investment, related migration flows and their implications around the globe — have started a new blog, MqVU (the name reflects that it will very soon be a joint venture between people based at Macquarie University in Sydney and the Free [...]

Downloading Firefox 3 and the digital divide

The new version of the Firefox web browser was released yesterday with much fanfare in circles that get excited about web browsers. The Mozilla folk were attempting to crack a Guinness Book record for the most downloads in one day, and they appear to have been successful with reportedly more than 8 million copies [...]

From refugees to ‘envirogees’?

Scott Thill at Alternet has published an article on the social impact of climate change.  The article goes as far as coining a new term: ‘envirogee’.  The implication seems to be that ‘refugee’ has a certain amount of baggage, being intrinsically associated with political persecution.  We are entering an age, mainly due to climate change, [...]

The global food crisis II

Following on from Nursel’s recent post, I’d like to draw readers to a recent New York Times article about the “global food crisis”. According to the article, rising commodities prices, especially fuel and food prices, are producing unprecedented stress and anger across the globe, resulting in unrest and even riots. The article includes [...]

The Global Food Crisis

George Monbiot’s latest article ‘The Pleasures of the Flesh’ on 15 April 2008  is about the causes of the current global food crisis. Currently there are food crises in 37 countries. Monbiot says “the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1).” and according to the World Bank one [...]

Link to applied neuro-anthropology

Normally, I wouldn’t cross-post from the other anthropology site that I do, but my partner-in-blogging on Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende, has been putting up some great posts that could just have easily been featured on Culture Matters because they’re about applying anthropology in all sorts of ways. I won’t reference them all, but I thought [...]

development 2.0.

Lately I have kept a very low profile on Culture Matters. One of the reasons for this is a project I would like to put up for discussion today: www.betterplace.org, an internet platform I co-founded and have been working on for the past 10 months. It went online last friday and I would greatly appreciate the [...]

The dangers of biofuels

George Monbiot has just written a powerful article about the dangers of biofuels.   Amongst other things, he points out the enormous social impact they will have if agricultural land is increasingly used for vehicles during a time of unprecedented demand to produce food in the Third World.  Essentially, the increasing production of biofuels, unless strictly [...]