Civil Society and Citizenship Volunteering Development education |
What matters to me
My research started from a concern with how issues of global development and global justice are understood and engaged with by citizens in the global North. That research developed into a broader interest in citizenship and civil society and, most recently, volunteering. My initial interest in volunteering focused on international volunteers, and was an extension of my longer standing concern with how people who are not development professionals, engage with development and stuggles for global justice. My current work is focused on the diverse ways volunteers from different parts of the world are engaged in in development and humanitarian settings. I am particularly interested in the roles of volunteers as innovators, the kinds of knowledge volunteering produces, and in the kinds of citizenship volunteering offers. Alongside this, I have an interest in co-production, as a subject for study as well as a way of working as an academic. Across these areas and through diverse projects, my work has addressed how development is constructed in schools, how NGOs engage citizens in development, development education, representations of development, the life histories of development activists, international volunteering, professionalisation and citizenship, faith based volunteering, qualitative methodologies and emotions in development research. Through this, I have worked in a range of countries across Europe, North America, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. |