Overview

This book addresses, for the first time, the question of how development NGOs attempt to 'listen' to communities in linguistically diverse environments. NGOs are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they 'listen' to the people and communities that they are trying to serve, but this can be an immensely challenging task where there are significant language and cultural differences. However, until now, there has been no systematic study of the role of foreign languages in development work. The authors present findings based on interviews with a wide range of NGO staff and government officials, NGO archives, and observations of NGO-community interaction in country case studies. They suggest ways in which NGOs can reform their language policies to listen to the recipients of aid more effectively.

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9783030517755

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Angela M. Crack is Reader in Civil Society at the University of Portsmouth, where she leads the ‘Transnational Civil Society’ research cluster. Her research specialism is NGOs and civil society, and she is the author of several journal articles on this subject as well as Global Communication and Transnational Public Spheres (Palgrave, 2007). She is the founder and co-convenor of the British International Studies Association (BISA) Working Group on NGOs. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate units that focus on the role of civil society actors in world politics. Hilary Footitt is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies, University of Reading, and PI for the AHRC funded project: 'The Listening Zones of NGOs: Languages and Cultural Knowledge in development programmes'. She was in the interdisciplinary research team of the Leverhulme funded project, 'The Liberal Way of War', led in the Politics and International Relations Dept. of the University, and has taught on the Masters programme in War and Conflict. She has published widely on languages in international settings.. Wine Tesseur is Researcher in the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies at the University of Reading. She is currently working on the AHRC-funded project ""The Listening Zones of NGOs: Languages and Cultural Knowledge in Development Programmes"", which aims to explore the role that languages and cultural knowledge play in the policies and practices of development NGOs. She has taught and published on language and translation policies in NGOs.

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