In four days, I am embarking on my second journey to Nepal. Since I traveled there in 2009, I have been planning my trip back, or rather scheming my next trip back. In order to pay for the research, travel expenses and most importantly, research assistant, I applied for a CIIS Grant and Kahr's Award. Luckily I received both to travel from December 21st until January 18th to perform research on my project titled, "Grassroots NGOs in Uganda and Nepal: Structure, Agency, and Identity." Luckily, I have quite a crew accompanying my travels and research. St. Lawrence alumni and current students will be working alongside me for support, inspiration, and interpretation. Not to mention another student, Kelly Prime, is studying traditional methods of healing thus giving a multidisciplinary perspective to my research that I hope to document as we go along.
My main research questions are:
- What shapes, limits, and enables the conditions of possibility for education in Nepal?
- How is media, especially social media, changing the structure and agency of grassroots NGOs in rural and urban Nepal?
- How does the role of a NGO in a local community impact the identities of all people involved?
I hope to travel to various cities and villages to create a multi-faceted perspective of NGO perspectives in Nepal. I am planning on traveling to Kathmandu, Birgunj, Nichuta (village where Literacy for Nepal built a library and Brijlal Chaudhari's home), Pokhara, and hopefully Dhanghadi. But who knows, travel plans can rapidly change!
Then I plan on comparing this knowledge to case studies and NGOs in Uganda. Although these two countries are absolutely nothing alike, I hope to provide a comparative perspective of the differences and simialrities in NGO influences in two countries that I feel comfortable discussing. I take a Foucaultian perspective on the uselessness of "global, totalizing theories" (Power/Knowledge) Development and NGO work specifically to the community and cannot be managed internationally the same way. This has been one of my major realizations after traveling to Nepal for 6 weeks and living in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania for 4 months. Nothing really is the same. Neoliberalism, media, NGO management, religions, and governance (and much more!) all work completely differently. Language is the most central difference. In Nepal, there is no word for development. But the word "vikas" or "bikaas" is used to describe it. This ultimately means to open up to the West considering Nepal was closed off until the 1980s. But open up to what? Is development helping the people of Nepal or simply opening up their economy and to international influence?
Thus for the next month my blogs will document interviews, experiences, setbacks and whatever comes our way. Finally, I will focus on profiling of particular NGOs considering a huge part of my research is interviewing urban and rural NGOs. Warning: Posts may go off topic as the altitude consisently adjusts my consciousness to hybrid Kathmandu culture and isolated Hindu communities in the Tarai.