EADI CONFERENCE 2023
The annual conference of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) was organised by the Centre for African and Development Studies (CEsA), ISEG-Lisbon School of Economics and Management/University of Lisbon (Portugal) in July 2023. The central theme of the conference was “Towards New Rhythms of Development”.
The 2023 EADI Conference promoted a hybrid space (in-person and online) to explore the multiple and varied spatial and temporal rhythms of development (e.g. planetary, climatic and seasonal, economic and capitalist, political, institutional) in light of a fundamental transformation of policies, practices, mindsets and behaviours in the world. The conference framework highlighted the need to consider a variety of data, evidence and research to identify key challenges and to develop new concepts, methods and policies.
On 11 July, Prof Matt Baillie Smith and Dr Bianca Fadel co-convened the seed panel “Everyday rhythms of voluntary labour for change: beyond ‘volunteering for development’” which invited contributions critically interrogating how voluntary labour has been mobilised in development, or that explore the rhythms and dynamics of voluntary labour outside traditional framings. This included contexts such as community responses to Covid-19, activist organising for the climate emergency and responses to displacement. As part of this panel, Dr Moses Okech presented the RYVU paper “‘I call it work and at the same time I call it volunteering’: Navigating Hidden Volunteer Economies in Refugee Settings in Uganda” investigating the emergence, production and impact of volunteering economies through and against development through research evidence from Uganda. The paper generated discussions amongst conference attendees on how volunteering for humanitarian and development organisations can become a form of precarious work, increasingly disconnected from the ideas of citizenship and civic agency that are celebrated in its promotion and mainstreaming in policy-making.
On 13 July, Prof Baillie Smith and Dr Fadel also presented the RYVU paper “Refugee Volunteering and Responses to Displacement in Uganda: Navigating Service-Delivery, Work, Precarity and Development” as part of the seed panel “Overcoming forced displacement and envisaging translocal development: Revisiting durable solutions and approaches towards global refugee crises“. This paper provoked debates on how volunteering can provide often unseen connections within and between refugee communities, with host communities and with home communities, forming translocal spaces in which refugee solidarities and agencies can emerge. Based on RYVU evidence, the paper also argues that volunteering connects with responses to displacement in ways that are shaped by refugee subjectivities and livelihoods in particular places, but its potential to offer alternative approaches is ambivalently situated between self-reliance strategies and the perpetuation of dependencies.