An article in the New York Times in 2015 provoked Michael Truscello and Ajamu Nangwaya to bring together the volume: “Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up? Organizing the Twenty-First Century Resistance” (2017). This book is divided into two sections, one on the Global North and another on the Global South, and is an “anthology of […]
Tags: #collective action #people power #Resistance #Social movements #Struggle
Rene Dumont’s “False Start in Africa” (1962) is arguably one of the most influential and widely read texts on agriculture in Africa. The book is more of a conversation, than it is an academic text. However, Dumont was a pioneering voice for identifying key issues such as soil erosion, micronutrient deficiencies, soil type and quality […]
Tags: #Africa #Agriculture #False Start in Africa #Rene Dumont #Rural Development
“Citizen Action and National Policy Reform: Making Change Happen” (2010), edited by Gaventa and McGee, presents a series of case studies of citizen movements and advocacy for national policy change. The book fits well within the “How Change Happens” space. Cases are presented from: South Africa, Philippines, Mexico, Chile, India, Brazil, Morocco and Turkey. The […]
Tags: #Advocacy #Citizen Action #Civil society #How change happens #Policy
As other reviewers of this book have mentioned, there is probably few who are better suited to write this book than Paul Richards, with such a depth of knowledge and experience of the areas where the epidemic occurred. In “Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic” (2016) the author argues that faced “with […]
Tags: #Citizen science #Ebola #Epidemic #Public Health #Social science
Cochrane, L. (2017) Worldviews Apart: Agriculture Extension and Ethiopian Smallholder Farmers. Journal of Rural Social Sciences 32: 98-118. Abstract: This paper presents an inquiry-based learning assessment into why farmers in the highlands of Ethiopia were not adopting a new planting methodology promoted by the government and non-governmental organizations. It offers a process of reflexivity whereby assumptions […]
Tags: #Agricultural extension #Agriculture #Ethiopia #Rural Development #Worldviews
Edited volumes do not tend to have staying power as a publication – collections of essays pass like most academic articles. Rarely does an edited volume remain an essential reading for decades. “Ethiopia: The Challenge of Democracy from Below” edited by Bahru Zewde and Siegfried Pausewang (2002) is one of those books. A number of […]
Tags: #Democracy #Ethiopia #Governance #Participation #Power