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Brokering Religion and Development: Ethnographic Approaches to NGOs

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Religious NGOs have attracted considerable scholarly and professional attention over the past two decades, resulting in a flurry of surveys and mapping exercises, as well as a number of practitioner-oriented handbooks and toolkits aiming at integrating religion into development programming. Beyond these more instrumentalist approaches, however, ethnographic approaches are beginning to provide new insight into the ways in which emergent institutional forms advocating diverse social interventions arise out of or in conversation with religious communities and discourses on transcendent values. Our project seeks to explore how religious actors, discourses, and practices intersect with development efforts, and how these engagements result in changes to our understandings and experiences of both ‘religion' and ‘development'.

Giuseppe Bolotta is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Catherine Scheer is a post-doctoral fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster at the Asia Research Institute,  National University of Singapore

R. Michael Feener is the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Islamic Centre Lecturer in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford

More information here.