Reimagining Aid

""This brilliant, beautifully intimate ethnography challenges the image of post-war Western aid hegemony, illustrating the new regionalized global society in which we live. As Cambodian aid workers navigate between Japanese and U.S. aid agencies and between competing 'regional development imaginaries, ' they resist what they see as culturally alien, while creatively reconstructing models of aid, and of gender, for their own societies."" --Ann Swidler, University of California, Berkeley ""Reimagining Aid is a groundbreaking and deeply insightful ethnography that reframes how we understand the global development apparatus. Through richly textured fieldwork, Mary-Collier Wilks exposes the tensions between Western and East Asian donor regimes and the ways in which Cambodian practitioners navigate and rework these competing imaginaries. Essential reading for anyone interested in global health, feminist development, and the shifting geopolitics of aid."" --Kimberly Kay Hoang, University of Chicago ""At a time of Asian ascendance and American retreat from foreign aid, Reimagining Aid centers attention on the power of Asian and Western imaginaries in the development field. A must-read for anyone concerned with how development happens, resistance to hegemony in the Global South, and the ways narratives of progress are intimately bound up with ideas about family, gender, and motherhood. A real tour de force!"" --Joseph Harris, Boston University