of intimate life. As an experienced ethnographic field researcher with a strong linguistic foundation in French, Italian, and Wolof, Hannaford uses fine-grained ethnography to offer fresh insights into the conditions, challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. With an eye to questions of gender and power, her work provides a substantive contribution to crucial questions about mobility, technology, intimacy and inequality.
Hannaford applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Aid and the Help: International Development and the Transnational Extraction of Care, and reported the following:
Page 99 is the second page of chapter 3, a chapter called “Stratigraphies of Mobility.” Chapter 3 looks at the inequities of mobility between expat aid workers and the local people who do domestic work in their homes. This inequity, which I explore ethnographically in the chapter, illustrates one of the core arguments of the book, that the development industry brings mismatched rewards to its supposed “practitioners” and supposed “beneficiaries” and is built on colonial understandings of a hierarchy of humanity.Visit Dinah Hannaford's website.
On this page, I conclude the opening ethnographic vignette about a European aid worker who admits she chose to work “in the field” in Africa because she knew she would have access to cheap domestic labor and thus access to a better work-life balance. I also lay out the main argument of the chapter:In this chapter, however, I seek to explore the role of migration in this story of expatriate aid workers and their domestic workers. There are two stories of economic migration here—that of aid workers finding remunerative careers and enhanced lifestyles through North-South migration and that of rural Senegalese women coming to the city to find precarious employment as domestic workers. By putting them into conversation, I hope to highlight the interdependence of these two migration stories and the inexorable inequities of mobility they reflect. The migration of aid workers to Senegal gives them the means for increased status, financial well-being, and an enhanced work and family balance. The migration of rural Senegalese women to Dakar to work as their domestics can also provide some financial gain but just as often leaves domestic workers mired in economic and social precarity and separated from family.The Page 99 Test works reasonably well for my book, in that it succinctly summarizes one of the book’s key takeaways and gives a glimpse of how ethnography and theory are woven together throughout the book. Missing, however, are the other key arguments about race, security, informality, guilt, and imperialism that add to this chapter’s claims to round out the central case made by the book. Absent too, is the ethnographic attention given to the stories and voices of Senegalese domestic workers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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