Reorienting Scholarly Focus in ‘Aidland' and its Implications

The empirical research informing this book invokes questions about methods, ethics and epistemologies in relation to existing scholarship on Aidland (Sundberg 2024 ). This chapter describes how my studies mirror three research orientations that differ from long-standing, as well as some more recent, focus areas in qualitative scholarship on aid workers. They entail a concern with development workers as categories of professionals rather than private individuals, with those originating in aid recipient countries rather than the OECD-DAC community, and with experts involved in profit-making work rather than grant-based assistance carried out by NGOs and state agencies. The latter two orientations may bring with them certain challenges for the many aidnographers, like myself, who have professional roots in Aidland's ‘traditional' vicinities of expatriate, non-profit work. They concern access to the field and the institutional transparency of research objects, as well as how interviews are shaped by researchers' and interlocutors' respective power, racial identification and conceptions about the relationship between poverty relief and capitalism.