Bio
Author Biography
Chris Dolan has worked extensively in sub-Saharan Africa in a range of academic, civil society and UN spaces. Since 2006, he has been Director of the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, a community outreach project of the School of Law, Makerere University. His practical work with survivors of sexual violence in conflict settings brings him into regular contact with refugee survivors of sexual violence, both women and men, including sexual minority and gender minorities and refugee sex workers. His research and advocacy on male victims is helping to generate more comprehensive and inclusive international policies and practice regarding men as victims of sexual violence.
Bio
Author Biography
Thea Shahrokh has worked as a researcher for eight years, with a focus on gender, violence and citizenship. Her research specialises in qualitative and participatory methodologies with a critical approach. She worked at IDS for four years and conducted research on the role of collective action in challenging discrimination that constrains social justice. She was also centrally involved in Participate, a research network on participation and accountability in development policymaking. She is now at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, undertaking PhD research on refugee and migrant youth narratives of gender, violence and social change in Cape Town.
Institute of Development Studies
Bio
Author Biography
A development social scientist and worker primarily focused on HIV/AIDS and Development. Formerly a Director at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, overseeing NGO support programme development and methodological adaptation, such as the institutionalisation of participation.
Bio
Author Biography
Darius King Kabafunzaki joined the Media for Social Change
programme (formerly the Video Unit of the Refugee Law Project. (RLP), Makerere University) in July 2014 as an intern. His main rolewas to document the activities of the RLP and to produce audiovisualmaterials. His new role as a Video Advocacy Assistant has developedfrom documentation and production of videos, to advocacy andfundraising, writing blog articles and training clients (who are forcedmigrants) in video skills. The aim is not only to promote the rights of clients, but to empower them, as well as to create awareness inpolicymakers and partner organisations.
Volume 47
Number 6
Published: January 31, 2017
This article considers the Institute of Development Studies’(IDS) concept of ‘engaged excellence’ from a postcolonial perspective, interrogating notions of ‘excellence’ determined in the global North, and calling for deep, long-term and mutually constitutive ‘excellent engagement’ between institutions in the global South and North. It offers a case study of how excellent engagement has developed over a decade-long relationship between researchers from IDS and from a partner organisation in Uganda, the Refugee Law Project, and how incrementally these have extended to include intensive engagement with the lives and advocacy commitments of an association of male survivors of sexual violence. Engaged excellence, it argues, can only be the outcome of excellent engagement, itself a process that is challenged by structural arrangements related to funding from and academic enterprise within the global North.
Keywords:
- Engaged Excellence
- Development
- Gender
- Conflict
