Table of Contents for Aid and the Help
Introduction: Aid Work and the Extraction of Care
The introduction argues that the relationship between expat aid workers and their domestic staff is a prism for understanding the contemporary aid industry. Drawing from researchers of care, reproductive labor, postcolonial studies, and global neoliberal capitalism, the introduction uses extraction as a metaphor to emphasize the reproductive labor of local people that props up the industry and sustains colonial-era hierarchies of knowledge and power. A snapshot of expatriate Dakar and a discussion of methodology round out the chapter.
1.Finding Help in the Informal Economy
Though the general exploitation of domestic workers has become a focal point of development intervention globally, the practices of development workers as employers of domestic labor remain ignored and unspoken. Through an analysis of social media posts and classified ads soliciting and offering domestic labor, as well as interviews with aid worker employers and domestic workers, chapter 1 lays out specifics of the domestic worker marketplace in Dakar. The basic contours of the informal but routine process of recruiting and hiring a domestic worker in Dakar, the expectations of employers vs. employees, and the implications of an informal labor sector and a rotating door of transient employers for the precarity of domestic workers are explored in detail.
2.Security and Everyday Bordering
Chapter 2 explores the role of security in the domestic life of expat aid workers in Senegal. Within the framework of increased securitization that defines contemporary aid work, fears about security, especially material security, shape how expat aid workers live and behave in Dakar. Concerns with security create a distance between expat aid workers and those around them more generally. Expat aid workers develop everyday bordering practices to mitigate their vulnerability, and these practices have implications for the residential geography of Dakar, as well as how aid workers interact with those closest to them physically, their domestic staff.
3.Stratigraphies of Mobility
This chapter explores the theme of migration and mobility, arguing that both domestic employee and employer are, in essence, economic migrants. Moving from one part of the world to another explicitly in search of work that allows a better quality of living is economic migration. Race and colonial legacy often prevent scholars, governments, and laypeople from categorizing expatriates from the West to the developing world in this manner, but their transnationalism is a constitutive part of postcolonial mobility that merits analytical attention. The discrepancy between the extent of the respective mobilities of aid workers and domestic workers highlighted in this chapter and their relative ability to prevent precarity underline the mismatched rewards of development to its practitioners and supposed beneficiaries
4.Inequalities of the World Personified
Chapter 4 probes the ambivalent feelings that expat aid workers have about their domestic workers and about the work contracted between them. The chapter identifies three strategies that aid workers employ to recast their purchase of cheap domestic labor as an act more in line with their self-image as humanitarians. By positioning themselves as job creators, nice friendly bosses, and capacity-building developers of their domestic employees, aid workers seek to ignore or minimize class and racial discomfort through idioms of care. These tactics make individual aid workers feel more comfortable, but do little to alter the tremendous power imbalances and wealth disparities that allow them to move to a poor country and purchase a level of caring labor they could not afford back home.
Conclusion: Conclusion
The conclusion engages the growing call for a reexamination of the hierarchies within international development work. A burgeoning movement seeks to upset the existing model of expatriate supremacy in aid work through localization and argues for the decolonization of the development sector. In light of recent revelations of various abuses of power by aid workers, the need to investigate the dynamics of privilege and impunity in aid more closely is clear.