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Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Constituting The Entrepreneurial Poor: Social Capital, Development, And The Contemporary Microfinance Industry, Luke Allen
Political Science Honors Projects
The contemporary microfinance industry struggles to manage the tensions that arise from its competing roles as a tool in the fight against poverty and as a lucrative financial market. I contend that the microfinance industry manages these tensions through discourses that emphasize the entrepreneurialism of the poor in the Global South. Furthermore, I argue that the industry attempts to constitute the entrepreneurial "microfinance subject" through networks of coalitions, discourses, personnel, and technologies. These networks produce and distribute new forms of risk onto these subjects, necessitating a critical response.
The Problem With Eating Money: Remittances And Development Within Senegal's Muridiyya, Rebecca F. Sheff
The Problem With Eating Money: Remittances And Development Within Senegal's Muridiyya, Rebecca F. Sheff
Political Science Honors Projects
Contemporary development theory is poorly equipped to understand remittance-based development occurring in transnational spaces that partially escape the control of the state. An extended case study of the Muridiyya, a Sufi brotherhood in Senegal, reveals how collective remittances from Mouride transmigrants become tools for community-level development when channeled through transnational religious associations. I argue that remittance-based development projects transform the political, economic, and social contexts in which they are embedded, including the relationship between the Muridiyya and the state. Development theory must be reconceptualized to account for how remittance-based development defies conventional understandings of the scales of economic and social …