Hope and Insufficiency: Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison

A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept’s role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

Rachel Douglas-Jones is Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where she is currently the PI of Moving Data- Moving People, a study of emergent social credit systems in China through the lens of trust. Her recent publications include ‘Committee as Witness’ (The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2021) and she is the editor (with Antonia Walford and Nick Seaver) of Towards an Anthropology of Data (JRAI, 2021)

Justin Shaffner is a Research Associate at the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan where he focuses on issues related to the "future of work" and global commodity chains. He is editor (with Huon Wardle) of Cosmopolitics: The Collective Papers of the Open Anthropology Cooperative, Volume 1 (OAC Press, 2017); and co-founder of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.