This September, Berghahn published a book that has been ten years in the making!

In 2011, Justin Shaffner and I convened a panel at the American Anthropological Association’s conference in Montreal. A few years later, that became the basis for a Wenner Gren workshop, which I hosted here at the IT University of Copenhagen.

The co-edited book – which collects articles published in 2017 in the The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology – is aimed at both teachers and researchers. With a new critical preface from Martha MacIntyre, and thought provoking afterword from George Mentore, we hope the collection will be useful and interesting to any scholar encountering discourses and practices of capacity building.

The cover, a wall of post-it notes, refers back to comments made by Ruha Benjamin at the 2015 Wenner Gren workshop. Unwittingly, our format for discussing capacity building borrowed from so many capacity building workshops we had all attended in the course of our fieldwork, with post-it notes being the prime emblem that capacity building was, in fact, taking place! As Shannon Mattern has discussed in “Post-it Note City“, post-its mark the idea of participation, if not its reality.

Justin and I have written a blogpost for Berghahn about the book, its origins, purpose and contributions. For more, see  here.