The Ambivalence of Altruism: White Canadian Women in International Development in East Africa

This dissertation investigates what remains of ‘the white man’s burden’ – or, in this case, the ‘white woman’s burden’ – and how it continues to structure the ethos and everyday lives of white women Canadian development workers living and working in East Africa. While those who decide to work overseas often do so with a desire to ‘do good,’ once arriving in the field development workers are often caught between these altruistic ideals and the (neo)colonial and racial inequalities that make up the foundation of the development industry. This dissertation extends earlier works to more fully and empirically understand the subject position of development workers and how development workers reaffirm, negotiate, and contest their position of white and economic privilege within global and localized racial hierarchies as they are encountered and enacted ‘on the ground.’ Bringing together the methodological and epistemological frameworks of transnational feminism and critical race and whiteness studies, I draw from primary data collected onsite from September-December 2015 and May-June 2016, including twenty-one semi-structured in-depth formal interviews with self-identified white women Canadian development workers living and working in Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda. I approach this inquiry through three primary research questions: (1) How are the subjectivities and lived encounters of white women Canadian development workers structured through (neo)colonial and racialized conceptions of ‘doing good’?; (2) How do these development workers simultaneously reinforce and seek to contest hegemonic development narratives?; and (3) How are the subjectivities of these development workers potentially (re)produced and (re)configured through encounters on the ground? Ultimately, I argue, the contemporary white man’s burden manifests in these women’s lives as a deeply profound yet fraught relationship to their sense of self and purpose in the world, an ambiguous positioning raising questions about the motif of ‘doing good’ and forcing a confrontation with the self as much as with the imagined Other.

Department dc:contributor.department

Women and Gender Studies Institute

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Gross, Zoe

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lo, Marieme

• Canada
• East Africa
• international development
• whiteness

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/121509

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/121509