front cover of Giving Back
Giving Back
Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving
L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano
Temple University Press, 2021

Many Filipino Americans feel obligated to give charitably to their families, their communities, or social development projects and organizations back home. Their contributions provide relief to poor or vulnerable Filipinos, and address the forces that maintain poverty, vulnerability, and exploitative relationships in the Philippines. This philanthropy is a result of both economic globalization and the migration of Filipino professionals to the United States. But it is also central to the moral economies of Filipino migration, immigration, and diasporic return. Giving-related practices and concerns—and the bonds maintained through giving—infuse what it means to be Filipino in America.

Giving Back shows how integral this system is for understanding Filipino diaspora formation. Joyce Mariano “follows the money” to investigate the cultural, social, economic, and political conditions of diaspora giving. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how power operates through this charity and the ways the global economic and cultural dimensions of this practice reinforce racial subordination and neocolonialism. Giving Back explores how this charity can stabilize overlapping systems of inequality as well as the contradictions of corporate social responsibility programs in diaspora.

[more]

front cover of Giving Back
Giving Back
Research and Reciprocity in Indigenous Settings
R. D. K. Herman
Oregon State University Press, 2018
How can scholars best give back to the communities in which they conduct their research? This critical question arises from a long history of colonial scholarship that exploited study subjects by taking knowledge without giving anything in return. It is a problem faced by all field researchers, even those working in their own communities.
 
Over the past several decades—and especially since the evolution of feminist methodologies, participatory research, and the post-colonial turn in the 1990s—there have been calls for research to be less exploitative, but also for researchers and for the research itself to give something back. Giving Back: Research and Reciprocity in Indigenous Settings addresses the need for reciprocity in the research process, especially (though not exclusively) in regard to Indigenous Communities.
 
The twelve case studies in this volume demonstrate that giving back can happen through the research itself – through the careful framing of questions, co-production of knowledge, and dissemination of results – but also through the day-to-day actions and attitudes of researchers that inevitably occur in the field. It can range from everyday give and take, to the sharing of research materials, to larger and longer-term engagements.
 
As practitioners of community-based research gain greater awareness of these issues, scholars and institutions need guidance and strategies for ensuring reciprocity in the research process. This volume presents a variety of situations from a wide range of research contexts, discussing what has and hasn’t worked, and exploring what issues remain.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter