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Life history methods are gaining popularity in Development research, linked to attempts to capture narratives marginalised by dominant accounts of Development. In this paper, we reflect on using life history methods with NGO activists in India. We explore how this approach led us to develop particular understandings of the participants as 'vulnerable', and the implications of this for the research process and the knowledges it produced. We explore how activists' individual biographies were interwoven with institutional narratives, complicating but also enriching our understanding of activists' experiences of Development. Secondly, we analyse the relationality of our subjects' vulnerability and our own positionality as global North Development scholars. We reflect on how our engagement with Development actors we consider as vulnerable takes place through and against the relational histories and presents that brought us together. We explore the implications of this for the ways the research created both discursive and physical spaces for meeting and talking, and what this means for our approach to vulnerability. This requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement that Development research may reproduce vulnerabilities, even as it seeks to challenge them. The paper contributes to broader theorising of vulnerability, recognising vulnerability as embedded in the relationalities of the research moment.

AbstractIn this article, we address the ways in which theories and practices of cosmopolitanism and professionalization intersect in the sphere of global civil society. We emphasize the experiences of grassroots development activists, arguing that although they have so far been pivotal to the legitimacy of these spaces and discourses, such activists are increasingly absent from the practices of global civic spaces. We explore this process of change over time using the example of grassroots health promoters in Peru, explaining it in terms of the articulation of neoliberal processes of professionalization with a particularly neoliberal version of cosmopolitanism. We argue that the two are mutually reinforcing and produce a particularly narrow, and arguably less cosmopolitan, rendition of global civil society, with implications for the possibility of building critical and transformative encounters across difference as a foundation for more equitable ideas and practices of development and democracy.

Trans-national medicine, historically associated with colonial politics, is now central to discourses of global health and development, thrust into mainstream media by catastrophic events (earthquakes, disease epidemics), and enshrined in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Volunteer human-resource is an important contributor to international health-development work. International Voluntary Health Networks (IVHNs, that connect richer and poorer countries through healthcare) are situated at a meeting-point between geographies and sociologies of health. More fully developed social-geographic understandings will illuminate this area, currently dominated by instrumental health-professional perspectives. The challenge we address is to produce a geographically and sociologically-robust conceptual framework that appropriately recognises IVHNs' potentials for valuable impacts, while also unlocking spaces of constructive critique. We examine the importance of the social in health geography, and geographical potentials in health sociology (focusing on professional knowledge construction, inequality and capital, and power), to highlight the mutual interests of these two fields in relation to IVHNs. We propose some socio-geographical theories of IVHNs that do not naturalise inequality, that understand health as a form of capital, prioritise explorations of power and ethical practice, and acknowledge the more-than-human properties of place. This sets an agenda for theoretically-supported empirical work on IVHNs.