An ethnography of NGO practice in India

Through an ethnographic study of the 'Barefoot College' an internationally renowned non- governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan India this book investigates the methods and practices by which a development organisation materialises and manages a construction of success. Paying particular attention to the material processes by which success is achieved and the different meanings and discourses that they act to perform this book offers a timely and novel approach to how the world of development NGOs and development ideologies work. The author argues that the College as a prolific producer of various forms of development media achieves its success through materially mediated heterotopic spectacles: enacted and imperfect utopias that constitute the desires imaginings and Otherness of its society. The chapters that follow consider the different scenarios through which success was realised at the College.