How progressive culture resists critique: The impasse of NGO Studies

Abstract

Ethnographies of NGO and nonprofit practices are increasingly focused on the social lives of middle-class liberals who significantly shape how societies recognize social suffering and its redress. At the same time, the boundaries between academic and NGO worlds are blurring ever more as ethnographers prioritize ‘engaged’ projects and as more doctoral students enter graduate school with NGO experience. This article addresses the distinctive dilemmas that arise from this lack of distance between ethnographers and research subjects and particularly the difficulty of critically examining the moral sentiments of progressive actors. I tell the story of a first fieldwork project in which I struggled to objectify the social power of professional education reformers who already analyzed themselves and whose efforts to combat race and class inequalities seemed to be beyond reproach. The narrative explores how the particularity of their norms and ideals continually threatened to disappear in the contexts of university life, of critical ethnographic literature, and of the fieldwork itself. I argue that a direct focus on the production of morality is crucial to grasping the meaning of ‘progress’ as a product of struggle.