Lotte Meinert – författare

Universal Primary Education programs are being promoted around the globe as the solution to poverty and health problems, but very little in-depth qualitative knowledge is available about the experiences of these programs in children''s life-worlds.

Hopes in Friction offers a vivid portrait of life and the implementation of Universal Primary Education in Eastern Uganda, based on long-term fieldwork following a group of children as they grow up. The book considers how the actions and hopes of these children and families, to attain what they perceive as ''a good life'', are crosscut by political aspirations and projects of schooling and health education. When hopes are in friction inspiration as well as disappointment occur.

Policy makers in Uganda and in international organisations expect health improvements as one of the bonuses of education programs. Families in Eastern Uganda also hope for and experience health – in the local sense of a good life – as part of schooling. Lotte Meinert explores the taken for granted effect of schooling on health and focuses a careful eye on how boys and girls appropriate and negotiate ideas and moralities about health in the context of what is possible ethically, materially and experientially.

Events are “generative moments” in at least three senses: events are created by and condense larger-scale social structures; as moments, they spark and give rise to new social processes; in themselves, events may also serve to analyze social situations and relationships. Based on ethnographic studies from around the world—varying from rituals and meetings over protests and conflicts to natural disasters and management—this volume analyzes generative moments through events that hold the key to understanding larger social situations. These events—including the Ashura ritual in Bahrain, social cleavages in South Africa, a Buddhist cave in Nepal, drought in Burkina Faso, an earthquake in Pakistan, the cartoon crisis in Denmark, corporate management at Bang & Olufsen, protest meetings in Europe, and flooding and urban citizenship in Mozambique—are not simply destructive disasters, crises, and conflicts, but also generative and constitutive of the social.

Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These ethnographic studies are international in scope and look at many different countries and continents. They come to the overall conclusion that people construct their own circumstances with the intention to modify their experience of time.