Elsje Fourie

Elsje Fourie is a tenured Assistant Professor of Globalisation and Development at Maastricht University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her research examines the flow of ideas and imaginaries around modernity and modernization to/between locales in the global South. More specifically, this has chrystalised around projects focusing on: Ethiopia's industrialisation agenda, the role of kaizen promotion in Japanese ODA, theories of multiple modernities and the politics of international development cooperation (especially South-South DC). More recently, she has become interested in how these ideas might inform and be informed by creative writing - both through the use of creative non-fiction as a medium of research communication and through the study of the literary novel as a vehicle for the global circulation of modernist imaginaries.

Recent publications:

Fourie, E. (forthcoming in 2022). Freeing the Frog in the Well: Borrowing from History to Understand Contemporary Japanese Development Aid to Ethiopia. In Interdisciplinarity in the Scholarly Life Cycle: Learning by Example in Humanities and Social Science Research, by K. Bijsterveld and A. Swinnen (Eds). Palgrave MacMillan.

Fourie, E. (forthcoming in 2022/2023). On Watching Shoes Being Made in Addis Ababa. Anthropology and Humanism, 48(1).

Fourie, E. (2020). Humanizing Industrialization? Japanese Productivity Methods, Ethiopian Factories, and Low Modernism in Foreign Aid. Global Perspectives, 1(1).

Mawdsley, E., Fourie, E., & Nauta, W. (Eds.). (2019). Researching South-South development cooperation: The politics of knowledge production. Routledge.​