In this project, I look at the work of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and the role that brokers at the organization play in constructing, promoting, and institutionalizing a body of LGBT human rights. While a great deal is being written about the diffusion of LGBT politics and human rights discourses from the Global North, there are few ethnographic analyses of who is doing the exporting, how, and toward what ends. Based on a year of fieldwork in IGLHRC’s New York and Cape Town offices, I look at the history of IGLHRC, the interactions among brokers and how these shape their daily work, how brokers understand their mandate and the hybridity that it so often requires, and how partnership with groups in the Global South, the production, verification, and circulation of information, and the possibilities and constraints of the formal human rights arena all shape the work that brokers do. Ultimately, I conclude that human rights advocacy must be understood holistically if it is to be understood at all. Such advocacy always necessarily involves a degree of theoretical elaboration, promotion, and codification by human rights defenders and NGOs, and focusing exclusively on one or another of these aspects paints a skewed portrait of what it means to work within a human rights framework. Drawing from the anthropology of sexuality, queer theory, literature on brokerage, and interdisciplinary studies of transnational advocacy networks, this project aims to deepen understandings of how LGBT NGOs and the brokers that animate them regularly engage in the construction, promotion, and institutionalization of particular understandings of sexuality and the claims that can be made by sexual subjects globally.

Le mouvement Terre de liens (TDL) en France poursuit l’ambition de préserver les terres agricoles, soutenir les porteurs de projets agricoles en leur permettant de s’installer et sensibiliser le public aux questions foncières. Grâce à de l’épargne et des dons citoyens, TDL acquiert du foncier, le retire définitivement du marché en le louant à des agriculteurs engagés dans des démarches biologiques. Il tente ainsi de reterritorialiser l’agriculture et de recréer un lien collectif à la terre que l’État et le marché avait transformé en objet de gestion sectorielle et de spéculation privative. À partir d’une étude sociologique de la profession agricole, d’une approche ethnographique de TDL, nourrie par une enquête statistique et des entretiens semi-directifs, nous nous sommes penchée sur ceux qui travaillent sur ces terres collectives. Nous avons examiné les transformations socioprofessionnelles qu’implique le soutien de TDL pour les fermiers. Ces derniers s’installent généralement hors cadre familial, développent une agriculture biologique, paysanne et une vision de leur métier où se mêlent sensibilité aux questions environnementales et responsabilité sociétale. Quoi que leurs activités correspondent aux attentes de TDL, leur rapport à la terre n’est pas uniforme ni stabilisé. Les diverses tensions qui traversent TDL, de la prise en charge des travaux de réfection du bâti jusqu’aux modalités de représentation des fermiers, donnent à voir les ambiguïtés d’une gestion foncière collective. Elles témoignent des questions qui se posent pour une organisation alternative face à la définition d’une identité paysanne contemporaine, où liberté et contraintes socioprofessionnelles se combinent dans de complexes agencements. / “Terre de liens” (TDL) is an activist organisation in France whose main objectives are to maintain farmland, provide support to the setting up of farmers and raise public awareness on land tenure issues. Thanks to savings and public donations, TDL purchases land, withdrawing it definitively from the market to lease it to farmers engaged in organic processes. Thus, it seeks to reterritorialise agriculture and recreate a collective link to land, which the State and the market had transformed into a sectoral business and private speculation object.Based on a sociological study of agricultural profession, a TDL’s ethnographic approach, enriched with a statistical survey and semi-structured interviews, this study focuses on those who farm on these collective land plots. It examines the socio-professional changes which follows TDL's support to farmers. The latter generally set up on farms with no family connection, develop small-scale organic farming and a vision of their profession combining environmental sensitivity and social responsibility. Even though their activities are in agreement with TDL's expectations, their relationship to land is not uniform nor stabilised. The various tensions TDL experiences, from covering repair work of buildings to arrangements for the representation of farmers, show the ambiguities of collective land management. They illustrate the issues an alternative organisation raises in the context of the definition of a contemporary peasant identity, where freedoms and socio-professional constraints combine in complex arrangements.

This dissertation explores how people address problems of real human concern in situations of complexity, ambiguity, uniqueness, conflicting values and rapid change. Such circumstances stretch formal and idealistic rules and procedures to the breaking point. And yet, people in a variety of fields work through such difficulties in a pragmatic manner, at times finding ways to assert their humanity. Sensemaking and human- centred design are related activities through which many people approach such work. Through cases in digital innovation, global health care delivery and an unlikely voyage of the Amazon River, this portfolio shows that they are relevant to a wide range of settings. Rather than isolating the components or key variables of such work and taking their measure, this research advances a more holistic view of sensemaking and designing as sociomaterial practices. My research is grounded in performing the phenomenon of study, offering insights from complex practice rather than a spectator’s study of it. This ethnographic approach has yielded theoretical contributions related to designing for the emergence of practices, embodied sensemaking, a more substantive notion of what it means to be ‘human’ centred and more pragmatic ways of investigating sociomaterial practices. By discussing sensemaking and human-centred design as antidotes to failures of imagination in global health and development, this dissertation suggests a distinctive perspective on why these topics matter for the health of poor and marginalized people around the world.