If you have ever worked at the desk in an organization – any organization – chances are you have traded in grant application drafts, logframes and progress reports.
These are some of the tools through which the money that pays our work is channeled, and our labour managed, across geographical locations, educational divides, and racialized and gendered hierarchies. They make up what we call, following sociologists of organizations and development studies scholars, the project economy: an economy in which we all produce projects, and then labour for them.
The project economy seems to be everywhere, from unemployment policies in the Nordic countries, to reconstruction efforts in Haiti. Yet it remains mostly invisible.
Our research explores the inner workings of this economy and thinks with existing and imagined ways of organizing otherwise.
- Perhaps we should tell the stories of "bad projects" that were never implemented, or were left incomplete?
- Listen to what resources that went wasted, and people that had to live through "failures" have to say?
- Perhaps we should take seriously the administrative tools with which we respond to crises, and indeed rethink them, as we all face overlapping climate and health breakdowns?
These are among the questions that drive our work. Drawing on our extensive professional experience in the humanitarian NGO and academic sectors, we look at how the project economy silently shapes Western donors' relations with the “Global South”, as well as how it determines the working lives of researchers, academic and not. Our "bad project" strives to go beyond the "solutionism", performances of control, and government through precarity embedded in project economies.
We do interviews, participatory research and fictionalized research writing primarily in Finland, Italy, the UK, Jordan and Syria. However, our approach is relational and transcends national and other territorial boundaries.
People
Nadine Hassouneh (Website | LinkedIn) is a post-doctoral researcher and Co-PI of the The Bad Project based at Tampere University, Finland. She has a PhD in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent in the UK and 10 years of experience working in the private and not-for-profit sectors in executive and analysis roles. She has published on displacement as well as precarious work in humanitarianism and development. Her main research interests include (Internal) Displacement, Intra-State Deportations, Syrian Conflict, Safety, Security & Risk Studies, Critical Humanitarian Studies and Everyday Humanitarianism, Conflict and Security, (Stateless) Diaspora Studies, and Language & Context Specific Methodologies.
Giacomo Guizzardi is a PhD Student at the Department of Sociology and Business Law of the University of Bologna, Italy, and a visiting researcher at The Bad Project, based at TUNI MAB, from March 3rd to April 5th, 2025. His research interests lie at the intersection between (critical) social theory and the Sociology of work. He is currently conducting a PhD research study investigating experiences of work, meaning, and alienation in the International Aid sector.
Elisa Pascucci is a senior researcher and Co-PI of The Bad Project based at the School of Management and Business, Tampere University, Finland, where she is a member of to the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG - a political geography research group). She has a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Sussex, UK, and between 2018 and 2023 she has worked as postdoctoral and then senior researcher at the University of Helsinki. Most of her research has focused on the spatial politics of displacement and humanitarianism, with particular attention to questions of labour, infrastructures and logistics, as well as protests and other forms of political agency among refugees and other so-called "aid beneficiaries". Her work has been published in the journals World Development, Antipode and International Political Sociology, among others. She is the co-editor of Citizen Humanitarianism at European Borders (with Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert, Routledge, 2021) and Europeanization as Violence: Souths and Easts as Method (with Kolar Aparna and Daria Krivonos, Manchester University Press, 2025).
Impact
Publications
Hassouneh, N. (Accepted/in press) Risk dumping: humanitarian programming in opposition-held Syria before Al Assad’s run-off. Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 6.2/3.
Hassouneh, N. (Accepted/in press) “From Invalidation to Precarity: A Story of an Upgrade”. In Burlyuk, O. and Rahbari, L. (Eds.) Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity in the Global North. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.
Hassouneh, N. and Pascucci, E. (2025) Bypassing former blunders: grassroots testimonies by Syria's aid ecosystem prior to al-Assad's escape. Humanitarian Practice Network.
Aparna, K., Krivonos, D. and Pascucci, E. (2025) "Introduction: Europeanisation as violence - Souths and Easts as method". In Aparna, K., Krivonos, D. and Pascucci, E. (eds) Europeanisation as violence - Souths and Easts as method. Manchester, Uk: Manchester University Press.
Pascucci, E. (under review) Frontiers of managerialism: the consulting industry in migration governance. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.
Adalgeirsdottir, K.; Arvidsson, A.; Herlin, H.; Pascucci, E.; Vega, D. (under review) Closing the loops in humanitarian logistics and supply chains. Journal of Business Logistics.
Pascucci, E. (2023) The Humanitarianesque Carnival at the end of the European Game – Review of Pallister-Wilkins, P. (2022) Humanitarian Borders. Unequal Mobilities and Saving Lives London: Verso. Society & Space Open Website.
Pascucci, E. (2023) Project management and research governance – towards a critical agenda beyond neoliberalization?: commentary to Refstie. Fennia: International Journal of Geography 201(1): 130-133.
Pallister-Wilkins, P., Aloudat, T., Brankamp, H., Pascucci, E., Plowright, W., Richey, L. A., Smith, J. & Turner, L. (2023) "Humanitarian Futures". In Mitchell, K. and Pallister-Wilkins, P. (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism, Abingdon: Routledge.
Pascucci, E. (2023) "Labor". In Mitchell, K. and Pallister-Wilkins, P. (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism, Abingdon: Routledge, 50-58.
Hassouneh, N. (2022) The Green Bus and the Viapolitics of Intra-State Deportations in Syria. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 49(9), 2172–2193.
Funding
Contact persons
Elisa Pascucci
Grant Holder, Post Doc Research
Space and Political Agency Research Group SPARG
We develop new perspectives to understand political agency and subjectivities in the context of translocal politics, place attachment, forced migration and (post)conflict societies.