“Ethnography of Bureaucratised Listening: Foreign Aid and the Reconfiguration of Feminist Practice in Morocco”

This paper engages with the panel “Hyper‑Imperialism and Rethinking Gender Theory in the Global South” by analysing how foreign aid regimes bureaucratise practices of listening within feminist associations in Morocco. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Casablanca, the study explores how donor‑driven accountability frameworks reshape everyday interactions between social workers, legal professionals, and women victims of domestic violence. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, it examines how listening is redefined as a measurable activity, privileging indicators and reporting over responsiveness to beneficiaries. Second, it highlights the reconfiguration of professional roles, where practitioners negotiate between ethical commitments to women and institutional imperatives of documentation. Third, it analyses the production of categories of victimhood, whereby forms and registers selectively valorise certain trajectories while marginalising others. Methodologically, the paper reflects on the challenges of conducting ethnography in spaces where the researcher’s position is constantly renegotiated — as intern, member, and observer — and where access is mediated by confidentiality, trust, and organisational overload. These positional shifts illuminate the tension between participation and observation, and the fragility of windows of access in contexts of bureaucratised care. Conceptually, the paper situates the Moroccan case within broader debates on bureaucratisation, accountability, and gender politics in the Global South. It argues that foreign aid does not merely provide resources but actively reshapes the meaning of listening and feminist practice, producing an ambivalent professionalisation that narrows the scope of support. By foregrounding the politics of bureaucratised listening, the study contributes to rethinking gender theory under conditions of aid dependency and authoritarian governance. This contribution thus combines ethnographic insights with analytical framing to show how hyper‑imperial logics of aid penetrate the micro‑practices of feminist associations, transforming both the categories of gendered subjectivity and the methodological posture of the researcher.