Dr. Lamia Karim’s book Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) recently came out in a Korean edition (Maybooks, 2015).
The book is a radical critique of the effects of microfinance NGOs, including the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh that went onto win the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Through ethnographic case studies, the book examines how access to microfinance loans have disempowered rural women in Bangladesh.
Karim is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon, and a former associate director of CSWS.
