In its inaugural year, the Critical Development Studies seminar series opens a space for scholars and students to analyze international development practices and their impacts on social well-being, food systems and environmental justice.
Housed in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Department of Global Development, this semester’s series features early career scholars who study the role of private development in the West Bank; origins of neoliberal agrarian change in Chile; and the racialization of climate adaption projects in Guyana.
The series is co-organized by Jenny Goldstein, assistant professor of global development and Ph.D. students Marvi Ahmed and David Balgley in the Field of Development Sociology.
The seminar committee invited early-career scholars whose work is pushing the study of development in new directions, according to Balgley.
“In providing an interdisciplinary forum for emergent leaders in the field, the series has fostered conversations that critically interrogate the status quo of development while asking how we can collectively work towards a more just, equitable, and sustainable world,” Balgley said.
The Critical Development Studies seminars are held Fridays at 3 p.m. throughout the semester. Students, faculty and the general public are welcome to attend via Zoom.
This semester’s speakers and their topics are:
- March 11: Shifting Priorities, and how private development is transforming aid, governance, and daily life in the West Bank with Kareem Rabie (assistant professor of anthropology, University of Chicago, Illinois)
- March 25: The Rentierization of Food: Regimes of Property and the Making of Chile’s Globalized Agriculture with Martín Arboleda (assistant professor of sociology, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile)
- April 29: Another Skin: Climate Adaptation and Accountability with Sarah E. Vaughn (assistant professor of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley)
Kelly Merchan is a communications specialist in the Department of Global Development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
