Beyond the Global Great Society: Critical Perspectives from the Decade of Development as Lessons for Today

Event Date: 

Friday, May 2, 2014 - 1:00pm

Event Location: 

  • McCune Conference Room
  • 6020 HSSB

A symposium featuring exciting new scholarship that explores the historical connections between the domestic “war” against poverty and the twentieth-century development project as led by policymakers and foundations in the United States—and asks how we might see critical insights from this history of intervention playing out in the politics of development today.

Background reading for the symposium is available here

Panelists

Karen Ferguson is a Professor of History at Simon Fraser University and author of Top Down: the Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

OffnerAmy C. Offner is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.  She earned her PhD at Columbia University and is currently writing a book on anti-poverty programs and economic thought in Colombia and the United States, 1948-1980.

 

GoldsteinAlyosha Goldstein is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Duke University Press, 2012) and the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism (Duke University Press, forthcoming in October 2014). 

Javiera Barandiarán is an Assistant Professor in the Global Studies program at UCSB. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of California, Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Barandiarán works on environmental politics, experts and the state in Latin America, to understand how states come to know about the environment in order to regulate it. She is working on a book that explores four environmental conflicts in Chile to reflect on the ways in which the Chilean state organizes, accesses and believes in environmental information since the end of the Pinochet regime. 

Gabriela Soto-Laveaga is an Associate Professor of History at UCSB and author of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of Global Steroids (Duke University Press, 2009).  Her interests are in the history of science, knowledge production, and public health in Latin America, and she is working on new projects examining public health and social movements in 1960s Mexico City, and poverty and rural health programs in Mexico in the 1980s.

Kum-Kum Bhavnani is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has written and edited/co-edited a number of books such as Talking Politics (Cambridge University Press), "Race" and Feminism (Oxford University Press), and On the Edges of Development (Routledge). She has also produced and directed two research documentaries, The Shape of Water (2006) and Nothing Like Chocolate (2012). 

The first panel, Amy Offner, Karen Ferguson, and Alyosha Goldstein