This special Guest Speaker event was held Wednesday 10th November as a pre-cursor to the DSAI Annual Conference proceedings. Guest Speaker Gustavo Esteva is an activist and "deprofessionalized intellectual" well known for his contribution to post-development theory and practice.
About the Talk:
The Guardian was right: climate change or global warming are euphemisms. There is a climate collapse. And the institutional collapse is even worse. We can no longer put our hope in governments or international conferences, as the current show in Glasgow demonstrates. But a new hope is emerging at the grassroots. Beyond the mobilizations, increasingly useless, we have all kinds of initiatives, as La Travesía, the Zapatista tour in Europa, is making evident. Yes, it is time to say YES to life and NO to the projects of death and war.
Gustavo and Discussant Dr Orla O' Donovan are welcomed by DSAI Chair, Nita Mishra, with Opening Remarks by Michelle Winthrop, Policy Director, Development Cooperation and Africa Division, Department of Foreign Affairs.
About the Contributors
Gustavo Esteva is a Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca. He is well known for his contribution to the post-development theory and practice. A prolific writer, he is the author of more than 40 books, published in seven languages. Among his numerous academic honors: an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa), the National Award for Political Economy, and the National Award for Journalism. He has served as president of the Mexican Society of Planning and the 5th World Congress on Rural Sociology and Chairman of the Board for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.
Discussant Dr Orla O'Donovan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork. Her research and teaching is centrally concerned with social imaginaries of progress, health and medicine. She is Principal Investigator for the Wellcome Trust funded project 'Living well with the dead in contemporary Ireland'