KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
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We are pleased to announce the plenary speakers who have agreed to participate are Prof. Dame Marilyn Strathern (plenary address) and Dr Tony Lawson (plenary address). In addition Prof. Arturo Escobar has agreed to participate in an open workshop.
MARILYN STRATHERN
DBE is mistress of the Girton College,
William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology and
head of the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University.
Dame Marilyn has recently received the prestigious annual Huxley Memorial
Medal, awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute for lifetime
achievement at the highest lever. A fellow of
the British Academy, and Foreign Hon. Member of the American Academy of
Arts & Sciences, she is currently Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Her research interests are divided between Melanesian and British ethnography, and latterly between new medical technologies, intellectual property issues and the audit culture.
Selected recent publications:
“Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia” Edited by Eric Hirsch and Marilyn Strathern, Berghahn Books, 2004.
“Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in
Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (European Association of Social
Anthropologists S.)”
Routledge, an imprint of
Taylor & Francis Books Lt, 2000.
“Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge (ASA Decennial Conference Series: The Uses of Knowledge: Global & Local Relations)” Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Lt, 1995.
“Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception” co-author with Jeannette Edwards, Sarah Franklin, Eric Hirsch, Frances Price, Manchester University Press, 1993.
“The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology) “University of California Press, 1992.
For further information, please click here http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/strathern_marilyn.html
Marilyn Strathern
ABSTRACT
How might one critique good practice? With the double resonance of ethical behaviour and effective action, standard of measurement and target to which to work, 'good practice' is held to bring its own reward. Organisations will be more effective in their performance if they are at once explicit about their goals and honest about their behaviour. Explicitness is often achieved through documentation, and it is a mundane and routine documentary practice that is the subject of this paper. It takes the apparently innocuous format of bullet points -- such are found in university mission statements -- to address Barnett's observation: 'The existence of a mission statement is tantamount to an admission by the university that it is missionless: as a general idea, the university is without mission’ [Realizing the university in an age of supercomplexity]. In raising a query about the drive to explicitness, this paper tries to find a narrative form that will not immediately acquiesce in the consumption of criticism. For in a world where criticism is gobbled up as more information, consumer preference or just another instance of explicitness, to answer the question in the coinage of criticism as such would only result in bigger and better good practice.
TONY LAWSON
is
a leading critical realist who is best known for his penetrating critiques
of mainstream economics (e.g. Reorienting Economics, Routledge, 1993). He
is in great demand internationally as a charismatic lecturer and
inspirational researcher. Tony has run a Critical Realist Workshop at
Cambridge for many years and recently co-founded the Cambridge Social
Ontology Group CSOG) which has
the aim of
pursuing social ontology, the systematic study of the nature and basic
structure of social reality. The intention of CSOG is to initiate
collaborative (interdisciplinary) research projects, conferences, summer
schools, reading groups and other activities concerned with social
ontology. Although the group is based in Cambridge, network members of
CSOG are internationally spread.
Selected Recent Publications:
(2003) Reorienting Economics, London and New York: Routledge.
(2003) 'Institutionalism: On the Need to Firm up Notions of Social Structure and the Human Subject', Journal of Economic Issues, vol. XXXVII, no. 1, pp. 175-201.
(2003) 'Ontology and Feminist Theorising', Feminist Economics, (9):1, March, pp. 119 - 150.
(2004)
'Rethinking Economics as a Science', Kyiv Mohyla Business Studio,
[a Ukrainian Quarterly Management Journal, published by Kyiv Mohyla
Business School (kmbs), Kyiv, Ukraine], vol 1, no. 7, pp. 19-31.
(2004) 'Social Explanation and Popper', in Tom Boylan and Paschal O'Gorman (eds.), Popper and Economic Methodology: Contemporary Challenges, London and New York: Routledge
(2004) 'Methodological Issues in the Study of Gender', in Nobuko Hara (ed.), Gender Study: Theory, History and Policy, Tokyo: Hosei University Press.
(2004) 'The Nature of Heterodox Economics', Cambridge Journal of Economics.
For further information, please click here
http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/lawson/select.html
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Unfortunately, Professor Zizek has withdrawn from presenting his addr
ess
due
to an impending medical operation.
ARTURO
ESCOBAR is Kenan Distinguished Teaching Professor of
Anthropology,
UNC-Chapel
Hill Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill
Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct
Professor, Department of Communications, UNC-Chapel Hill Research
Associate, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia,Bogotá
His research interests are in Anthropology, Latin American Studies, Political Ecology, Development Studies, Cultural Studies of Science and Technology, Political Economy, Theories of Complexity.
Selected
Recent Publications:
"Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies
of Localization." Political Geography 20(2001): 139-174, 2001.
El Final del Salvaje: Cultura, Desarrollo y Naturaleza en la Antropologia Contemporanea (Bogota: ICAN/CEREC, 2000)
"After Nature: Steps to an Anti-essentialist Political Ecology." Current Anthropology 40(1): 1-30, 1999.
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Best Book Award, New England Council of Latin American Studies, 1996. Also published in Spanish and Forthcoming in Portuguese, Spring 2000.
Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988). Co-edited with Sonia Alvarez and Evelina Dagnino.
For further updated information, please check his resume.
OPEN WORKSHOP WITH ARTURO ESCOBAR
Professor Arturo Escobar will be presenting his paper entitled “Reconstructivist Agendas in Critical Development Studies”.
Drawing on some recent insights regarding activism and the value of ethnographic research in Science and Technology Studies, he suggests ways for bringing together “critical development studies” (CDS) within the academy with various forms of activism in development policy and NGO worlds. This “reconstructivist” agenda takes the very engagement between communities and development experts, on the one hand, and between both of these actors and the CDS researcher, on the other, as a standpoint for investigation. Any reconstructivist agenda, it is argued, should strive to arrive at a complex understanding of the local narratives and experiences of communities, as refracted through their responses to development.
The workshop runs as a session within the Development and Globalization stream but is open to all conference participants.
Reconstructivist Agendas in Critical Development Studies
Arturo Escobar
ABSTRACT
Drawing on some recent insights regarding activism and the value of ethnographic research in Science and Technology Studies, this paper suggests ways for bringing together “critical development studies” (CDS) within the academy with various forms of activism in development policy and NGO worlds. This “reconstructivist” agenda takes the very engagement between communities and development experts, on the one hand, and between both of these actors and the CDS researcher, on the other, as a standpoint for investigation. While this investigation is understood largely, and ideally, in ethnographic terms the agenda is not seen as restricted to the ability to undertake prolonged ethnographic research.
Any reconstructivist agenda, it is argued, should strive to arrive at a complex understanding of the local narratives and experiences of communities, as refracted through their responses to development. This would include questions such as: What is the larger cultural-historical world within which local narratives and actions makes sense? How do both communities and developers understand themselves and each other? What is/are the system(s) of power that circumscribe the communities and that bring them together with developers? Finally, based on the enriched knowledge of the CDS scholar/practitioner, how can developers and communities be brought together into different dialogical situations and thus towards alternative collaborative approaches and projects? The theoretical argument to be developed builds largely on recent reinterpretations of modernity and development by a group of Latin American scholars, and by recent concepts in CDS such as “counterwork,” “postdevelopment,” “participatory development,” and the like. In the last instance, the aim is to come up with ways to utilize the development encounter to re-imagine and re-construct socio-natural orders from the perspective of the multiple place-based cultural, economic, and ecological practices of difference that exist in communities world-wide. Development workers would thus engage in conversations with modernity from the perspective of the politics of difference. In this way, the paper also argues, development projects have a better chance at not reproducing old power/knowledge asymmetries and conditions of coloniality.
