Online series, webinars and events

Queering International DevelopmentAddressing heteronormativity in Development Policy and Practice

24 February 2021

How to queer International Development? What are queer critiques of developments?

In this roundtable event, scholars and development practitioners will present their work in relation to LGBTQI inclusion in International Development and discuss the challenges in addressing heteronormativity in development policy, practice and research in different regions of the world. The virtual roundtable also offered space for questions from audience members.

IGDC Annual Lecture 2021: Decentering Migration Research: The Challenges of Walking the Talk

27 October 2021

Although migration between the countries of the Global South is increasingly significant in terms of its scale, complexity and consequences, migration research typically focuses on the movement of people to the countries of the Global North reflecting, in significant part, the empirical, political and policy interests of researchers and funding bodies. Drawing on her experiences as Director of the MIDEQ Hub, Professor Heaven Crawley explores the challenges of ‘walking the talk’ when it comes to decentering migration research. MIDEQ is the UK’s largest GCRF-funded project bringing together partners from 12 countries in the Global South to tell a new and very different story of migration and its relationship to inequality. But this process has been far from straightforward. From pulling together the funding proposal to designing the research, undertaking the data collection and dealing with the fallout from sudden and dramatic funding cuts, the project’s researchers have been in an almost constant tussle with dominant assumptions about what and whose knowledge ‘counts’, how to ensure ‘equitable partnerships’ in the context of deep and long-standing inequalities access to resources for the production of knowledge, and how to address the migration-related inequalities which often stretch beyond borders in contexts where the political focus is on national interests and priorities.

This IGDC virtual Annual Lecture is in collaboration with MigNet.

Speaker: 

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Racing Climate Change

20 October 2021

Research on the overlap between race and vulnerability to the physical and governance-related aspects of climate change is often globally scaled, based on extended temporalities and colour-coded with non-white populations recognized as being at greater risk of experiencing the adverse effects of climate change.

Dr Ariadne Collins will discuss her recent paper showing how de-centring whiteness from its position as an automatic, oppositional counterpart to blackness can make space for greater recognition of the role played by the environment in processes of racialization. De-centring whiteness in this way would form a valuable step towards recognizing how race, constructed in part through shifting relations between people and the environment, overlaps with climate vulnerability within multiracial populations. 

Without discounting the value of global, colour-coded interpretations of race, she aims to point out the limits of their applicability to understandings of how climate change is unfolding in Guyana and Suriname, two multiracial Caribbean countries. Furthermore, Dr Collins intends to argue that in the post-colonial period, relations with the environment take historical constructions of race forward in ways that undergird the impacts of climate change. Even further, she will highlight how the environment has always played a key, underacknowledged role in processes of racialization, complicating colour-coded interpretations of race, whether global or local.

• Dr Ariadne Collins is a Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. 

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Decolonising Methods and Methodologies

13 October 2021

The groundbreaking book 'Decolonising Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples '(1998) by Dr Linda Tuhiwai Smith remains an international bestseller, translated into Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, and Bhasa Indonesian.

'Decolonising Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples' is a foundational resource for critiques of the existing relationship between imperialism, dominant approaches to scientific research and Indigenous knowledge systems.

In this event, Dr Tuhiwai Smith discusses decolonising research methods and provides reflections regarding the practical conduct of social science research methods. She will talk about how to navigate and resist colonial legacies of knowledge production and resist extractivist models.

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Unpaid Care Work and Covid-19: A Missed Opportunity to Recognise, Value and Take Action?

5 March 2021

Globally, women and girls carry out 75% of unpaid care work, and this gendered burden of labour intersects with inequalities of race, class and caste. What is commonly referred to as the economy - consisting only of production and measured only by GDP - would not function without this work of maintaining and reproducing the population, which is undertaken every day within homes and communities. Unpaid care work accounts for a huge part of global economic activity: in 2016, for example, unpaid household service work in the UK was valued at £1.24 trillion, nearly two-thirds of the country's GDP. Yet, care work remains largely unvalued, unrecognised and unsupported in society. The Covid-19 pandemic has foregrounded its fundamental importance for society and the economy; simultaneously, pandemic policy responses have exposed and exacerbated the persistence of gender inequality in care work and revealed the inadequacy of existing support structures. How are feminist and women's movements challenging this continuing non-recognition?

This webinar is organised in collaboration with WICID.

• Dr Diya Dutta, Research Manager and Theme Lead, India and the World at Oxfam India. 
• Professor Juliana Martínez Franzoni, Humboldt Chair and full professor at the University of Costa Rica. 
• Dr Rosemary Morgan, Assistant Scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in the Department of International Health, with a joint position in the School of Nursing. 
• Dr Ruth Pearson is an Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the University of Leeds and an international development consultant. 

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Racist Disciplines? Critically exploring approaches to race in the Social Sciences and Humanities

12 February 2021

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 and the protests that followed, academics across the social scientists have been forced to scrutinize their own biases and racism with their own disciplines and institutions. In the context of Black History Month in the United States, the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre is seeking to explore how race is dealt with across three distinct disciplines.

Both fields in social sciences and humanities have long suffered from being largely founded on Eurocentric understandings of the world that often paper over colonial legacies, legacies of the slave trade and racism, and that neglect insights and contributions from the non-Western world. This has led to campaigns to decolonize the university and decolonize the curriculum. In this panel, we have experts from Political Science, Economics and English that will address how these problems manifest themselves in their own field and the movements in the fields that aim to address the disciplines’ shortcomings.

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Migrants and refugees facing Covid-19: UK and global concerns

11 November 2020

Covid-19 is having a devastating impact across the world and on the most vulnerable.

Sara de Jong chairs a panel discussion to explore the impact of Covid-19 on refugees and those engaging in cross-continental migration. This workshop will explore these questions from the viewpoints of six expert speakers from NGOs, activism and academia whose work engages with migrants' rights.

Our speakers will focus on the types of response measures that are likely to be implemented by different actors (governments, non-government) to address migration and refugees trends. The panel will also discuss how these are likely to change as countries move from Covid-19 emergency response to recovery, as well as the fundamental principles that should be maintained to ensure they uphold the rights of migrants and refugees. 

This webinar was organised in collaboration with MigNet.

• Emily Arnold-Fernandez, President and CEO of Asylum Access, USA
• Niamh Ni Bhriain, Programme Coordinator War and Pacification, TNI, The Netherlands
• John Grayson, Independent researcher and adult educator, South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group, UK
• Dr Adriana Marcela Velasquez Morales, Researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences- FLACSO, Honduras
• Dr Pia Riggirozzi, Professor of Global Politics, University of Southampton, UK

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Supplementary information provided by speakers

Publications

• Protecting Migrants or Reversing Migration? COVID-19 and the risks of a protracted crisis in Latin America (with Jean Grugel and Natalia Cintra)
• Displaced women and girls threatened by Covid 19 in Latin America (with Jean Grugel and Natalia Cintra)
• Grayson, J, 2020. 'Making Profits in Hostile Environments: Asylum Accommodation Markets in the UK and Ireland' in Siobhan McGuirk and Adrienne Pine 'Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry' PM Press.

Topics of discussion

• Refugee Legal Empowerment During Covid19 / Empoderamiento Legal De Las Personas Refugiadas Durante La Crisis Del Coronavirus
• Public Health // Telephone Legal Aid - #Covid19 and Refugee Rights (University of York faculty Martin Jones presented)
• Parte 1: La Salud Pública // Parte 2: Asesoramiento Legal Por Teléfono
• Talking Points: "Making the Case" to Public Health Officials /Temas Claves: "Presentar el Caso" antes los Funcionarios de Salud Pública
• Practice Note 1: Legal Advice by Telephone as a Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic (a collaboration with the University of York Access to Justice in Displacement project) 
• Effective Advocacy In Uncertain Times / Incidencia Política Efectiva En Tiempos Inciertos
• Donors In The Pandemic / Los Donantes Durante La Pandemia

Reflections on public health system responses during Covid-19 in low-and middle-income countries

4 November 2020

Robust and resilient health systems are effective bulwarks against shocks. Still, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the existing and diverse nature of weaknesses of health systems across the world, especially in low-and-middle-income countries (LMIC). 

This webinar aims to synthesise perspectives from experts in academia on key lessons learnt by the health systems in LMICs in responding to the present pandemic. Our speakers will be sharing insights and experiences on measures that could contribute, or have been successful, to protect and respond to different health system constraints and challenges in different country contexts. Strategies that would help health systems in ‘building back better’ make them resilient against similar future shocks, and the resource needs commensurate to such responses will also be discussed.

Speakers:

• Dr Achin Chakraborty is a Professor of Economics and currently the Director of the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata
• Dr Daniel Maceira is a Senior Researcher at the Center for the Study of State and Society (CEDES), Independent Researcher for CONICET, Director of the Health Policy Department at FUNDAR, and Professor at the Economic Department, National University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. 
• Dr Weeam Hammoudeh is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Community and Public Health, Palestine. She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from Brown University and an MPH from Birzeit University.

Chair:

• Dr Papiya Mazumdar is a geographer and population scientist for the Department of Health, at the University of York. Her research focuses on environmental linkages to population health, including socioeconomic vulnerabilities of populations, in Low-and-Middle-Income Countries

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Inequalities in Global Finance and Gender: Economic Responses to Covid-19

30 July 2020

Covid-19 is exacerbating social and economic inequalities across the world. Developing countries face particularly severe constraints to economic policy-making. There has been a dramatic reversal of capital flows in the wake of the pandemic and many developing countries have experienced currency depreciation as well as severe debt and liquidity problems. As fiscal spaces have become constrained, activists, academics, and policy-makers are calling for debt moratoria, debt relief and IMF support. 

At the same time, feminist economists across the world have been pointing to the fact that COVID-19 also exacerbates gender inequalities, because of the uneven impact of the lockdown on women. This webinar brings these two perspectives together to unpack the economic and financial consequences of the pandemic on developing economies and women in developing economies in particular and hopes to open a discussion on what kinds of policies at the global and domestic level are necessary to address the challenges developing countries, and in particular women in developing countries, face.

Speakers:

• Daniela Gabor is a Professor of Economics and Macro-Finance at the University of West England, Bristol
• Crystal Simeoni is Director of NAWI: Afrifem Macroeconomics 

Chair:

• Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven - Department of Politics

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Supplementary information provided by speakers:

• Christian Aid report

:

7 July 2020

Recent debates have linked future climate action to the current responses to Covid-19. How investments are made will determine how communities in the Global South, who have contributed least to climate change, are impacted by current and future climate change. This is likely to change how local, national and regional communities engage in advocacy for climate justice. This session will highlight why local-national-regional linkages in climate justice are important for climate change policy and will also bring together experiences from two regions in the Global South—Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. 

Speakers:

• Dr Deborah Delgado Pugley is a Professor and Researcher of Sociology at PUCP (Peru) focusing on global environmental politics, sustainable development policies and environmental issues at the community level.
• Dr Prakash Kashwan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs.
• Zainab Aliyu is a 3rd Year Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar in Climate Justice at the University of Reading.

Chair:

• Dr Jessica Omukuti, Department of Politics

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Supplementary information provided by speakers

• Dr Deborah Delgado Pugley - Presentation slides
  
• Zainab Aliyu - Presentation slides
• Dr Prakash Kashwan - Presentation slides
• Indigenous peoples organizations Facebook page
  
• Working group on Covid-19: Society of anthropologists working on South American lowlands
  
• Publication by Dr Deborah Delgado Pugley (Spanish)

Covid-19 and the ‘Global Development Industry’

29 June 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is having an unprecedented effect on global development. But could this time be both unprecedented and liminal? Could it offer us a unique opportunity to rethink the Development Industry and how we approach the business of development? And what might that look like? Or will we all return to ‘business as usual’?

Christine Wallace chairs a panel discussion to explore the impact of Covid-19 on the Global Development industry and discuss the challenges presented by Covid-19 to the business of development. This workshop will explore these questions from the viewpoints of five speakers from different aspects of the ‘development industry’.

Speakers:

• Dr Rita Bissoonauth presently heads the African Union International Centre for Girls and Women’s Education in Africa (AU/CIEFFA) based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
• Dr Joanne Bosworth is UNICEF’s Chief of Public Finance and Local Governance based in New York where she leads UNICEF’s global programmatic work to support the development and resourcing of equitable social policies to realise children’s rights. 
• Dr Nicholas Burnett has over 30 years of experience in Development, particularly in the education sector. His last position was leading the global education portfolio at Results for Development (R4D), but his distinguished career includes spells with UNESCO, the World Bank, the British government and his own consulting firm.
• Jonathan Glennie is a writer, researcher, consultant and practitioner on international poverty and human rights.
  
• John Young is the Executive director of INASP. Previously, John was head of the RAPID (Research and Policy in Development) programme at ODI, a global leader on the research-policy interface. 

Chair:

• Christine Wallace is a consultant in International Development, with 30 years of experience spanning from NGO work on relief and rehabilitation, managing area-based development programmes with UN agencies, advising governments on sector policies with DFID, to policy development with DFID and the European Union.

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Supplementary information provided by speakers

• INASP Strategy
• INASP Blog
• INASP Report
• AuthorAID network
• Blog: How can Covid-19 be the catalyst to decolonise development research?"
• World Bank infographic
• UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report
• UNESCO resource paper on reopening schools
• IJED article about international education architecture by Nicholas Burnett

Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Time of Coronavirus: Perspectives from Brazil and India

12 June 2020

Covid-19 interacts with underlying political trends in the 'rising powers', especially their complex relationship with democracy and authoritarianism. This session explored how the coronavirus pandemic affects political dynamics in Brazil and India, and particularly the perceived shift of both countries towards more authoritarian governance in recent years. The session examined how the crisis intersects with the politics of Hindutva in India and the end of the Pink Tide in Brazil, how it affects the quality of democracy and the potential of movements that oppose the governments in both countries.

Speakers:

• Dr Sabrina Fernandes is an academic and activist, researching currents within left activism in Brazil during the rise of Jair Bolsonaro
• Dr Harsh Mander is a public intellectual working on human rights, citizenship and social exclusion.

Chairs:

• Dr Phil Roberts, Department of Politics
• Dr Indrajit Roy, Department of Politics

Learn more about our panellists