The Dutch Anthropology Association (Antropologen Beroepsvereniging; ABv) organises a webinar with anthropological perspectives on growth and degrowth. The webinar will take place on Thursday 30 March 2023, 15:30-17:00 (GMT+1). Click HERE to register for the webinar (or paste this link to your browser: https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/anthropological-perspectives-on-growth-and-degrowth-tickets-574490064247). Registration is free, you will receive a link short before the 30th.
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Since the publication of the ‘Limits to Growth’ report some 50 years ago, the desirability of economic growth has been a topic of fierce dispute. Although the growth conundrum has long triumphed these debates, this has started to shift over the recent years. Academics and politicians seem to have fallen out of love with economic growth as panacea for development and growth is increasingly being villainized in relation to the multiple environmental crises, especially climate change. At the same time, calls to move beyond economic growth are gaining popularity among academics, social movements and policy-makers. Particularly degrowth is well under way to consolidate as a vibrant field of inquiry, a movement and a community of practice.
In the light of these events, we ask what this may imply for the work of anthropologists. How do they engage with the conceptual body of degrowth and the degrowth movement? What unique theoretic, methodological and political contributions can anthropology make to a post-growth society? How to deal with the ongoing importance of growth in the many contexts anthropologists research? What could a sustained engagement with and theorization of growth look like in such contexts? In this webinar, we invite scholars focusing on economic growth and/or degrowth to discuss these and other pressing questions.
Guests:
- Lys Alcayna-Stevens is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven, and a Research Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. Her current research focuses on exploring an agenda for a post-growth anthropology and for a rethinking of Degrowth debates from the South.
- Eric Hirsch is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. His current research focuses on what economic growth actually looks like for people in their daily lives, the results of which have been recently published in the book “Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru” (2022, Stanford University Press).
- Shivani Kaul is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and a visiting researcher at the Royal University of Bhutan. Her current research focuses on alternatives to sustainable development, post-growth approaches to global health and science in Bhutan, and the interface between degrowth and psychoanalysis.
- Joost Beuving is a university lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University where he specializes in the anthropology of economic life, especially entrepreneurship and problem debt. He is the author of “Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future: Voices from Global Frontiers” (Berghahn, 2023).
This webinar will be moderated by Karolien van Teijlingen, postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen and board member of the Dutch Anthropology Association.
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Check earlier webinars here.