Colloquium
Friday, February 19, 2010
12:30 pm
1261 Bunche Hall
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Event title: TBDPresented by Gillian Hart, UC Berkeley |
About the Speaker
GILLIAN HART is the chair of the Development Studies undergraduate major at the University of California Berkeley. Her research focuses include political economy, social theory, critical development studies, gender, agrarian and regional studies, labor, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia. Hart serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She participates in a research cluster program with South African graduate students. She is also working collaboratively with a group of South African and Indonesian scholars and activists to explore the rise of agrarian movements in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Suharto Indonesia, and the connections they are forging with one another.
Hart began her academic career doing battle with economistic and Eurocentric understandings of agrarian change in Java, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. Her more recent research is in her native South Africa, where she has traced divergent post-apartheid dynamics in two towns and adjacent townships, and their connections with East Asia. In Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (University of California Press, 2002). Hart draws on this work to engage critically with discourses of “globalization,” and explore alternatives to neoliberalism. She has also become increasingly fascinated by the possibilities of journalism, contributing to debates over the future of post-apartheid South Africa in a series of newspaper articles.
This event is co-sponsored with the Department of Geography.
