summer 2007 activities

The summer of 2007 was, as usual, a busy few months.

In terms of research, for most of the summer I worked on two papers. One was commissioned for Third World Quarterly , and is on the relationship between market-led agrarian reform and neoliberal enclosure. The paper is now finished, and will be published before the end of the year. The second was for a forthcoming collection entitled Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals in an Age of Human Insecurity, and examines the macroeconomics of the MDGs from a gender perspective. This paper is currently in its third draft; the book will come out next year. I have also done final work on a review essay for the Journal of Agrarian Change, entitled 'Land reform, rural social relations and the peasantry', which was published in volume 7 number 4 of that journal.

In addition, I was appointed to the United Nations Development Programme's International Expert Group on Gender Equality, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction. As a result, I attended an intense, exhausting and very rewarding two-day workship at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK in June with members of UNDP's Gender Team and an impressive international panel.

Also in June I attended the annual meetings of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development. I found this event to be an extremely revealing portrait of the state of academic international development studies in Canada. As a result of these meetings, I agreed to become Co-Chair of the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, a post that will be both demanding and important in the development of international development studies in Canada.

I have been continuing my tasks as Co-Editor of the Routledge-ISS Book Series Studies in Rural Livelihoods. As part of this role I have been busily working on my next book, which will be edited with C Kay of the ISS, and which is entitled Political Economy, Rural Livelihoods and the Agrarian Question: Peasants and Globalization.

In July I had the opportunity to act as respondent to a series of questions posed by the BBC Vietnamese service on land disputes in Vietnam, while in May I acted as a respondent for Peterborough This Week, offering my views on global inequality.

Finally, of course, as befits anyone involved in teaching, I worked during the summer on my lectures for the 2007-2008 academic year, and I hope that my future students will find the results worthwhile.