Recent activities, spring 2012

With the end of the 2011 - 2012 academic session it was, as usual, extremely gratifying to meet graduating students one last time. They will be missed. Spring of 2012 will be busy. Following a seminar for the NGO Working Group on Food and Hunger at the United Nations, I will be returning do the second half of my graduate teaching, Development economics, on the Master's in Development Practice Program at Emory University, Atlanta, USA. I then travel to Korea, continuing my advisory work for the Gender and Economic Policy Management Initiative of the United Nations Development Programme's Gender Team. I will also commence an assignment for UN Women on engendering macropolicies. Following the annual conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development, I travel to New Zealand (for the first time) to deliver the Keynote Address to a symposium entitled 'Reconsidering gender in Asian studies: a Pacific perspective', organized by the Asia New Zealand Research Cluster at the University of Otago in Dunedin. Of course, my administrative responsibilities as Chair of the Department of International Development Studies will continue, particularly in light of the forthcoming program review that must be undertaken by the Department. In terms of research, I plan to finally complete my essay on contextualizing land grabbing in the developing world, for the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and submit my manuscript, Hungry for Change? Farmers, Agrarian Questions and the Global Food Crisis, to Brunswick Books/Kumarian Press.