Monday, May 4, 2015

Current activities, fall 2014

The summer is at an end, and I must say, it has been a whirlwind. In May and June I gave seminars to PhD students at Oxford University and the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, where I used to work. Following the preparation of my fall and winter courses, in mid-July I hit the road, providing capacity building in gender and economics to the Vietnam Women's Union, the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics and Public Administration, the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Committee on Financial and Budgetary Affairs of the Vietnamese National Assembly, UN Women Vietnam and the United Nations Development Programme in Vietnam. I then moved on to Kenya, where, for the Poverty - Environment Initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme, I delivered a five-day capacity building workshop on poverty, environment and gender-responsive economic planning to civil servants from ministries of finance in five east and southern African countries as well as people working within the UN system in east Africa.

Now I can settle back into my 'real' job: teaching Human inequality in global perspective and The World Food System at Trent University. In addition to that, and my usual administrative tasks as Chair of the Department of International Development Studies, I will be giving presentations in the fall to Engineers Without Borders and at a workshop at the University of Waterloo entitled 'Mapping the state of play in the global food landscape'. I have a number of writing commitments that I must complete before the end of October. Finally, I will be settling into my new duties as Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

Of course, other things will come up: they always do, as a busy summer gives way to a busy fall.