Stephen Resnick

On January 2nd, a brilliant economist, Stephen Resnick, one of the founding members and a cornerstone of the heterodox Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, died. Professor Resnick touched the lives of hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students over his career, including myself; even though I never met him, when I used to teach economics I often referred to a book that he co-authored with his long-time collaborator Richard Wolff, Economics: Neoclassical versus Marxian. An early obituary, written by one of his former students from Umass, can be found at:

Stephen Resnick, professor of economics at UMass-Amherst, dies at age 74

In addition, Professor Resnick's complete Economics 305 course on Marxian Economics at UMass Amherst can be found on YouTube.  This first lecture is:



Stephen Resnick will be missed.

GMOs in Canada

Timur Khudaiberdiev's excellent 2 minute animation on GMOs in Canada's food system.

Michael Pollen's food rules

This RSA animation of a talk by Michael Pollen is an excellent, succinct reason why agriculture has to change.

Michael Pollan's Food Rules from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.

Marx's theory of crisis

This is, without doubt, the best short exposition of Marx's theory of crisis that I have ever heard. It is brilliant, and congratulations to Cliff Bowman of Cranfield University for being so succinct.

An excellent new short video on the food system from Oxfam International:

The secret history of your favourite hamburger

An excellent article that emphasizes the cruelty of the food system:

The secret history of your favourite hamburger - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

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.