Along with a few colleagues at the University of Washington, last month I helped to found a new student group dedicated to challenging ourselves to critically reflect on development challenges and our role in the overall system. The group is called the Critical Development Forum – and we just set up a blog.
My personal hope is that the group helps us expand our ambition – to make “doing what we can” include more than just band-aid projects. After I returned from Nicaragua, I realized that so few students get the same opportunity to see the underbelly of ‘development’ up close. If we can begin to raise a critical consciousness about the challenges facing development as practiced, perhaps we can begin to make that change here that I so often referred to in this blog.
But more modestly, I just hope we can get the students interested in international development in a room together to talk to one another. We are too often divided across disciplines and between groups and ideologies. Engineers roll their eyes at social scientists while activists scoff at practitioners. This needn’t be the case.
We are actively looking for engaging speakers to catalyze our discussions – so if you are one, or know one, let me know!
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February 27, 2011 at 12:35 pm
tish lopez
I literally just stumbled across this and am rather excited. I’m a graduate student in Geography focusing on Health, Political, and Critical Development Geographies. I read your piece in Real Change, and am happy to know that there are other people struggling with these questions across the campus. It does often feel like different disciplines and frames of knowing get in the way of trying to move forward with many of these conundrums.