EVENT:
IDRN Scholars’ Cafe on Feb 25th — Education in Haiti

A Critical Study of Development Interventions in Education: Educational Policies and Governance in Haiti, 1980-2013: Progress, Redundancy, or Gridlock? With Gerald Fallon and André Mazawi.

When: Feb 25th, 12:00pm

Where: Liu Institute, 1st floor Research Unit 

RSVP: idrn.ubc@gmail.com

Snacks and coffee will be provided.

 IDRN Scholars’ Café is a monthly series of informal conversations over coffee/tea, fostering casual but thoughtful conversation on relevant cross-cutting topics related to international development. Open to all faculty, graduate students, and practitioners, these events aim to promote stimulating discussions on a wide range of relevant topics. The IDRN Scholars’ Cafe also aims to facilitate a much needed dialogue between scholars and practitioners and an advancement of international development, both in theory and in practice.


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IDRN Scholars’ Cafe on Feb 25th — Education in Haiti

Where to publish? | Top Development Journals:
A Guide for the Perplexed

Many of us are still in the throes of graduate research. As such we’re less experienced (and often less confident) in our work than are seasoned academics, and we struggle with how best to package and disseminate our findings for maximum effect. Choosing the right journal to submit to is central to this process. Not only does the choice of journal label us as emerging experts (or not) in one field versus another, it also has a direct impact on how we go about analyzing, and ultimately articulating, our data.

With that in mind, we’ve begun trawling the internet for methodical rankings of journals that focus on global development issues. Below is a roundup of what we’ve found thus far:

From the ICT4D blog, a ranking of development-focused journals based (roughly) on the average number of Google Scholar citations per paper, per year, in each journal. This ranking excludes development economics journals.   (Compiled in June 2010)

This table (above) is from IC4D, a blog that focuses on the role of information and communications technology in development. Their list uses Google Scholar to create an algorithm that approximates the average # of citations per paper/year for each relevant journal. (This differs slightly from a classic impact factor approach, which instead ranks journals based on a ratio of  # of citations : # of recent articles published). For some reason the folks at IC4D decided to explicitly leave out development economics journals from their ranking. Continue reading

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EVENT: Field Debrief | Violence against women in Guatemala | ‘Entering the Field and Managing Identity’

A new Field Debrief workshop will be led by Tal Nitsan, from the Department of Anthropology. It’s entitled:

 “Here I Am: Entering the Field and Managing Identity” 

Nitsan is currently researching violence against women in Guatemala.

Date: January 28th, at 12-2:00pm

Location: 3rd floor Boardroom of the Liu Institute

RSVP Anastasia: anastasia.shesterinina@gmail.com

Copyright 2009. Johan Ordonez-AFP/Getty Images

We are happy to invite you to the next event in the Reflections on Fieldwork in Difficult Settings series at the Liu Institute for Global Issues.  Tal Nitsan will lead a workshop entitled “Here I Am: Entering the Field and Managing Identity.”

Tal Nitsan is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology studying the intersections between gender, violence, law and society focusing on Latin America. Her work has been focusing on peace and wartime violence against women in Guatemala. She is specifically interested in the influence of international, regional and local discourses, ideas and funds on the different ways women activists understand violence against women in Guatemala and, accordingly, the different modes of action they choose to struggle against this violence.  Tal holds an MA in Sociology & Social Anthropology and a BA in Latin American Studies and Sociology & Social Anthropology from Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

 


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Workshop on Religion and Politics of Development

Workshop Opportunity

Organized by the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, on 28-29 August 2013, the workshop you can attend is titled Religion and the Politics of Development: Priests, Potentates and “Progress“. You should also visit the site for more information.

Priests, Potentates, and “Progress” will explore the nexus of religion, development, and politics in Asia. Any discussion of politics must pay close attention to the state and discussion at the conference will be informed by recent developments in religion-and-the-state theory. However, politics extends beyond the state and includes activity at communal-levels as well as global flows of ideas, finances, and institutions. We are interested in exploring religion and the politics of development at multiple levels ( e.g. – municipal, provincial, national, transnational) and within key sites of development activity – especially topics related closely to poverty alleviation ( e.g. – health care, malnutrition, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), water and sanitation, social justice).

Please submit all applications to Dr Robin Bush (arirb@nus.edu.sg) and Dr Philip Fountain (aripmf@nus.edu.sg) by 1 February 2013. Successful applicants will be notified by 1 March 2013 and will be required to send a draft paper (5,000-8,000 words) by 15 July 2013. Travel and accommodation support is available from the Asia Research Institute, depending on need and availability of funds.

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Green College Talks – On Poverty, Health, and other Development Challenges in Asia

Those of you with interests in poverty, development, globalization, health policy and Asia should find the next talks in this Green College series useful and informative. (See here for the full schedule of talks in the series.)

Poverty And Globalization and Indonesia – by Arianto Patunru and Zakir Machmud of the University of Indonesia, January 21st at 5-6:30.

Health and Intellectual Property Rights: The Dynamics of Coordinated Compliance in the Provision of Pharmaceuticals to the Chinese People – by Ilan Vertinsky of the Sauder School of Business, UBC, February 25th at 3-6:30

Challenges of Public Health Policy in China – by Wan Yanhai of the Institute of Asian Research, UBC, March 18 at 5-6:30.

Work Environment of Physicians and Quality of Healthcare in Japan. Yoshitake Wada of  Waseda University, April 15th at 5-6:30.

All talks will take place at Green College, Cecil Green Park Road, UBC Campus. 


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Solving the Global Food Crisis | New research, good reads and an interview with Dr. Navin Ramankutty (video)

In October of last year, the UN warned–ominously–of a new global food crisis threatening to hit sometime in 2013.

Food stocks have been dwindling.

Apparently, 2012’s record heatwaves and droughts brought crop reserves down to historic lows. While those of us in the global North are largely insulated from the vagaries of these fluctuations, at least 870 million people in the global South remain chronically malnourished, while grain supplies in the politically volatile Middle East and North Africa are precariously diminished.

.

Click here to jump to our video interview with Dr. Navin Ramankutty, McGill University’s Tier II Canada Research Chair in Land Use and Global Environmental Change. Or keep reading, below. 

Continue reading

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Political Consequences of Violence in Guatemala: Fieldwork Event with Yale’s Regina Anne Bateson–Jan 11th @ the Liu

The event will include a workshop and reception with Regina Anne Bateson of Yale University. The workshop will focus on Regina’s in-depth fieldwork on order and violence in Guatemala and resulting doctoral dissertation.

Regina is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University (http://www.reginabateson.com). Her fields are comparative politics, international relations, political economy, and research methods. Her current research focuses on the political consequences of violence, including civil wars and crime and her dissertation, which is based on fieldwork in Guatemala, is about public security and vigilantism in the wake of civil wars. She also researches the politics of crime, and her article on crime victimization and political participation appeared in the August 2012 issue of the American Political Science Review.

Full Event Blurb

When: January 11th, 2-5pm (1 hour presentation, followed by optional workshop and reception)

Where: 1st floor, Multipurpose Room, Liu Institute

RSVP:  anastasia.shesterinina@gmail.com 

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New Course on Development Practice and Planning

A new course is being offered at UBC by The School of Community and Regional Planning. The title is: “PLAN 572: Theory and Practice of Project Planning for Development“, and a full description is available here.

This course is intended to introduce students to issues theoretical and practical that have direct impacts upon project planning and program design in third world contexts. Through this course, students are expected to gain familiarity with theoretical concepts relevant to development planning, and be able to apply them in the analysis and design of planning interventions for social, economic, and environmental betterment.

Some of the topics that will be explored are: globalization; development theories and discourses; the role of the state; social contexts; state‑community dynamics; participatory planning; the informal sector; bureaucracies and corruption; non‑governmental organizations; spatial aspects of social change.

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7 Billion and You – Conference

The conference “7 Billion and You” invites us to free public lectures and discussions by leading thinkers on the patterns, processes and prognosis for a planet housing 7 billion humans. How can wealth and health be expanding as populations grow? Where is the world population heading – what happens when we get there? Can the world really support the future population? What major ethical issues must we confront?

These are just some of the questions that various scholars will be discussing in this conference organized by Human Evolutionary Studies Program (HESP) of SFU.

Register for free here!

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Field Debrief: Sensitivities of Affiliation and Information

Join us in this Field Debrief!

The Field Debrief will focus on “Sensitivities of Affiliation and Information,” which arise when doing fieldwork in difficult settings. It will raise questions of who we affiliate with as researchers, how this provides access to and/or biases information, and what we do with sensitive information that we encounter in our field research.

In 2010-2011, Elaine spent nine months in the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda conducting interviews on transboundary collaboration and community conservation in and around the Central Albertine Rift Transfrontier Protected Area Network. Her research there explored the development of networks of local water user groups for community-based transboundary integrated water resources management for peace and resilience.

Copyright of Elaine Hsiao

Copyright of Elaine Hsiao

Time: Friday December 14th, 12:00-2:30

Location: 3rd Floor BoardRoom at the Liu Institute

RSVP! idrn.ubc@gmail.com

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