Author: @Bea

Channel “Inequalities With Alice Krozer”

Inequalities
A podcast hosted by Dr Alice Krozer
Dr Alice Krozer is a researcher based in Mexico working on inequalities. In this space, we share the conversations Alice has with inequality experts from Mexico and around the world dedicated to studying inequalities from different angles and disciplines.

What are inequalities? Why do they matter? What could be done about them? Accompany Alice on her exploratory tour to better understand the shape, origins, and consequences of the complex phenomenon of inequality.
Want to know more? We invite you to join the conversation! Write to us with questions about inequality, or if you would like Alice to further explore some aspects you are particularly interested in.

 

 

This is episode number 11 of season number 2 of #futureframedtv – #inequalities, an original traces&dreams podcast hosted by Dr. Alice Krozer.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Raul Zepeda Gil, a sociologist of conflict and lecturer at Oxford’s Department of International Development (ODID) who researches organized crime in Mexico. They talk about the concept of “Ni-ni”s (NEET in English), the youth population that is not on labor, education, or training, and their (imagined) association with organized crime in Mexico. Raul argues that the concept is both stigmatizing and empirically inadequate, and depicts possible better policies to prevent crime instead of labeling vulnerable youth as the culprits by statistical association.

Traces&Dreams is a unique transdisciplinary agency working for a wiser tomorrow.
We harness the power of narrative for a wiser future. We bring knowledge out of silos and use it as a strategic asset for cultural transformation, societal change, and collective innovation.

In this time of accelerated disruption, discoveries, and developments, we illuminate the transformations that take us from the past into the new future, creating new frames of understanding and meaning.

Dr. Mariana Heredia in conversation with Dr. Alice Krozer.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Mariana Heredia, Sociologist and professor at the Interdisciplinary School for Higher Social Studies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, about her new book ¿El 99% contra el 1%?
Por qué la obsesión por los ricos no sirve para combatir la desigualdad (The 99% against the 1%? Why the obsession with the rich does not serve the fight against inequality).
Mariana is an expert in social inequalities and power relations. They speak about what we need for a more egalitarian future: inclusive public policies and less ambition toward money only.

Dr. Raymundo Campos in conversation with Dr. Alice Krozer.
 
In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Raymundo Campos Vazquez, professor at the Center for Economic Studies of El Colegio de México, about his new book Inequalities: Why a more equal country would benefit everybody.
Raymundo is one of the foremost experts on inequality in the country and walks us through the most pressing dimensions of inequality afflicting contemporary Mexico, that they have existed for a long time, and what we should do to finally improve the situation.
(The book title in original is Desigualdades: “Por qué nos beneficia un país más igualitario”)

Alexandra Haas – Inequalities

In this episode, Alice speaks with Alejandra Haas, director of Oxfam Mexico, about their recent report on the Gig Economy, “This Future does not APPly”.

The report focuses on the situation of delivery workers in Mexico City. Alice and Alejandra talk about their working conditions, the companies that employ them (“partner with them”), their customers, and the future of this, so far highly unregulated, sector of the economy.

Read the report here (in Spanish)
https://www.promesassobreruedas.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Este_futuro_no_applica_informe_01262022.pdf

https://www.oxfammexico.org/

Dr. Victoria Fernandes, Geomorphology

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Victoria Fernandes, a Geoscientist from GFZ Potsdam in Germany and specialist in Geomorphology, about her work on estimating the effects of climate change on river beds (erosion rates), and what they might be able to tell us about our future, i.e. the effects of climate change for landscapes and consequently, us (and all species).

“I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at GFZ Potsdam. My work focuses on integrating geological observations with quantitative geophysical and geomorphological models. Specifically, my research encompasses complementary avenues: (1) Extricating past vertical motions from the stratigraphic record using novel data and analysis of global datasets; and (2) Understanding how different geological processes shape Earth’s surface by integrating geological information with modeling approaches that quantify surface process interactions with climate and tectonics.

With a focus on Southern Patagonia, my current research combines low-temperature thermochronology with cosmogenic nuclide dating to investigate how the impacts of climate change in glacial regions are translated downstream into fluvial channels and depositional sinks. Additionally, I aim to gain insight into the role of climate change, tectonics and geodynamics on the topographic evolution of Patagonia. My project is part of the ERC GyroSCoPe Project, aimed at better understanding how periodic changes in climate affect Earth-surface processes.”

https://vmfernandes.github.io/

A north-south story – can we stop the global trade of looted cultural object?

In today’s episode, Alice speaks with Daniel Salinas Córdoba, a historian, and archeologist specializing in cultural heritage.
They talk about the problems relating to international trade, or trafficking, of historical artifacts and what needs to be done to improve the (complex) situation.

He is the author of “Guiding heritage. Representations of Mexico’s national heritage in tourist guidebooks, 1920-1994.

Abstract

“RMA thesis, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University. The present thesis explores the relationship between heritage, tourism, and the nation. It aims to contribute to the understanding of how the promotion of tourism in Mexico by state and private actors created, negotiated or displayed notions of heritage throughout the twentieth century and how these notions changed and evolved over time. Following a case study of the depiction of cultural elements of the Mexican state of Morelos in tourist guidebooks of the twentieth century, a sample of 12 guidebooks published between the 1920s and the 1990s was analyzed. The content analysis carried out looked for the images, narratives and discourses that the guidebooks presented of the archaeological sites, historical buildings, traditions and other cultural elements of Morelos.”

“In my own work and research, I’m interested in exploring the relationships between heritage, nationalism, and tourism, as well as the illicit traffic of archaeological artifacts and cultural restitution.” Daniel Salinas Córdova

https://danielsalinascordova.com

What is going on in Guatemala?

In this episode, Alice talks to Dr. Alejandra Colom, a professor of anthropology in Guatemala. They talk about Alejandra’s recent book Dissidence and Discipline, which explores the reaction of Guatemalan elites when the country’s Commission against impunity (CICIG) starts to investigate them – how the organized private sector becomes split into those that align (and get “disciplined” and the dissidents), and the consequences either of those positions can have for its members on the individual level.

Find out more about Dr. Alejandra Colom here:
https://califoundation.org/fellows/alejandra-colom/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandra-colom-bickford-83554a16/?originalSubdomain=gt

And here is her new book (in Spanish):
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B09522X9H6/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1667305749&refinements=p_27%3AAlejandra+Colom&s=books&sr=1-1

ELITES AND POWER – Do you understand the impact of networking?

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Julián Cárdenas, a Sociology Professor at the University of Valencia, who specializes in network analysis and research methods. We talk about corporate elite networks, how they differ across countries, and why their configuration matters. Julián explains how they can influence policymaking, particularly with regard to redistributive policies, and also how we can measure and better understand them.

Find Dr. Julian Cárdenas on Twitter as @juliancardenasx
Here is the link to the publication:
“Exploring the Relationship between Business Elite Networks and Redistributive Social Policies in Latin American Countries”
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/1/13/htm

How to stop toxic behaviours

In this episode, Alice speaks with Eréndira Derbez, a young illustrator and writer from Mexico (currently based in London), about her recent bestselling book They are not micro – everyday machismo (coauthored with Claudia de la Garza). It’s about the normalized everyday interactions like mansplaining and other toxic behaviors that are not only uncomfortable for women and other “minorities” but actually violent and in aggregate very harmful for individuals and the community.

Universities, elites, and inequality

Dr. Cristóbal Villalobos, Vice Director of the Research Center for the Politics and Practice of Education at Universidad Católica de Chile. Cristóbal is an education specialist and Alice talks with him about his research on the role that higher education institutions, particularly elite universities, play in the reproduction of elites, and hence inequalities. They also discuss the experience of non-elite students that manage to enter these institutions, which is often marked by social pressure, stress, and anxiety due to the cultural clash between their backgrounds and the new environments.

The hidden game that feeds Mexican inequality – and how to change it.

In this episode, you will meet Dr. Viridiana Ríos, a Mexican political analyst and journalist for the NYT and El País. She talks about her new bestselling book “No es Normal” ( This ain’t normal) which describes many different facets of inequality in Mexico, and what should be done about them.

Connect with and out more about Dr. Viridiana here:
https://www.viririos.com/
https://twitter.com/Viri_Rios
https://www.linkedin.com/in/viridianarios/?originalSubdomain=mx

In this episode, the last for this first season, Alice welcomes Nerina Finetto, founder and director of Traces&dreams. They are going to speak about Alice’s research. Perceptions of poverty, wealth and social mobility underpin policy preferences about redistribution in Mexico and beyond. But Mexicans’ desired level of equality is inconsistent with the contribution that they are willing to offer, especially at the top end of the scale. Instead of being seen as a burden, taxes should be understood as an investment in an inclusive, prosperous, and fair society.

Today, progressive taxes on wealth, inheritance, and capital are non-existent in Mexico. Moreover, the Mexican state’s limited capacity for tax collection and redistribution is compounded by the redistributive weakness of Mexico’s fragmented and hierarchical welfare state. To change this situation, the discourse around taxation needs to be reversed. Instead of seeing taxes as a burden, they must be understood as an investment in an inclusive, prosperous, and fair society.

How much would you be willing to sacrifice for that?

In this episode, Alice speaks with Djaffar Shalchi, entrepreneur, civil society activist, and millionaire – in favor of taxing #millionaires.

We speak about his organization Human Act, with its initiative Millionaires for humanity, which aims to get other multimillionaires on board and committed to a 1% global wealth tax for themselves and their peers.

Denmark-based Iranian-born Djaffar explains how difficult it is to convince his fellow wealthy people, why he is not betting on space travel and the importance of the state in the fight against inequalities.

In this podcast episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Lara Monticelli, Assistant Professor and Marie Curie Fellow at the Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on economic and political sociology and social movements, and she is a co-founder of the Alternatives to #Capitalism research network.

They speak about what defines capitalism, its relation to crises, and what alternatives within or without capitalism might look like.

Find out why good industrial policies are important to fight against inequality. In this podcast episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Amir Lebdioui, a Fellow at the Latina America Centre at the London School of Economics and an expert in industrial policy and economic diversification.

They talk about what industrial policy is, why it had just a bad image until recently, what makes its importance in the fight against inequality and how his Algerian home got him interested in the subject in the first place.

How can we change economics? How to make an economy that works for people and the planet | Purpose vs Profit podcast with Jennifer Hinton.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Dr. Jennifer Hinton. Jennifer is an expert in sustainable economics and Senior Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute located in Bristol (she is based in Stockholm though). She has a Ph.D. in Economics and another one in Sustainability Science. They talk about the relationship-to-profit theory, how it could help address the sustainability and inequality crises we’re currently facing, and how a not-for-profit world would look like.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Jonathan Mijs, Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and lecturer in sociology at Harvard University.

Jonathan is an expert on how people perceive and explain inequalities. He explains how the formation of these beliefs is anchored in our individual surroundings, why people overestimate social mobility, what meritocracy has to do with it, and if there can be a future where everybody knows more about people different from themselves.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Javier Gonzalez, the Director of SUMMA (Education, Research and Innovation Laboratory for Latin America and the Caribbean), an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and an associate researcher at COES (Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies) in Chile.

They talk about failed Meritocracy, on the basis of the recent report he published called “Divergent Trajectories: From the Higher Education Promise of Social Mobility to the Reality of Graduates in the Labour Market. He explains that social class of origin matters for incomes later in life even where individuals pass through the same institutions of higher education and actually social class becomes increasingly important over time.

A podcast episode with the economist Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez – What has poverty to do with inequality? | Inequality, Poverty, and Growth | WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF SEVERE CRISIS | Countries are suffering.

In this episode of #futureframedTV, Alice speaks with the economist Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez, a researcher at King’s College London and the Strategic Policy Engagement Unit of UNDP. Eduardo is an expert in poverty and inequality measurement and social policy; he explains the workings of the poverty-inequality-growth triangle (famously coined by F Bourguignon) and they talk about different indicators to measure inequality, the inequality- decrease over the last decade in Latin America and poverty reduction in Mexico at the municipal level.

What is the role of the state to reduce inequalities? How society without taxation looks? Do we need to pay more taxes?

In this podcast episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Jorge Atria, a specialist in economic and fiscal sociology and social stratification at the University Diego Portales and the COES -Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies in Chile.

They talk about tax policies, the role of the state, distributive justice and the need to have a more progressive fiscal structure in most countries of the world, and how there might be a window of opportunity to move towards this right now.

In this podcast episode, we talk about easy, legal, and free migration.

Dr. Alejandra Díaz de León explains why do migrants leave their homes. She is telling their story about crossing the borders.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Alejandra Díaz de León, sociologist specializing on migration, at El Colegio de México. They talk about Central American migrants on their way to the US, trust between people who shouldn’t trust each other, the difficulties of transmigration more generally, and the particularities of deterrence policies on the American route. Tune in!

What is the price women pay for love? Podcast episode about gender inequalities in household and how to overcome them.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Sofia Mosqueda, political scientist and consultant, about the Politics of Love: the different expectations by gender towards what “to love” means, the convenience of the state to maintain intrahousehold inequality, and how a good love should look like instead.

ARE WE SEGREGATED BY CLASS? Let’s talk about economic development, big data, and urban inequality in Mexico City. Podcast episode with Diego Vazquez.

In this podcast episode, Alice speaks with Diego Vazquez who is the Research Director of #Oxfam Mexico. Diego is an economist specializing in Economic Development. They talk about last year’s report on Big Data and Urban Inequality where they found Mexico City to be completely segregated by class in terms of spaces used for recreation, education, and more.

Interplay of fiscal and monetary policies.
Why we need to know more about monetary policies!

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr Carlo Panico, economics professor at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, an expert in financial events, income distribution, and growth.
They talk about the interplay of fiscal and monetary policies, the role of central banks, and the financial markets’ lack of trust in party politics, especially in emerging countries. We also discuss how this, rather than being a technical challenge, is a political problem; in other words, how political will provides (or impedes) improvement in the coordination of institutions.

How China Escaped Shock Therapy.
The making of China’s economic reforms.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr Isabella Weber, assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is a political economist of China and global trade. They talk about Isabella’s new book “How China Escaped Shock Therapy”, what actually is shock therapy, why it was a bad idea (in hindsight) and how China managed to develop its own way of transitioning from state planning through gradual reindustrialization to its current strong position.

The Resource Curse – Does oil make you rich?

“The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty or the poverty paradox, is the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuels and certain minerals) having less economic growth, less democracy, or worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources.” Wikipedia

In this episode, Alice speaks with Jesus Carrillo, Mechanical Engineer pursuing his Ph.D. in Economics at El Colegio de México, currently on a fellowship at Yale University, who specializes in the political economy of energy. They talk about the challenge of countries relying on natural resources for development (the resource curse), the sustainability of state reliance on oil, and how the future of big oil companies is changing.
#future #inequalities #economics

The Economic History of Large Pandemics

Today’s guest is Diego Castañeda, Head of Economics, Finance, and International Development at Ai-D (Agenda for International Development) think tank.
We had already the pleasure to speak with him in episode #4.
Have a watch here:
https://www.tracesdreams.com/video/inequalities-4/

In this episode, Alice and Diego talk about his new book “Pandenomics”. They talk about crises, pandemics, economic history and lessons learned (or not) for governments from previous crises.

The British Royals- Wealth, Power and Inequality

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Laura Clancy, lecturer in Media and Inequality at the University of Lancaster.
Laura researches the British #royalty and their relationship with/representation in the media. They talk about wealth, the importance of Royals in society today, the difficulties of researching anything related due to the secrecy and guarded image they keep, and recent cracks in this image with the Harry/Meghan conversation with Ophra and the accusation of racism.

Migrants, Expatriates, Mobility & Perceptions

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Sarah Kunz, Research Fellow at Bristol University who focuses on the politics of Migration categories, particularly elite mobility.

They speak about the meaning of terms like migrant and expat, the privileges and prejudices associated with one or the other, and how their meaning changed over time, also about the way citizenship and belonging are used or discarded in people’s identity and how this all links to international inequalities.

The politics of care

The episode in #Spanish with English subtitles.

In this episode of #Inequalities, Alice speaks with the sociologist Dr. Makieze Medina Ortiz, who is an expert in Childcare and Human Rights policies. They talk about the unequal division of care work in the households, and the missing engagement of the state to compensate and equalize this burden.

Inequality in Finland

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Hanna Kuusela, Academic Research fellow at Tampere University in Finland and cultural studies scholar working on issues of wealth.
They talk about the particularity of Finland, and of researching inequalities in the allegedly most equal country/example in the world.

Violence, Youth and Education

In this episode,i Alice speaks with Cirenia Chavez, a doctor in development studies from the University of Cambridge, and has been a consultant for different UN agencies including UNDP, Unicef, etc. Cirenia’s research focuses on the relation between violence, youth, and education. They talk about Cirenia’s study with imprisoned young male offenders in Ciudad Juarez, and some of the factors that drive them towards becoming offenders or not.

We dedicate this episode to the memory of Giulio Regeni, Cirenia’s and Alice friend and co-PhD student at Cambridge, who was killed in Egypt in 2016.

You can find out more about Dr Cirenia Chavez here:
https://www.cireniachavez.com/

Ethical challenges in the time of Covid19

In this episode, Alice speaks with Mira Krozer, a cultural anthropologist, who is an Integrity Advisor at Governance and Integrity in the Netherlands. They speak about the ethical questions faced by the medical staff and care sector during the pandemic, who decides what are morally right ways to act, and how an archive of testimonies can help inform and create accountability towards our dealing with the crises, on the individual and societal levels.

Reconciliation, Peace-building, and Forgiveness.

I had today with Jakob Silas Lund, stay-at-home-dad, writer, a consultant for a wide range of international development organizations (particularly UN women and other UN entities), and award-winning reconciliation activist. This conversation is about the issues of Reconciliation/ Peace-building, Forgiveness, and retributive justice, on a personal and global level.
Enjoy this reflexive and personal conversation!

Financial Market Central Banks, and Inequality.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Dr. Jens Van T’Klooster, a specialist in Monetary Policy and Financial Markets who is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven and the University of Amsterdam. Alice and Jens speak about the role of central banks in dealing with crises, and how the conventional wisdom of what monetary policy is able (and allowed) to do has suddenly been turned on its head since the onset of the pandemic. Jens explains how central banks effectively create (and should do so) money out of thin air to pay for the pandemic related costs in the EU/US, while those of other regions of the world are more restrained in their policy space still, unfairly – and how this all relates to inequality.

The costs of Inequality

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr Diego Sanchez-Ancochea, Director of the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford about his new book “The costs of inequality in Latin America: lessons and warnings for the rest of the world”.

Inequality and caste in India (and beyond)

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Ujithra Ponniah who is a Wealth Inequality and Elite Studies Fellow at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, about inequalities in India, the importance and meaning of caste (in and beyond India) and social protests.

Extreme Wealth and Inequality in London

In this episode, Alice speaks with Prof. Rowland Atkinson from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. Rowland is an expert in the urban concentration of wealth, and what it does to the social fabric of the City.
In this conversation, you will learn about what extreme wealth has done to London, the changes it brings socially, politically, and physically (in terms of urban structure).

Climate, Inequality, and Sustainable finance

In this episode, Alice speaks with Aranxa Sanchez. She works at the Mexican Ministry of finance- Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público- where she is the Encargada de Finanzas Sostenibles. They speak about environmental inequality, the impact of climate change, and how sustainable finance can help to mitigate the related problems.

How to fight Inequality

In this episode, Alice speaks with Ben Phillips the author of How to Fight Inequality (And Why this Fight needs you).
Ben Phillips advises the UN, governments and civil society organisations. He was Launch Director of the Fight Inequality Alliance, and Campaigns and Policy Director for Oxfam and ActionAid International. He has lived and worked in four continents and a dozen cities. He has led programmes and campaigns teams in Save the Children, the Children’s Society, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty and the Global Campaign for Educationd. He began his development work at the grassroots, as a teacher and ANC activist living in Mamelodi township, South Africa, in 1994, just after the end of apartheid.

The Social Unrest and Inequalities in Chile

In this episode, Alice interviews Dr. Javier Gonzalez, who is Director of SUMMA (Laboratory for Education, Research and Innovation for Latin American and the Caribbean); he s also an affiliated lecturer at Cambridge Uni and researcher at COES (Uni Chile). They talk about the relationship between inequalities and the social unrest in Chile, how institutions influence the distribution, and the country’s recent move to change the Constitution, and what this could mean for its education system.

Tax Havens, Offshore Finance and International Inequality

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Andrea Binder, who is a Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute, and an expert in offshore finance. They talk about the relationship between tax planning and banking, the role of the state, who or what actually IS the state, and how all this interlinks with elites, and ultimately, international inequality.

Inequality, Power, and Elites in Central America.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Francisco Robles, professor at the School of Communication and the Institute of Social Research at the University of Costa Rica. Francisco specializes in the investigation of elites. We talk about the particularities of studying inequality in Costa Rica and Central America, and the danger and difficulties of doing elite research in the region.

You can find the podcast hosted by Dr. Francisco Robles here:
https://anchor.fm/iis-ucr

And here some of the resources suggested:
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137359391
https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/fesamcentral/07598.pdf

The Impact of Public Finance on Inequality

In episode 19 Alice speaks with Carlos Brown, an expert in fiscal justice and public finance. He is the co-director of the Urban South Institute, a think-and-do-tank for environmental and governance issues in the Global South.

Food Inequality in Different Social Classes.

Dr Paloma Villagómez is a postdoc at the Social Research Institute of Mexicos national university UNAM. She specializes in food inequality and she talks with Alice about food processing and eating habits and practices by different social classes, and the prejudices related to (un)healthy diets.

The Multidimensionality of inequalities.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Raymundo Campos-Vazquez, economist, professor at the Colegio de México currently on academic leave at the Central Bank.

They talk about the multidimensionality of inequality, perceptions of inequality, and discrimination on the labor market related to obesity.

Elections, politics, and criminal organizations in Mexico.

In this episode, Alice is with Dr. Amalia Pulido, assistant professor at the Political Studies Department of the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE).

Amalia is an expert in political violence and its relation with political parties. They talk about the upcoming elections, how criminal capture of candidates fosters inequality, murders of politicians, and the importance of accountability in the election process.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Raul Bravo Aduna, the (former) journalist and (now) editor of the resort Economy and Society at Nexos Magazine (arguably the most important editorial in Mexico).
They talk about the role of publishing intelligible information about inequality for society, and what its impact could be. It’s a pessimistic chat with a hopeful tone.

Worth watching!

In this episode, Alice meets Dr. Rosario Aparicio, a researcher at the Seminar for Labor and Inequality at El Colegio de México. They talk about the difficulties that indigenous women confront in the labor market, and in Mexico in general, the Zapatista revolution of 1994, and the current feminist movement and demonstrations going on these days.

The conversation is in Spanish with English subtitles!

Rich Russians and wealth creation.

In this interview, Alice speaks with Dr. Elisabeth Schimpfössl, a sociologist specialized elites and Russia at Aston University (UK). They talked about Elisabeth Schimpfössl ‘s book ‘Rich Russians’, and how the dramatic changes in Russia since the 1990s conditioned wealth creation and concentration, and where the (in)famous oligarchs are now.

In this episode, Alice speaks with the economist Dr. Eva Arceo-Gómez, professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico. Eva is one of the foremost gender economics experts in Mexico. They talk about Eva’s research on the penalty of motherhood in the labor market, the persistent gender pay gap, the unequal distribution of unpaid work in the home, and what needs to be done to improve women’s situation and decrease gender inequalities.

The opportunities technologies hold for a better future.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Michal Kosinski from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior. Michal Kosinski’s research focuses on individual differences in behavior, preferences, and performance.
Alice and Michal speak bout the opportunities technologies hold for a better future, and how there is always a good and bad potential in all change.

Enjoy the conversation!

This is a conversation between Alice and Hugo Cerón-Anaya, an assistant professor in the sociology and anthropology department at Lehigh University in Bethlehem

They talked about his recent book Privilege at Play, which analyses the entanglement of Class, Race and Gender in the creation of privilege in Mexico, through an ethnographic study of Golf clubs. Hugo explains about the importance of studying privilege and what it meant to immerse himself into spaces of privilege as a researcher (without belonging to them himself).

The Covid-19 Crisis and Inequality in Mexico.

In this episode, Alice speaks with Dr. Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid, Professor of Economics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). They talk about the necessity to the consequences of the Covid-19 crisis on inequality in Mexico and the Latin American region, and how, in order to get rid of physical distancing, we first need to reduce the social distance between those who have, and those who don’t have, resources like income, health care, and others.

Migrants, Racial Discrimination, and Inequality

In this episode, Alice speaks with Jean Beaman from the University of California Santa Barbara. They talk about Jean Beaman’s book “Citizen Outsider” which describes the experience of second-generation migrants from the Maghreb and racial discrimination in France, and how the situation is there compares to the US.

What does golf have to do with inequality?

In this episode, Alice speaks with Patrick Inglis, Professor at Grinnell College in Iowa. They talk about his recent book Narrow Fairways, which describes the points of connection between elites and the poor in India through studying the relationship of golfers with their caddies, and about the study of elites and inequalities in general.

In this episode, Alice meets Dr Máximo Jaramillo, a sociologist working at Fundar (civil society foundation for tax research) and the founder of Gatitos contra la desigualdad (kitties against inequality), a viral social media persona informing people about inequality with cat pictures). They chat about Máximo’s research on perceptions of poverty and inequality, and the influence that the myth of meritocracy has on these perceptions.

In this episode, Alice meets Luis Monroy-Gómez-Franco, who is a Ph.D. student in economics at CUNY Graduate Center, lecturer at The City College of New York, and external associate researcher at the Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias (CEEY).
The topic of the conversation is social mobility, and how it functions as a link between big contemporary issues like poverty, inequalities, and the concentration of opportunities and how life trajectories are possible/likely in a given society, Mexico in our case, based on these.

You can find out more about Luis Monroy-Gómez-Franco here: https://sites.google.com/view/lmonroygomezfranco/home

Diego Castañeda Garza is an economic historian (currently finishing his PhD at the University of Lund) and prolific contributor to a range of media on questions of inequality, development, and economic history. Alice and Diego chatted about the impact of crises on inequality, and the challenges of historic analyses.

Dr. Roberto Vélez Grajales is currently the Director of the influential Mexican think tank Espinosa Yglesias Research Center (Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, CEEY). We met to converse about the unequal distribution of life chances in Mexico and what needs to be done to equalise both opportunities and outcomes.

Find out more about Roberto here:

https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=_7vh20AAAAAJ&hl=es

Find out more about the Espinosa Yglesias Research Center here:

https://ceey.org.mx/

In this episode two, Alice speaks with Ricardo Fuentes Nieva, an economist and the Director of Oxfam Mexico. He has previously worked at UNDP and World Bank and is co-author of the influential report “An Economy For the 1%”.

The main topic of the conversation is about the importance of studying inequalities today.

Enjoy it and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions you want us to ask about inequalities.

In this first episode, Alice meets Dr. Katie Higgins who is an Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. They speak about wealth inequality and the influence of urban elites in Manchester.

Enjoy the video!

#PHDstory | Vlad Schüler Costa

Vlad Schüler Costa
PhD Student in Anthropology

 

This project is about shedding light on the dreams and work of academics and researchers. The aim is to sharing their aspirations with larger audiences who care about current research that is conducted from around the world. As a start please introduce yourself.

Sure. I’m Vlad Schüler Costa, I’m a Brazilian anthropologist, and I’ve been doing my research here in Manchester for the past three years now.

What is your research on and where are you conducting it (what stage you are at, what department and university, where you conduct your research?

I’m a fourth year student now, within the Social Anthropology Department at the University of Manchester.

My research is situated within the subfield of “anthropology of science”. More specifically, I conducted one year of fieldwork observing scientists at work in a laboratory within the University of Manchester’s Institute of Biotechnology. The scientists in this lab were working to develop a “robot scientist” — an apparatus that uses laboratory robotics and artificial intelligence to automate a specific kind of microbiological research, without the need for human intervention (only oversight).

Why did you choose this topic of research?

Honestly, there were many reasons. Back in 2013/2014, during my Master’s, I was exposed to the anthropology of science, the sociology of knowledge, and STS (science and technology studies), and I found it all absolutely fascinating. I was studying digital anthropology back then (with a side focus on the political economy of knowledge), and through that I got to know some people who were doing research in IT and AI, and it seemed to me a field that opened so many questions to the core issue of anthropology — “what makes us human?”.

After that, it was a matter of luck and persistence until figuring out the particular place where I wanted to conduct my research — back then I hadn’t any idea I would get so involved with microbiology!

What contribution your research is going to add?

Well, it depends, honestly. In some ways, I make very humble contributions — a huge part of what the thesis is about is saying that “this thing this author says happens in these conditions also happened in my fieldsite!”.

But I also aim at bigger discussions — for example, the anthropology of robotics is completely fixated on anthropomorphic (humanlike) robots, and I want to argue not only that not all robots are humanlike, but that the way we treat those non-humanoid robots is much more fraught with uncertainties than the literature seems to convey.

Tell us a little more about your research and it’s significance

Okay. I’ve done this year of participant observation within this lab. We anthropologists tend to prefer participant observation because it is the best method to, well, observe people and understand what they do in their daily lives. That (what some people also call “ethnography”) is what mostly distinguishes the kind of knowledge anthropologists are generally interested in generating — rather than what stands out or is uncommon, we tend to look for the everyday, quotidian practices of regular people.

And this is highly important when discussing science! You see, most scientists know that science is mostly done by regular people, carrying out their research, which sometimes can be boring and tedious. However, when scientists (and other people, such as science journalists, etc) write about science, they tend to highlight the fun, “sexy” parts of it, rather than the troublesome and laborious reality of it. People don’t talk about how many experiments failed before finally getting that reliable, reproducible one. Or about how much time you have to spend calibrating your equipment every time before you run an experiment, because any slight change in parameters might affect the data.

So these everyday realities of science becomes similar to what Michael Taussig calls “public secrets” — “that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated”. Scientists might chat about these issues among themselves — particularly, I’ve found out, when touching base with their colleagues, when people trade these “war stories” — but rarely in public fora. And I feel that is one of the reasons why “laypeople” are sometimes shocked when they get to know the “backstage” of science. They expect science to be all about absolute certainty and minute precision, so when they discover that science is not quite like that, well, they might feel shocked!

That’s why I think it’s important to demystify science even if just a little bit, and that’s what I try to do in my research.

Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years from now?

That’s an unknown yet. I’d like to stay in academia, hopefully as a permanent lecturer or professor — as I love teaching and supervising, even more than researching or writing.

Of course, as we all know, it isn’t so easy to find a stable job within academia nowadays, so I might keep conducting research and writing — either as a postdoc, or even outside academia.

What do you think can be improved in higher education and participation in order to encourage more people to conduct research that makes a change?

Honestly, the crescent neoliberalisation and commercialisation of higher education concerns me, a lot. Not only because it completely distorts what academia should be about — “the pursuit of knowledge” or however you’d like to phrase it — but also because it creates an unnecessary hurdle to people who cannot afford to participate.

We are asking teenagers to decide if their parents can afford their studies, or alternatively whether they want to get piles of debt that will last throughout their adult life.

Furthermore, this impacts the actual research being conducted as well. Researchers cannot afford to pursue long-term research goals, because the current system is increasingly based on short-term quantifiable metrics, like publications — see Peter Higgs, Nobel prize winner, who has said ‘no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough’ (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system).

What inspires you as a person and a researcher?

That’s a tough one. I’ll risk sounding cheesy, but I think the world inspires me.

One of the reasons I became an academic is because the world as a whole, and the social world in particular, absolutely baffles me. I find the oddest things completely fascinating, and sometimes I’ll spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about the most mundane stuff.

This is what Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta has famously called the “anthropological blues” — becoming fixated and delighted in the simplest things, and euphoric when you finally get to figure them out. This feeling, of “figuring things out”, inspires me.

Is there anything you would like to share with us regarding a change of perspective or belief you had during your PhD journey?

There are a couple, but I think the one that I find the most interesting is how I stopped “believing” in (completely closed) academic disciplines. The lab I worked in was inherently interdisciplinary, and people would have loads of interests and knowledge about things you wouldn’t immediately expect them to have based on their degrees. I now tend to think of disciplines as being similar to languages — they are a way of representing the world and communicating that to others, but they are much less rigid than they seem at first sight.

What are the challenges and benefits of your type of research and topic?

The biggest challenge in the anthropology of science is actually getting access to fieldsites. Most of us have our stories of approaching a particular laboratory or research group asking to study them, and having that request denied. I think this happens more often nowadays, as all of us feel the threat of science denialism and anti-science movements in the broader society. And I’m not saying I don’t understand that people might get uncomfortable when a stranger appears out of nowhere wanting to observe them! It’s just that sometimes it is challenging trying to find a place that will accept your presence as a “resident anthropologist”.

And in fact, I think the loss ends up being on those labs, because anthropologists of science overwhelmingly end up being the most passionate science advocates you can find. In fact, some of us, myself included, end up dedicating a lot of (unpaid) time and energy to science communication and popularisation. Not only because we end up befriending most of our informants — it’s very difficult to conduct anthropological research if you don’t get along with them –, but in fact it is a skill we acquire through our research — after all, most of my work is “translating” the (robotics, AI, microbiology) research I have witnessed to “laypeople” (other anthropologists).

Ph.D. is a big commitment, what would you like to say to aspiring researchers?

Don’t rush into it! I know some people who think they are “too old” or have “lost the timing” to pursue a Ph.D., but many of the best anthropologists I know started their PhDs later in life.

Otherwise, keep in mind that pursuing a Ph.D. tends to be a highly stressful enterprise, regardless of your field. You are not the only one who is struggling, and it’s tough because discovering new knowledge is tough. Remember to enjoy life, chat with friends and please go to therapy.

Conversation by:
Nada Al Hudaid

Vlad’s research is very interesting as it looks at the human aspect within a robotic environment. He seeks to highlight the human experience in a scientific lab which does not really get much attention apart from the final outcomes of the experiments (contingent on its success).

Vlad is a very intelligent intellectual and full of life which reflects very well in how he presents his work. Keep an eye on his work, you will learn a lot and enjoy his light-hearted tweets.

Learn more about Vlad's work:
http://www.vladschuler.net
Connect with Vlad:
https://twitter.com/@v_schulercosta

 

Conversation by:
Nada Al Hudaid

Vlad’s research is very interesting as it looks at the human aspect within a robotic environment. He seeks to highlight the human experience in a scientific lab which does not really get much attention apart from the final outcomes of the experiments (contingent on its success).

Vlad is a very intelligent intellectual and full of life which reflects very well in how he presents his work. Keep an eye on his work, you will learn a lot and enjoy his light-hearted tweets.

#PHDstory | Carolina Arruda Braz

Carolina Braz

 

How would you describe yourself?

I’m a relatively reserved person, tend to talk as little as possible but enjoy the presence of people I consider close.

What is the focus of your research?

My research is in the Drug Design and Developing field, with a focus of compounds with action against Leishmania spp.

What are the questions that you are dealing with?

I’m researching if a determined class of compounds has an action against parasites and looking for a possible protein target.

Why are they relevant?

Because Leishmania current treatment is highly toxic for patients, so new alternatives are always welcome. And this particular class of compounds has actions against several other parasites, but the mechanism of action is still unknown.

What kind of answers would you like to get out of it?

I’m hoping to propose a target and find a hit – highly potent- compound.

Why is this kind of research relevant?

Improvement in the already limited therapeutical arsenal.

How do you see the future in this field, what kind of challenges you believe we will encounter?

Challenges concern of leading this research to the next logical step, which is animal trials. The optimal future, in this case, would be to be able to launch a new drug in the market.

Is there a new research approach that you think is going to be relevant?

Probably the neglected diseases field is not much within the industry’s concerns, but I think getting rid of parasitic diseases, especially in under developing countries, is relevant for public health.

Is this a topic that you think is relevant right now?

Yes. Because of the recent cases of resistance to current treatment.

How did you get interested in what you are doing?

I have always liked medicinal chemistry, especially when allied with molecular modeling approaches. The field of research for new drugs is the very first step in the drug industrial process and has always caught my attention.

Why should everybody learn about subjects like history or biology?

Everybody should learn biology and chemistry – at least the very basics – because it’s primordial to have a basic understanding of how your own body and the environment around you work. All the debate around whether or not vaccines are bad for children would be avoided, for example.

What do you need to be a good researcher or a Ph.D. student in your program?

Independent and innovative behavior. Focus. The ability to overcome the many problems that happen every day. Networking and seeking other researchers’ aid and opinions.

Who inspired and who continues to inspire you?

Some of my professors in undergrad.

What motivates you?

The thought that I can contribute minimally to knowledge production and eventually help someone (or myself) in the future with some outstanding discovery.

What book would you read again?

I’m currently rereading a few of Garcia Marquez’s books.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Working in a research facility.

A challenge? The most beautiful day? The most difficult one?

Getting up every morning and solving all the problems that never cease to come. A beautiful day is always near the sea.

What kind of impact would you like to have?

I’d like to lead a successful research project, possibly discovering a new drug.

What does the world need the most right now?

Empathy.

What does research need the most right now?

Emotional balance and fundings.

If you could change one thing, what would you like to change?

The political scenario.

What is your dream, or the society you dream of?

I dream of a society where everybody has equal aces to health and education.

What is life about?

Learning every day and improving as a person. And traveling as much as possible.

Conversation by:
Amanda Fernandes

I decided to interview Carolina because she is a young researcher in the health area and works in a very relevant field. She is a Brazilian pharmacist who is studying the development of new drugs. As Brazil is a country with great potential for this, her research becomes very relevant worldwide. So, it would be very interesting to know what her goals are, as well as the inspiration to do it.

And in fact, it truly was. She is a nice girl with great intentions on her research. It is a very relevant study, englobing a neglected disease and the improvement of its treatment. I found it fascinating to learn more about it and to understand her field of work a little better.

Learn more about Carolina's work:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carolina_Braz

 

Conversation by:
Amanda Fernandes

I decided to interview Carolina because she is a young researcher in the health area and works in a very relevant field. She is a Brazilian pharmacist who is studying the development of new drugs. As Brazil is a country with great potential for this, her research becomes very relevant worldwide. So, it would be very interesting to know what her goals are, as well as the inspiration to do it.

And in fact, it truly was. She is a nice girl with great intentions on her research. It is a very relevant study, englobing a neglected disease and the improvement of its treatment. I found it fascinating to learn more about it and to understand her field of work a little better.

Picked 1


Geology Makes You Time-Literate

We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as a world map from the 14th century. …As a species, we have a childlike disinterest and partial disbelief in the time before our appearance on Earth.
Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences.


Wood wide web: Trees' social networks are mapped

Research has shown that beneath every forest and wood there is a complex underground web of roots, fungi, and bacteria helping to connect trees and plants to one another.

Trees talk and share resources right under our feet, using a fungal network nicknamed the Wood Wide Web. Some plants use the system to support their offspring, while others hijack it to sabotage their rivals.


The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, and to mystify the familiar — all this is the test of her or his power.
Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be.
Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last. My faith in art rivals my admiration for any other discourse. Its conversation with the public and among its various genres is critical to the understanding of what it means to care deeply and to be human completely. I believe.


Life is not what one lived,
but what one remembers and how one remembers it
in order to recount it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Keynote speaker John Seely Brown's 2019 commencement address

Today, we are at the beginning of another new era: the Imagination Age – an age that calls for new ways to see, to imagine, to think, to act, to learn, and one that, I will argue, also calls for us to re-examine the foundations of our way of being – being human – and what it means to be human. Yes, this is a different world – a world in which skills matter, tools matter, but integrity and authenticity are also required.


How to predict the future

Reliable insight into the #future is possible, however. It just requires a style of thinking that’s uncommon among experts who are certain that their deep knowledge has granted them a special grasp of what is to come…
The best #forecasters, by contrast, view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. This is called, in a word, #learning.



Not everyone
is guilty,
but everyone
is responsible.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Economist
Biography:

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, known as Jomo, is a prominent Malaysian economist. He holds the Tun Hussein Onn Chair in International Studies at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia, and is Visiting Senior Fellow at Khazanah Research Institute, Visiting Fellow at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, and Adjunct Professor at the International Islamic University, Malaysia.

He is also a member of the Malaysian Council of Eminent Persons who advises the Federal Government of Malaysia.

He served as the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) during 2005–2012, and then as Assistant Director-General and Coordinator for Economic and Social Development at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome during 2012–2015. He was also Research Coordinator for the G24 Intergovernmental Group on International Monetary Affairs and Development during 2006–2012. During 2008–2009, he served as adviser to Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, President of the 63rd United Nations General Assembly, and as a member of the [Stiglitz] Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System.

Jomo is a leading scholar and expert on the political economy of development, especially in Southeast Asia, who has authored or edited over a hundred books and translated 12 volumes besides writing many academic papers and articles for the media.

What are the engines of inequalities?

What do inequalities look like in the global scheme? Can we sustain a growing population? What role does capitalism play? Why are health and nutrition key for sustainable development?

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, world-renowned economist and current member of the Council of Eminent Persons for the Malaysian Government, speaks about the global landscape for inequalities in the modern era, and how these have been continuously shaped and reformed by world events, about different approaches of capitalism, how different powers are shaping our reality, how women, health and nutrition are key for a sustainable future and more.

Watch the trailer:
Watch another trailer:
Watch the trailer with Kreyol subtitles:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Jomo Kwame Sundaram's Video here

My name is Jomo Kwame Sundaram. I live in Malaysia. I used to teach economics in the university, and then I worked for about eleven years in the United Nations system overseeing economic and social development research, first in New York for seven and a half years, and then at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome for three and a half years.

Thank you so much for joining me here on Skype. We met at the conference, Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World, where you participated at the round table “Engines of Inequalities: Elite, Politics and Power.” How did we arrive at this moment in which the richest 1% of the population holds half of the world’s wealth?

Well, I think from what the data tells us, especially about income, inequalities have grown a great deal, especially in the last two centuries, since the time of the industrial revolution, and the change of the type of imperialism. This has very important implications. What basically has happened is that a huge gap group between those economies which successfully made the transition to either industry or very highly productive agriculture such as the so called settler colonies of the British Empire; Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and so on. This gap has been extremely important, but in the last century or so, there have been some important developments.

We find, for example, that after the first world war during the 1920s, there was a continued huge increase in inequality but also in economic vulnerability. This led to the crash and the depression, particularly during the 1930s. At that time there were a number of measures, which were taken in the United States, which we often refer to as the New Deal, but also in other parts of the world to get to the support of the publics behind them. An extreme type of ethnopopulism, which we often call fascism, developed in countries such as Germany, in Italy and Japan, of course. But there were also other sympathetic tendencies in other parts of the world, such as Spain and so on.

Before that, there was a very strong reaction to these growing inequalities, the more successful reaction against it in the form of the Russian revolution of 1917. Then slowly over time, there were other revolutions, but many of the subsequent revolutions which took place were also wars of national liberation. This I think is very important to recognize what happened, for example, in China and later on in other countries such as Vietnam, were really wars of national liberation. These all responded to different types of inequalities.

These different types of inequalities at that time were used by certain forces to mobilize around what was called socialism and so on. Then there was another type of reaction against inequalities; the inequalities among the rich world, between the established imperial powers, colonial powers, and the rising ones, such as Germany and Japan and so on. This could not be resolved, and eventually it led to the Second World War. During the Second World War, many, many people were mobilized for the war effort, and especially women.

Women were mobilized because men were often the main people in the war, and so much of the rest of the economy, including the household economy, was sustained by women. After the end of the Second World War, it was not … you just could not simply go back to the status quo ante. You had to organize life differently. For about a quarter of a century after 1945, there were quite a number of reforms which were used to be referred to as part of the Welfare State.

These were reforms or try to reduce the inequalities of the century since the industrial revolution, before the depression. Most of the time when we talk about inequalities, we think about national level inequalities. This is especially true in the west. But for many others in the rest of the world, they are not only thinking about the inequalities in their own societies, but they are also very conscious of the fact that they have been left behind, they have been marginalized by the way society has changed.

If you look at total inequality in the world today, about two thirds of it is due to differences among countries, and about one third are differences of so called ‘class’. These differences, if you describe them as differences of location or geography versus class, you can begin to understand why so many people want to move, they see movement, migration, international migration included, as a way of overcoming their own economic insecurity and economic deprivations.

Of course, there are many other reasons as well, but this is extremely important. What has changed however, is that in the last two or three decades, there has been a very important change, that we found that in some parts of the developing countries, you began to see, maybe not two or three decades ago, even half a century ago, you began to see accelerated economic growth, first initially in places like Korea and Taiwan and so on, but also spreading to other countries in East Asia. Then from the end of the 20th century, there seems to be accelerated growth even in the southern cone of Latin America, and from the beginning of the 21st century, accelerated growth in some countries in Africa, because there was greater demand for the things Africa could produce, especially minerals, but also some agricultural production. The demand was not coming from the West. The new demand was coming from the east, from China, from India, and so on.

All this has significantly changed the world. Even though the initial motivation for what is called globalization was for the big corporations of the north to make more profits from controlling more and more economic resources all over the world, that whole process has had unexpected consequences, including the fact that many countries have been able to grow much more than ever before. Some of this growth has trickled down, including to workers; and especially where the workers and the farmers have been able to secure rights, their incomes have often gone up. So we have a world which has changed quite a lot.

Then of course we have seen, especially during the last decade, much slower economic growth in the west, and also in Japan. All this has meant that the gap between the north and the south has been reduced a little bit, but at the same time, in many countries, both in the north and the south, inequalities at the national level have increased.

So it’s a very complex picture about how the world has been changing. But I think it’s important to remember that geography means a lot, and class continues to mean a lot. Interactions between the two are not very straightforward. Globalization for example, the reaction to globalization is quite complex. For example, in the west, everybody benefits from cheaper products; products which are made in poor countries with very low wages for the workers and so on and so forth. Everybody benefits from these cheaper products. But when people lose their jobs, or their working conditions become worse because the employers and the big corporations have alternatives abroad, they do not feel it all at the same time. So the resistance to this very complex processes of globalization, and economic liberalization more generally, were used to be quite uneven and quite slow.

But recently, one decade of very poor economic performance, especially in the West, has resulted in all kinds of reactions, some progressive, some reactionary, but generally there has been a tendency to blame the other, to blame the outsider.

The outsider in terms of somebody who is culturally different, who’s alien, who looks different or behaves differently, and also to blame the rest of the world, other countries, especially those who are different culturally and so on. So what has happened now is that there’s been a resurgence coming back off what is called ethnopopulism. Also, especially in North America, in the US, we have seen the return of jingoism, nationalistic jingoism of national chauvinism. This is not new.

When the West believed that they won the Cold War, there was an element of that, but now it is much stronger and it is combined with these other elements. So, what we have is a situation where the opposition to economic liberalization is bigger than ever before, but it includes very many reactionary forces in addition to the progressive forces in who oppose globalization almost from the outset. In many ways you can see due to the transformation of the economy, of the transformation of social relations and the transformation of politics in the postcolonial world.

In the economic system we have today, it seems that in order to have winners, we need losers. Can we change it? How?

Our society today, it is quite possible to have economic growth which is shared. If you look, for example at China, China has been growing and real incomes for working people have been going up. Unfortunately, China is the exception. China is the only country where you have this kind of very clear rising tide lifting all boats. Of course, there are some very ridiculous multibillionaires in China as well, but the high growth rate has enabled this phenomenon to take place in China. In different times in society, this has happened in many other parts of society, if you think about northern Europe for example. Even today Norway, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, is also one of the most egalitarian societies in the world. But these two countries, China on the one hand and Norway on the other, are almost exceptional. In most countries, we see the rich growing at the expense of the poor.

One cannot deny that one of the benefits of so called globalization, were cheaper consumer goods for many people in the West. Okay. For the producers, the workers who are producing those goods, who didn’t have jobs before, they benefited from getting some jobs, some steady income. It is very low, very, very low, especially when compared to the west. But it was probably higher than before. You find that in countries like Bangladesh or even in Ethiopia, people are getting better off. But again, these are exceptions.

The way in which the West particularly, but also Japan, responded to the last great, so called Global Financial Crisis in 2008/2009, mainly using so called unconventional monetary policies. Firstly, those policies are very blunt. They can benefit all kinds of people, but the way the policies were implemented, it really helped the rich to become even richer.

So the concentration, not of income, but of wealth, especially in the United States … The United States is one of the more successful examples of recovery compared to Europe during this period. But there has been a far, far greater concentration of wealth. Very often, when we talk about economic inequality, we mix up the two; income and wealth.

But income is a flow and wealth is a stock. It’s important for us to recognize this. So, the availability of cheap credit, or what they call easy credit, enabled the people who could borrow to borrow very cheap and to buy up wealth from other people who were distressed. The result is this far greater concentration of wealth in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world. This is part of the reason why there is so much alienation and resentment, but also, unfortunately, misunderstanding. This is part of the problem in terms of addressing this issues.

We do not have the resources to make everyone as wealthy as a billionaire. Neither do we have the resources to live as the rich are doing. We do not have sufficient resources on our planet to sustain such a lifestyle. How do you feel about this?

Well, to put it in terms of a slogan, we have enough for everybody’s needs but not for everybody’s greed. This is a slogan associated with Gandhi, but possibly it was there even before Gandhi. But I think that message is quite clear. Now, you’re quite right. This is a dynamic which we have in our society. But some of the recent technological developments are accelerating this process and part of these processes.

Part of the problem, of course, is that there is a very weak sense of social solidarity. Some of the people who are able to organize social solidarity do so on a reactionary basis. This is a very major problem. Unless you can organize an alternative, successfully organize and sustain an alternative, we’re in very, very serious trouble. As far as the problems of resources are concerned … I mean, the challenge is that it’s not simply as many people like to say, about all the population, human population is growing and so on and so forth.

Part of the problem is that we are taking resources from the earth without thinking about sustainability. We are also in the process of human consumption producing a lot of side effects, which are not going to go away, which are reducing the quality of life, increasing pollution and so on – more greenhouse gases and so on. All of which are going to have adverse effects not only for ourselves but for future generations.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to organize solutions. Part of the problem is that everybody wants to have what they call win-win solutions, so that the people will benefit, but also the businesses will benefit. Of course there are some such options, but very often business is most interested in promoting solutions which will benefit themselves. The benefit to society is a secondary consideration. There are not many occasions when the two coincide. So, it is very difficult in our society which is becoming increasingly individualistic.

At the conference, you spoke about capitalism and the near future. What options do we have?

Well, what I was saying at the conferences is that, in the near future, capitalism is the only show in town. There is no immediate alternative to capitalism. The anticapitalist forces are not strong. However, what I was also saying is that there are varieties of capitalism.

What is happening in China today or what is happening in Norway is not anticapitalist. It’s different type of management of capitalism. Likewise, with Bangladesh, they are not some other type of society, but they have learned to moderate capitalism. They have learned to manage capitalism, just as Roosevelt tried to do during the 1930s. Roosevelt was not a socialist. During the 1940s, when various reforms were taking place in Western Europe, ’40s and ’50s and so on, these reforms have helped improve conditions, reduced the worst inequalities. But to say that that was the end of capitalism, I think would be a great exaggeration.

Of course, there are some right wing libertarians who think anytime there is a role for government, that is the end of capitalism. Of course that kind of simplistic thinking is becoming quite popular. But leaving that aside, I think there are varieties of capitalism. What people will need to think about is also how we can mobilize some of those forces to do some good. Let me give you a simple example; during the time I was working in the United Nations, we proposed the idea of a Global Green New Deal.

We wanted to capture the idea of Roosevelt: a new deal with certain responsibilities of not only for the workers but also for the capitalists and so on, including paying taxes and so on. But in addition, we recognize the challenges of sustainability which we face in the world; resource depletion and exhaustion, the continued destruction of the environment, destruction of the basis for continued existence on earth.

Also, we raised the question, we said that because of the huge inequalities in the world today, these have to be inequalities which are going to be dealt with, and not just at a national level, but also global. That’s why the very clumsy slogan of a Global Green New Deal. We propose specifically that we have a golden opportunity.

This is 10 years ago, right? The golden opportunity to reduce poverty – especially what we call energy poverty – in the south by a massive subsidization of electricity from renewable energy sources in the south. Much of this was conceived of as solar. Some of it of course, could have been from other sources, so wind turbines and so on. At that time, we thought that the unit costs were coming down, but not coming down fast enough. There was a need to subsidize electrification in the south.

You cannot rely on existing demand because they are very poor people who do not have the resources to buy electricity at market rates, especially if you start introducing things like carbon taxes and all that without thinking about the distributional implications. So, that was our proposal. Unfortunately, because of this idea of independent power producers generating electricity, and the government should not be involved in producing electricity and so on, what we find is that business interests have become so powerful.

We have very, very powerful lobbies, which are misleading governments, misleading publics about the real options. I think we have a situation where we can actually move quite rapidly to renewable energy. This was part of the proposal to think about how to deal with the economic crisis in terms of changing the social relations.

It was not going to be the end of capitalism to be sure, but, if successful, we would have seen many people who have never had access to modern electricity, would be able to have access to modern electricity and to be able to improve the conditions of life. For example, to use the mechanical power to overcome the drudgery of certain types of manual labor, or to use electricity for cooking instead of certain fossil fuels or to use electricity for studying for children. All of this could have been made possible.

So, we should not say that the only thing is to end capitalism, but we need to begin to think about how we can improve things if the economic system does not fundamentally change. How do we manage it better so that we do not destroy the very basis for our own futures in existence.

What could also be done to initiate progressive change?

I don’t think there are any universal answers. There are no universal answers. I think those days when people thought in terms of a single force, with a very clear blueprint for everybody are no longer there. We have to begin to think creatively, recognizing that not everybody wants to change the system.

People all dream of a better life, but they don’t necessarily all want the same thing. We need to unite people to overcome the divisions which have been growing in recent decades, and to be able to mobilize them successfully; and mobilize them not just to replace one set of leaders with another set of leaders, but rather to be able to bring about much more fundamental and deep rooted transformations. It is always a context specific challenge. You cannot talk about it in the abstract.

If you had the power to change one thing tomorrow, what would it be?

I would begin with health and nutrition. Health and nutrition involves entire families. I see the possibility in health and nutrition for greater leadership of women. This I think is also important. The transformation of social relations will also involve transformation in the household. This I think will be important.

Part of the focus on nutrition is because many of the problems are not entirely systemic. Many of them have become, even if their origins are systemic, they’ve become part of our behavior. We are subjected to all kinds of propaganda from food companies, from beverage companies. We have changed our lifestyles and we are now suffering a lot of health and nutrition problems because of what we eat and drink. This is self-inflicted in some ways, or at least it appears to be so.

We need to begin to think about that, and to address that. If we are going to be serious about universal health coverage, it means that the price of medicines has to go down. Everybody should be able to afford decent health. As people deal with these problems, with health and nutrition issues, they begin to understand the subtle ways in which this system affects all of us. It’s not only at the level of production, but also at the level of consumption. In recent times, I’m putting a lot of emphasis on this, partly because perhaps this might be the way to go forward. When you think about health, you also have to think about, for example, the consequences of global warming and how it affects us. For example, when you think about sustainability, there are different options involved.

All this becomes important when you think about nutrition, you think about food. What you said earlier about producing for people’s needs – there’s enough for people’s needs, but not for everybody’s greed. The satisfaction which is derived from just having a good meal, a good healthy meal rather than a very, very expensive and costly meal. There are many issues which people become aware of. For example, the excessive use of agro-chemicals to produce food. As they become more aware of food and how that food affects their wellbeing, their health, their nutrition, then I think this kind of awareness is very healthy for people to begin to understand how the system operates.

You mentioned you see the possibility for more leadership of women. Could you tell me more?

In many traditional households, the division of labor is such that the decisions about household consumption are still made by the women. So, if you are able to enhance the power of the women there … Traditionally we think in terms of production, but we also should think about consumption and reproduction. For example, if a woman … if you think about nutrition, the current scientific consensus is on the first thousand days. That means from the moment of an unborn child’s conception until the child reaches the age of two, the mother, the prospective mother needs to be aware.

So there are certain health considerations involved. The mother has to be aware, and nutrition and health of the unborn child in terms of what the mother consumes, the interconnectedness of society; in this case between mother and child, but also the support system of the family and beyond is something you begin to appreciate more in this kind of context.

The household is just the nexus for this changing human relations, changing relations. So when the decisions are being made, which affect nutrition, affect health, and the decision making shifts, if we assume men bringing in money from the market – which is not the case; in many, many places it is the women who are working in the farm, or women who are working in the market. But that power associated with bringing income has to be shared.

If you take a different view about health and nutrition, and of course if you extend that to the appreciation, the greater appreciation of what now people call ‘care work’, that has important implications as well.

Who is ruling the world?

Well, I think there are different types of power. There’s what is called economic power. There’s a political power. There is a power associated with the state where even judges have some discretion. Then also, in some societies, legislators have considerable influence because they set the rules of the game.

Then you have a soft power as well. This notion of soft power. Power doesn’t just come from the barrel of the gun. It doesn’t come from the repressive apparatus of the state. It also comes from the powers of persuasion of, for example, the cult of certain personalities.

So there are different types of power, but I think given how things have changed in society, it is probably the power associated with wealth, which is the most important, because many of the politicians unfortunately are available … Some people joke, ‘we have the best election money can buy’, and there’s some truth to that.

But again, it is the way power is shared and distributed in many societies changes, and it changes over time. Where individuals locate them … see themselves and in their relationship into power.

A small farmer in a village, you could talk to them about the power of a big transnational corporation. It’s very difficult for them to appreciate it or the power of Google. It’s not easy to appreciate that. This is the problem. You may have very, very powerful rich people who are abusing their power and so on. But it is not self-evident to everybody that this is the case. Some of the people we may not like, maybe as seen, if you have a big company offering goods at very low prices, they are making billions. But do we, who go to those shops, resent the existence? It’s much more complex kind of situation which we live in. Yes.

Do you have a dream?

I’m so tired from work that I hardly have the chance to dream. Of course you want things to be better, but I don’t think I spend much time dreaming a dream.

What is life about?

I would like to go with the thinking that I have done something to make life better, especially for those who are marginalized. I mean, many people, because I live in Asia, they ask me why I’m still writing about African issues. Partly because of my names, I feel a connection, but also it is a way of reminding oneself that it’s not just about ourselves. When we say we, we the people, it is not just ‘we’ in the narrow sense of a ‘we’, but a broader sense.

You were named after two African anti-colonial leaders, but beside your background, what motivates you?

Only because I have continued to do things without any success. People often ask me, why bother? It’s not a very easy question to answer, but from an early age, I guess, I was quite happy to be innovative without necessarily being officially appreciated.

Perhaps it is their attitude. You need to be a change maker. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Okay Nerina. All the best. Thank you.

Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening and thank you so much for sharing. Next time we are going to continue with our mini-series about inequalities. Hope to see you soon again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, known as Jomo, is a prominent Malaysian economist. He holds the Tun Hussein Onn Chair in International Studies at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia, and is Visiting Senior Fellow at Khazanah Research Institute, Visiting Fellow at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, and Adjunct Professor at the International Islamic University, Malaysia.

He is also a member of the Malaysian Council of Eminent Persons who advises the Federal Government of Malaysia.

He served as the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) during 2005–2012, and then as Assistant Director-General and Coordinator for Economic and Social Development at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome during 2012–2015. He was also Research Coordinator for the G24 Intergovernmental Group on International Monetary Affairs and Development during 2006–2012. During 2008–2009, he served as adviser to Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, President of the 63rd United Nations General Assembly, and as a member of the [Stiglitz] Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System.

Jomo is a leading scholar and expert on the political economy of development, especially in Southeast Asia, who has authored or edited over a hundred books and translated 12 volumes besides writing many academic papers and articles for the media.

#PHDstory | Monica Apango Partida

Monica Apango Partida
PhD Student in Political Science
University of Guadalajara

 

How would you describe yourself?

I am a curious person. I like to learn new things, analyze and try to understand reality. I am a reflective person and I try to think about how to bring an improvement to society.

What is the focus of your research?

Russia and the configuration of the world order

What are the questions that you are dealing with?

What is the role of Russia in the configuration of the world order, and why has Russia become an influential actor in international politics.

Why are they relevant?

Because we are currently in a crisis of international order where the Chinese economy has overpassed the United States economy, and Russia has shown itself as an important political actor that defies that world order.

What kind of answers you would like to get out of it?

One in where Russia tries to rescue an order based on the reconstruction of the identity and values of the nations.

Why is this kind of research relevant?

Because the consequences of this international crisis could show another perspective in the economic, political and social field. Although it is an international crisis and it affects any nation-state.

How do you see the future of this field? What kind of challenges do you believe we will encounter?

We will face the possibility of redesigning the economic and political model, rescuing the identity of the state and common values, and respecting the sovereignty of the state.

Is there a new research approach that you think is going to be relevant?

An approach that tries to include different theories in international relations and that is multidisciplinary to better understand this reality.

Is there a topic that you think is relevant right now?

Yes, the transition to a new international order and the consequences that derive from this.

How did you get interested in what you are doing?

I had the opportunity to do a research stay in Moscow in 2017. I was able to know the position of Russia in its foreign policy and its influence in this crisis of international order.

Why should everybody learn about subjects like history or biology?

Because it is essential to have knowledge of reality in their different areas of study.

What do you need to be a good researcher or PhD student in your program?

You need to learn new languages and practice more English. I also think that it´s very important to publish articles on the topics that we are studying and discussing in the doctoral program. I think that currently the world is changing in political regimes, in economic models and different types of values and cultures; it is urgent to understand this reality and think about it in a more integral perspective, including values or basic social principles.

Who inspired and continues to you?

Aristotle the Stagirite (s. VI a. C), is a classic thinker whom I admire for his contribution to knowledge in different areas such as physics, politics, logic, etc. He was a genius for his time, and his thought is still valid today. He brought knowledge through observation, analysis and reflection of reality, a knowledge that includes theory and practice.

Another thing that inspires me is our own reality, the time and space we are living, because I believe that today more than ever it is necessary to reflect, understand, analyze and share the investigation of facts and concrete situations. I think that only that way one could think in alternatives.

What motivates you?

It motivates me to think that we are human beings, that is to say, rational and sensitive. We have the creativity to create new things and the sensitivity to be in solidarity with the other. This helps to improve the conditions of a society.

What book would you like to read again?

Now I do not plan to read a book again, rather I have many others to read.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

In 10 years I see myself teaching at the university, researching current issues, trying to reflect on how to humanize society and the world.

A challenge? The most beautiful day? The most difficult one?

Learning the Russian language. The day of my wedding. My master’s thesis presentation.

Whatever you would like the world to know!

It is urgent to put human beings at the center of society, to respect their dignity. Only in this way can we humanize society, politics and the economy.

What kind of impact you would like to have?

That my research influences to rethink reality and think about alternatives, but from the understanding of concrete contexts.

What does the world need the most right now?

The world needs human sensitivity.

What does research need the most right now?

Research in the area of social sciences, but in a multidisciplinary way, including philosophy.

If you could change one thing, what would you like to change?

Change the utilitarian and materialist mentality for a more human mentality.

Your dream / the society you dream of?

A society governed by basic social principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, respect for human dignity and good economic and natural resource management.

What is the question that nobody asks and you would like to answer?

I dream of a truly humane society, that the economic sector, politics, and society can be at the service of the person and seek their integral development, and this cooperation transcends the international scope.

What is your dream OR the society you dream?

My dream is to be able to contribute to the improvement of a society in all its areas, from my trench: research and teaching at the university.

What is life about?

Life is a moment. We were not made to stay in this world, but for eternity. Life would be the opportunity to be a good person and that would take you to try to improve the conditions of others according to your context, your skills and your potential.

It is important to leave a mark in history; that is the life of the saints and the great heroes of history, people who put at the service of humanity their creativity, their abilities, their potential, everything to bring good to society, either through knowledge or actions.

Conversation by:
Amanda Fernandes

“Mónica is a young researcher, interested in political sciences, and this was very interesting for me as an interviewer. I decided to interview her because a point of view in this area is very relevant worldwide.

Since I am from Brazil, and here we are living a currently difficult political situation, it is refreshing to see that there are people willing to fight for an improved society, and thus, a better world to live in.

Although her research is very specific, it was possible to notice by her answers that she is the kind of person that works to fulfill the dream of a better world, where people can have more empathy for each other and so, spread peace over war.”

 

Conversation by:
Amanda Fernandes

“Mónica is a young researcher, interested in political sciences, and this was very interesting for me as an interviewer. I decided to interview her because a point of view in this area is very relevant worldwide.

Since I am from Brazil, and here we are living a currently difficult political situation, it is refreshing to see that there are people willing to fight for an improved society, and thus, a better world to live in.

Although her research is very specific, it was possible to notice by her answers that she is the kind of person that works to fulfill the dream of a better world, where people can have more empathy for each other and so, spread peace over war.”

#PHDstory | Pedro Silva Rocha Lima

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima
PhD Student in Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

 

What is your research on and where are you conducting it (what stage you are at, what department and university, where you conduct your research?

Last September (2018) I started a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. My topic is about how global humanitarianism, which usually happens in situations of armed conflict (or natural disaster), is being deployed in places of everyday violence. In particular, I am looking at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and its Safer Access initiative in Brazil’s large cities (and mainly within favelas).

Why did you choose this topic of research?

Since my undergraduate studies I was fascinated by humanitarianism, both because of its strong moral appeal today everywhere, and because of its inherent contradictions or “aporias,” which made it a great object of study. When I found out about the ICRC’s work in Brazil I became very intrigued because it is not the “typical” operational setting for the organization.

What contribution your research is going to add?

There has been a lot of research about humanitarianism when it serves to substitute the state in the provision of health care and other services; so usually countries where the state lacks resources or is undergoing war. That is not really the case in Brazil, and I want to see how humanitarianism – and its expertise particularly – operates when it is deployed instead to support state apparatuses.

Tell us a little more about your research and it’s significance – Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years from now?

In the past 15 or so years there has been an emerging field of anthropology of humanitarianism, and parts of it has been in constructive dialogue with UN agencies, MSF, ICRC and others. I am hoping to make a meaningful contribution to that area and hopefully continue into academia after my PhD. Conducting research in a non-academic research environment (e.g. think tank) is another option.

What do you think can be improved in higher education and participation in order to encourage more people to conduct research that makes a change?

One of the things that could be done is rethink the “managerialist” turn we’ve had in academia in the past years. There has been too much of a focus on assessing research in terms of flaky indicators like numbers of citations or articles published in “high impact journals.” We need to push for new ways to assess academic departments, maybe ones that include aspects related to “change,” like social impact, for instance. But that’s just a suggestion, that would be an enormous task in itself.

What inspires you as a person and a researcher?

What got me into International Relations for my bachelor’s, and then Anthropology for the PhD, was a deep curiosity about difference. Connected to that, there is also a feeling of empathy and a desire to positively impact other people’s lives.

Is there anything you would like to share with us regarding a change of perspective or belief you had during your PhD journey?

I think it is still too early in that journey to be able to say something meaningful about that! I can only say I try to always remain open to different perspectives, even if they seriously contradict something I’ve been working on.

What are the challenges and benefits of your type of research and topic?

Ethnographic research, which is something like a defining feature of Anthropology, is unique because it is based on long-term immersion, 12 months for my PhD, in a specific setting. No other method affords such intimacy and close way of getting to know the everyday lives of people. The inherent challenges there are related to ethics, how you present your findings in writing (you may want to avoid making informants feel “betrayed”), and how to gain access.

PhD is a big commitment, what would you like to say to aspiring researchers?

Make sure you really like academic reading and writing first, because you will do a lot of it. And also be sure to be passionate about your topic – you’ll work with it for 4+ years after all.

Where can people follow you and your work (social media accounts, website, LinkedIn etc)?

I am starting to use Twitter as my “academic” social media, so feel free to follow me there @pedrosrlima

Conversation by:
Nada Al Hudaid

“I really enjoyed learning about Pedro’s work and believe that his contribution will be very valuable in regards to how humanitarian work is doing in Brazil which can help identify strengths and weakness that can be further addressed. Fieldwork in areas that are in need of development can reveal to us what work is actually useful in order to affect policies.

Pedro is a great person with so much passion for humanitarian work. I believe he will make great contributions to his area of research. Part of making a change is connecting with like-minded people.

Follow Pedro to learn more about his work and to create a larger circle of intellectuals who are doing their bit of making our earth a better place.”

Connect with Pedro:
twitter.com/pedrosrlima

 

Conversation by:
Nada Al Hudaid

“I really enjoyed learning about Pedro’s work and believe that his contribution will be very valuable in regards to how humanitarian work is doing in Brazil which can help identify strengths and weakness that can be further addressed. Fieldwork in areas that are in need of development can reveal to us what work is actually useful in order to affect policies.

Pedro is a great person with so much passion for humanitarian work. I believe he will make great contributions to his area of research. Part of making a change is connecting with like-minded people.

Follow Pedro to learn more about his work and to create a larger circle of intellectuals who are doing their bit of making our earth a better place.”

Megan Tobias Neely

Megan Tobias Neely
Postdoctoral fellow in sociology
Biography:

Megan Tobias Neely is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. In 2017, she graduated with a PhD in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. She studies gender, race, and class inequality in the workplace and the labor force.

Her research examines rising economic inequality in the U.S. through the lens of gender and race. She pursued graduate school after working as a research analyst for a hedge fund from 2007-2010. This insider experience led her to sociology to study the mechanisms that reproduce gender and race inequality in this industry and to understand how the financial sector perpetuates class inequality in society at large.

Hedged Out: Inside the “Boys’ Club” on Wall Street

Income inequality has skyrocketed in the United States. Since 1980, the richest 1 percent doubled their share of the nation’s earnings, and these high earners are concentrated in the financial services industry. Today, hedge fund managers earn an average annual income of $2.4 million, astronomical payouts that have mostly gone to elite white men. Megan presents an insider’s look at the industry. Have a watch!

We spoke with Megan Tobias Neely during the conference: Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilisation, organized by The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

Find out more about UNRISD here: http://www.unrisd.org

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Megan Tobias Neely's Video here

My name is Megan Tobias Neely and I’m a sociologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

Thank you so much for joining me. What are your main research topics?

My research examines rising economic inequality, through the lens of focusing on how social inequalities such as gender, race, and social class inequality works in elite workplaces. For example, my current research examines the hedge fund Industry, and I conduct interviews with hedge fund workers, and I do field observations at their industry events and at their workplaces.

Was it easy to find people who wanted to get interviewed in the hedge fund Industry?

Yeah. So the research on elites, especially ethnographic on elites , usually says that you have to have an insider connection to industries like the hedge fund Industry in order to study it. And I thought I would be well positioned to study it because I had worked doing kind of support research at a hedge fund from 2007 to 2010. And I was surprised when I entered that world. It wasn’t a world I ever thought I would work in. And so I was fascinated by it and I was fascinated by how it shaped inequality.

And when I returned to study the industry, I tried to use those networks and that knowledge to access the industry. But what I found is that they were very resistant to talk to someone. I had worked at a large hedge fund that’s associated with a large financial firm that invests in hedge funds.

And so I represented a client, which made them very concerned. But once I positioned myself just only as a researcher and first and foremost as a researcher, they were very eager to talk with me and share their experiences. And they were excited in some ways to share the secretive world with what they understood as an unbiased audience. As a researcher, they understood that I would dig past sort of the stereotypes and the scandals that are often featured in the news media and portray the everyday lives and practices within the industry. So once they understood that goal they were very excited and eager to talk with me.

What are the results of your research so far?

Yeah, so what I found is that many of the features of this industry that they view as being very beneficial, actually created inequalities in unexpected ways. So they put a high precedent on having passion for your work. They really value trust and loyalty among employees. But what I found is that these kinds of features that seem good, they seem like beneficial things in the workplace, actually allowed [inaudible 00:02:57] biases based on status characteristics, which is the term that academics use to refer to things like gender identity, racial identity, and social class identity. So these allowed biases to flourish. Because when we make a decision about who we trust or who we view as passionate about their work, it’s usually based on something that we determine at the gut level or the instinctual level immediately when we interact with people. So even though those in this industry don’t think of themselves as being prejudiced or discriminating, they have built networks that do end up leading to the exclusion of women as well as minority men.

And what I argue is that those same processes that lead to this exclusion also create an environment that allows them to justify the high incomes they earn. So I argue that it is the very processes of an inclusion and exclusion along gender and racial lines that helps to foster an environment that allows for these high incomes that drive the current trends and widening income inequality.

Why this topic?

The research on the financial sector in the U.S and transnationally, has largely found that it is increasingly characterized by insecurity. Financial crises are happening at more regular intervals. And this creates an environment where people who work at firms like hedge funds face considerable insecurity and instability. And of course they have the incomes to weather that insecurity, but it also shapes the way they are motivated to earn money.

So for example, I interviewed one trader who I called Craig. He receives a bonus based on the trades that he makes in the stock market, and this affects the kinds of risks you take. So what he described to me is that he could take very high risk trades after he’d made a big bonus that would allow him to live for so many months based on that bonus. It could pay for his family’s rent, his children’s tuition, and then he might be able to live off that income for six months before he would have to start making more modest trades again to make sure that he could ensure his lifestyle.

Case of traders like Craig really captures how these workers live in a pretty unstable environment, because if the stock market shifts, those trades are less predictable, and they have to really shift their approach. They actually benefit from insecurity in the labor market and in the stock market, but it also leads them to be highly motivated to protect their interests.

So firms like hedge funds face insecurity in the stock market. They also face what they perceive as regulatory insecurity. So the government changes the regulation that influences how they do their business and that forces them to abruptly shift. And because of this insecurity, they put a high premium on trust and loyalty, and they select people that they perceive as trustworthy and loyal, so that they can weather this insecurity. I started studying the hedge fund industry in part because I was reading about the increasingly precarious working conditions of workers in the U.S and abroad as they face unpredictable wage labor, irregular schedules, many juggle multiple jobs in the low wage service sector. And this has led to increased polarization and inequality in the labor market.

There are not many women working in the hedge fund industry, right?

Only 17% are women, and among senior workers, only 11% of them are women, which shows that women are gaining access to some entry level positions but struggling to stay in the industry as they move up throughout their careers. And what I found is that there are processes that start at the moment of hiring, that preclude women’s access to these jobs. Things like biases against women who maybe are mothers or could be mothers leads employees not to hire them in the industry. For example, when I was doing my research, a very famous hedge fund manager named Paul Tudor Jones at a conference said that he thought that the experience of having a child would compromise a woman’s passion to the work, and he cited this as evidence that women could not be as good of traders. The women I interviewed expressed considerable frustration with this quote, and they’ve often described how as they progressed in their careers, they were shifted from jobs and on the investment side of the business. So jobs in research and trading, to jobs in client services, which were perceived to be more conducive to having a family.

Whether this is true was not entirely clear in my research because women who worked in client services described how they had to be on demand all the time. They had to travel to meet with investor clients, but the perception among managers was that it was a better job. But what it also did is it made it harder for women to access leadership positions because more of the executive positions come from working on the investment side of the business.

Is the job of a hedge fund manager more than a full-time job?

As a sociologist, we call this discourse. Which means it’s a story that people tell to explain their lives, but it reflects their deeply held belief system. So people held on to this belief that the passion for work would conflict with passion for family. But what I found is that mothers and fathers alike, described equal interest and enthusiasm for their work as they did for their families. In fact, I actually found that the men talked more about their passion for their children in their interviews with me. They often cited that as part of what drove them to succeed and excel. And this also emerged, I found some evidence of a bonus for fathers. I had a couple of interviewees who are hedge fund managers who acknowledged that they paid fathers more because they perceived male breadwinners as needing more money to support a family in an expensive location like New York City.

Is there a result that really surprised you?

One of the most surprising findings from my research had to do with how these hedge fund managers create community. I assume that because hedge funds are small and relatively isolated in terms of how they work, they’re very insular. I assume that there would be networks, but I didn’t think they would be quite as close knit as what I found.

What I came across were deliberate efforts to forge really close bonds and create community throughout the hedge fund industry. I found that there is a strong anti bureaucratic sentiment as well as an anti hierarchical sentiment. Many hedge fund founder’s actually founded these firms as a way to believe the giant hierarchies and large pyramid structures and investment banks that they perceive to be inequitable. They perceive them to be bogged down in bureaucracy, and they perceive them to be an efficient. hedge fund managers often talk about how they want to include employees. They want to create an open workspace that promotes communication and a sense of collective participation in their work. The hedge funds engage in all kinds of bonding rituals. Some host initiation rituals like Karaoke nights for new employees. They do things like relay races, they ski, they play poker, they have dinners, some even do things like group activity puzzle solving.

And they do this all to create an environment where employees feel like a family and can rely on each other and trust one another. But what I found is that that close bonding actually led to some employees feeling very ostracized. And when they encountered, for example, when women and racial and ethnic minority men encountered discrimination or harassment, they felt very isolated and did not have any avenues to seek recourse. Instead, they perceive the labor market as the only avenue for recourse. They thought that they would take their talent elsewhere, and they thought that employers who discriminated would be penalized by losing their talent.

But unfortunately what I found is that by taking a view of the entire industry as a whole, ultimately this does not penalize the employers because it is such a white male dominated industry. So in the hedge fund industry, there’ve been several industry reports, one in 2011 and then another one again this year that it found that those who do experience harassment or discrimination in this industry often have few other options, by pressing charges or calling attention to the issues was perceived as a career ender because it would ruin their reputation.

And this meant that those firms who engaged in these kinds of practices would encounter a few consequences for this behavior.

How do they see their work? How do they see themselves?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I included in my interviews broad questions about how they perceive the benefits of their work as well as the risks or the negative aspects of their work. And I left it open ended because I didn’t want to lead the questions. I wanted to understand how they see the world. And what I learned from this is that hedge fund managers and workers at hedge funds tend to understand their work in narrow terms. Like most of us, we understand the social world that we impact, but we often don’t understand the kind of consequences our work might have for others. So for example, hedge fund workers, when they describe the benefits of their work, they usually reference the people who are impacted directly from their investments.

Roughly two thirds of hedge fund investments actually come from large institutions. These include pension funds, education, endowments like those at universities, and also government wealth funds. And so the average hedge fund worker, they understand the benefits of their work as being to save for retirement and help average workers save for retirement. So they often imagine the pension fund holder as the client that they’re serving. And I think that this would surprise many people. We assume hedge fund managers are thinking more about building wealth or driving companies into the ground. But really they’re focused on what they think of as adding value. And of course then many engage investment practices that do put workers at risk. So they often put pressure on companies to engage in labor practices that make work more precarious and unequal for workers. For example, they often want corporations to remove mid level managers or outsource labor or automate work using digital technologies, but they think that they are driven by this idea that that will make these firms more efficient and produce value in the market.

How do they feel they are perceived by everyone? Is this an issue?

Yeah. Yes. That is an issue. So one thing I encountered when trying to recruit participants is they often ask me or said to me, ’you’re not a journalist, right?’ Because they felt that the industry has been so burned (‘’burned’’ is how they would frame it) by journalists. And one of their motivations for talking with me was to kind of, because the focus of sociological research is to provide insight into the everyday practices of the people we study. And so what I heard from when I ask the question of how do people react when you tell them what you do for a living. Many of them said that they just don’t understand. They identified a gap between the public portrayals of the industry and the everyday lived experiences and many of also felt like the media portrayals focused on what they described as a few bad apples.

So they really thought that often those hedge fund managers who make news for doing really particularly egregious investments, or for engaging in insider trading or fraud, they felt like those hedge fund managers caught most of the attention but didn’t capture their work, which is largely true with what my research found is that is that: the average hedge fund manager is much less exciting and a little bit more boring than how we think of them in the media.

What does a hedge fund manager do?

What I find most interesting about what they do is that many hedge fund managers engage in all kinds of analysis of markets. So there are a number of hedge fund managers who use, they use all kinds of strategies to invest in the market. So some use quantitative strategies and algorithmic trading strategies, and others actually do analysis of economies around the world.

So they might study emerging markets and they’ll actually travel to different countries around the world to understand what kind of conditions the businesses face in each of those contexts. And then they use this information to invest worldwide. So for example, I had one interview with a hedge fund manager during the height of the Eurozone crisis. And she was investing in European stocks and government bonds. And she said, Europe is going to be here forever. Everybody’s trying to sell their European investments and I’m going to buy it while it’s low because Europe isn’t stable and I want to contribute to stabilizing it, and making sure that continues. So that’s kind of an example of what they do that you might not expect on the one hand. The other thing that was unexpected I found, is that many hedge fund managers come from academic backgrounds.

I interviewed several physicists, people with PhDs in artificial intelligence, biology, even fields like philosophy. And they use this academic training to shape how they think about markets, and that informs their kind of everyday decisions. And one thing that’s often not captured in media portrayals of hedge fund managers is that they engage in sort of what we would think of as more of like a tech startup culture. At their firms they’re often dressed more casually, especially if they’re not engaging with clients. They’re more relaxed and are a slightly nerdier bunch than what we think as in the media. And this is partly because of this academic influence. And that was a common theme that came across in my interviews with academics as they described a moment when funding went up for investments in research, whether by the government or by universities.

And this was the moment that pushed them into financial services as an alternative option for them to make a living with their academic degrees.

It sounds like many of the managers decided to do what they are doing because of the money.

Yeah. Yes. Many of them described how they were in academic positions, whether at research institutes or in postdoctoral fellowships or other kinds of positions, but just weren’t well funded. And they described how they couldn’t get jobs as professors like they had wanted. And so instead, many of them describe how a friend from Undergrad or a family friend gave them kind of the tip that their academic degree could be useful in finance. And that’s what led them then to the hedge fund industry or other financial careers that then led them to hedge funds.

I spoke to one hedge fund investor who had done his PhD in artificial intelligence in the late 1980s and early 90s. And he laughed and said ‘’when I graduated there was nothing to do with my PhD. So finance was the logical option for me.” And then with a laugh, he said, “it’s such a waste. There’s so many of us that could be coming up with solutions to broader issues in society, but because we haven’t found enough funding in academia or from government institutions, we ended up resorting to finance.”

In term of investment strategy, is there something that you feel people would not expect?

There were a few trends that I found particularly interesting in terms of investment strategies that the everyday person wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with. So during my research there were several ups and downs in the stock market, surrounding oil and gas prices as well as a stock market crash in China. And during these times, the people I interviewed spoke about how their client investors would redeem money because they get scared when the stock market crashes. And this made them very frustrated because one of the things few people know about hedge funds and other kinds of investment techniques is that they usually make money by buying a lot of stock at the bottom of the stock market crash. So even though stock market crashes are stressful and created headaches for them, they would be excited because it created opportunities for them to grow.

And this is something that theorists who study financial systems have theorized broadly – how it is actually these crises that create wealth. And that’s part of the nature of the system and how it creates inequality, because financial crises negatively impact everyday workers, but it actually allows those who are in positions to invest, to gain broadly from it. So that was one unexpected finding about how they invest. Another one that I found particularly interesting, so as a gender scholar, I teach fertility and reproduction. And one of the theories that I teach has to do with how fertility rates shape economic outcomes in capitalist societies or in other societies as well. And during my research, I heard a lot of investors talk about how they track fertility rates as a sign of where to invest in what countries around the world. And that is something you wouldn’t think of generally.

But as a country transitions from being high fertility, which is typically associated with a country with an agrarian economy. But as a country with an agrarian economy develops its fertility rate slows down and starts to decline. And so it becomes what’s called this economic sweet spot where there are many people who are young workers and just entering the workforce. And this creates a boom in the economy because there are fewer older workers who are dependents, who rely on their work for things like social security and other provisions. And then as they enter the workforce, they have fewer children. So there are also fewer children to take care of. And this creates a boom in economic development, which investors in hedge funds and other financial firms are aware of. And so they use this to shape what countries they invest in around the world. And they pay attention to where countries are in this fertility cycle as an indicator of how to invest in the companies in that country as well as in the government.

Why are you doing what you are doing? Why are you so passionate about this topic?

I pursued inequality because I cared about understanding poverty and inequality. And then I took this, I applied for a job at a financial firm when I graduated from university and ended up doing industry research at a large financial firm. I took this job because I wanted experience with data analysis to prepare me for graduate school, but I ended up being at one of the largest financial firms in the world and their hedge fund division. And this gave me access and knowledge of an area of the world that contributes to the rising incomes that are generating inequality on a broad scale. Those at the top of income distribution and how this contributes to inequality. I felt like we needed more insight into their social worlds and what shapes their everyday decisions to help us understand how inequality is reproduced and what the outcomes are for low wage workers and the poor.

Of course, we would like to have a decrease in inequality, but based on your study, how and where could we start working on it?

As a sociologist, we often focus on the causes of inequality rather than the solutions. And I currently work at a gender research institute called the Clayman Institute that focuses on interventions to create more equality in the workplace. So our research team actually works in partnership with corporations and government or agencies to create interventions. And what I think is key for interventions for social change is to have them be focused on the local conditions and the immediate context of the site that you’re trying to change. So what we do is we study work organizations and we identify the particular avenues that bias emerge and inequality happens within each organization. And then working with internal gatekeepers who are motivated to create change, we design interventions for change, things like calibration systems for how they hire, how they evaluate applicants and how they promote employees within the firm.

And then we work together with those gatekeepers to come up with that solution, how to implement it and then study the aftermaths to determine how much change can be made in terms of producing equality. And for example, in one firm that we studied, we found an enormous gap between men who are highly ranked in their performance evaluations and women who are ranked at highly. And what we heard in the interviews was that there was a perception that men would be harder to retain. And so they inflated their evaluations course. So the team working on this research project devised an intervention to create more specific criteria for evaluation of these employees, and they reduce that gap by almost 30% from the men’s evaluations to the women’s.

And if you had the possibility to change one thing tomorrow, what would it be?

It’s hard because I’m trained to study complex institutions. And so when I think of the problems, I think of them in terms of how many actors are at play in creating inequalities. One of the most startling dimensions of inequality in the world today ,from my perspective as a gender scholar, is the fact that there are very few women who are in the high earning salaries at the top. But most women earn the incomes that support the poor and working class families, whether that’s in the U.S or in the world. In general women worldwide carry the burden of poverty and inequality. They’re the ones who are raising children and with very few supports to do it.

And I think as a collective transnational society, we need to value the work of women who don’t often earn high wages, and especially the work that they do to reproduce society. So they perform all kinds of work to raise children who become future workers and we all need those workers, and we need to value those women’s labor as much as we do value the people who I study in finance.

Are you seeing positive changes?

I’m very encouraged and inspired by the fact that so many women are gaining access to political leadership positions. And I think what’s most important is the fact that many of these women in the case of the recent U.S midterm elections are not following traditional political careers, but rather they are entering office through campaigns based on transformative change, and are seeking to make more widespread changes in the institutions governing society. And I think that this provides a key to how women commit create broader change. I fear that if women only follow the same access to power as men do, that this will only serve to reinforce the institutions that help to generate power and inequality in our society. I think that we need more campaigns for transformative change like those we are seeing right now in many political movements around the world.

What kind of society do you dream of?

I think the kind of society I dream of is one where we value what people do outside of work as much as we value what they do for their paid labor. I wish that we live in societies where people’s care for each other was highly valued as well as their artistic pursuits, and a society that allows people to pursue those things and live comfortably while doing so.

What is the most important lesson you I have learned from this research?

I think what is most revealing about studying people who are considered political or economic elites is the realization that they are people like everyone else who make mistakes, who make decisions based on the information they have available to them. And this doesn’t excuse when they make decisions that have adverse consequences for everyone, but it does help us understand why they make those decisions and understand how the worlds that they live in influence why the kinds of solutions to social problems that they select. And I think we need more research that delves into those worlds and gets access to political and economic elites to better understand why there’s such a gap in between what they care about and what other people, the middle class, the working class and the poor care about in society. Overall, the economic elites that I speak to care about other people and they do care about the impacts of their work. But the problem is that they don’t understand necessarily the solutions to the problems that other people face.

What is the most important lesson you want your students to learn from you?

I think the most important lesson is about approaching research. Broadly speaking, approaching and understanding other people from a sense of curiosity and fascination rather than through preconceived notions about how we stereotype or assume people act or behave. I think that starting research or seeking background information on a group of people, we need to start from a place of really understanding where they’re coming from, understanding the experiences that they’re having and how that shapes their perceptions in the world. And I always hope that students will find that as fascinating as I do. To me, every person I interview prompts new questions and curiosities for me, and makes me want to learn more about their experiences, and it always challenges whatever I assume going into the interview based on social theory or based on previous research.

And I love that about my work, that it’s always surprising. It’s always unexpected because usually our assumptions going into research do not play out as we expect. And this is particularly true about ethnographic research, which is much messier because people’s lives are much messier than we like to portray them in stories or in books. And that’s what makes it so enjoyable and engaging and interesting.

What motivates you?

What motivates me is getting other people excited and interested in understanding inequality, and really delving into the data that helps us to explain how inequality reproduces and persists over time.

What do you look forward to?

I’m looking forward to continuing studying inequality, and what I want to do in the future is to really put workers who are at the top of the earnings distribution in conversation with those at the bottom. So I’m right now in the process of setting up a research project where I’ll investigate the lives of corporate elites as well as low wage workers in the same firm at different sites. One of the things that I love about studying inequality is figuring out how studying inequality at different parts of the earnings distribution changes how we understand it. And so I’m looking forward to putting those experiences within one context, within the same firm, into conversation with each other to understand why those at corporate headquarters make decisions that impact workers, low wage workers. And then to understand how those low wage workers actually experience those decisions, and how they think about them and how they impact their lives.

Thank you so much for this conversation.

Thank you so much for having me join you.

Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening and thank you so much for sharing. Next time we are going to continue with our miniseries about inequalities. I hope to see you soon again, bye and ciao.

Biography:

Megan Tobias Neely is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. In 2017, she graduated with a PhD in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. She studies gender, race, and class inequality in the workplace and the labor force.

Her research examines rising economic inequality in the U.S. through the lens of gender and race. She pursued graduate school after working as a research analyst for a hedge fund from 2007-2010. This insider experience led her to sociology to study the mechanisms that reproduce gender and race inequality in this industry and to understand how the financial sector perpetuates class inequality in society at large.

Fritz Nganje

Fritz Nganje
Lecturer in International Relations
Biography:

Fritz Nganje is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg.
Prior to this, he was a researcher in the Africa Programme of the Pretoria-based Institute for Global Dialogue. His research interest is in the areas of the diplomacy of subnational governments, decentralized cooperation, South Africa’s foreign policy and diplomacy in Africa, peace building in Africa, and South-South cooperation.

Cities, Cooperations, inequalities and the promise of a Democratic “Right to the City"

Who owns the future of our cities? Who determines how they develop? Who decides what does it mean a “dream city”? How can we challenge the unequal power distribution?

Listen to Fritz Nganje, a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg.
Mr. Nganje’s current primary area of interest focuses on the international relations of sub-national governments, and more specifically on how provinces, regions, and municipalities come together to promote city cooperation and inclusive urban governance and development.

We spoke with Fritz Nganje during the conference: Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilisation, organized by The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

The title of his presentation was :
City-to-City Cooperation and the Promise of a Democratic “Right to the City”

When city partnerships are designed and implemented in a manner that fails to challenge unequal power relations, the urban elite tend to use their position as gatekeepers of the institutional landscape of cities to determine which foreign ideas are localized and how, undermining
the transformative potential of city-to-city cooperation.

Find out more about UNRISD here: http://www.unrisd.org

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Fritz Nganje's Video here

My name is Fritz Nganje. I’m a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg. Right now my primary area of research is the international relations of sub-national governments, trying to look at how provinces and regions and municipalities are becoming more involved, their involvement in the global space and what is the significance of this, both for their relations with their national government, but also for power relations within these sub-national governments.

In fact, that is why my paper today looked at one of the key elements of this development, which is city cooperation. Trying to look at how cooperation between cities could be leveraged to be able to start challenging the influence of the elite both at the local and at the global level.

The key argument I made in the paper today is that the way these cooperation initiatives are designed does not really make them amenable to be able to serve as a catalyst for inclusive urban governance and development. Because for the most part they are designed as exchanges between city officials and politicians without necessarily bringing onboard the local population who also have an interest in the issues that form part of these transnational linkages.

I argue that in order for us to transform city-to-city cooperation into a tool for inclusive urban development we need to democratize this aspect of our international relations by ensuring that we design these partnerships in such a way that all interested stakeholders in the city, whether they are corporates or they are farmers or they are merely city dwellers, they shall have the opportunity to participate actively in these transnational linkages. Because ultimately they will affect the way that these individuals in the city are governed.

As things stand, for the most part, it remains more of a technocratic process that is not really amenable to significant democratic change in urban areas. Just to extend a little bit on that, I’m trying now to look at how the internationalization of cities, what kind of implications these have for power relations within cities. Because for the most part every single city in the world today, be it in the developed world or the developing world, wants to be globally connected, wants to be competitive.

I think we need to start asking the question: what vision of the city informs this global connectedness? Because for the most part, it is the visions that the elite have for the city that inform the way the city engages with the outside world. If that is the case, it means that the interests of the ordinary people are not reflected in these internationalization efforts of the city. That is why we have cities that devote significant time and resources just to make themselves to be seen to be competitive, even to the detriment of the livelihoods of ordinary groups in the cities like your street vendors or those who do not have any significant dwelling or accommodation in the city.

Well, I’m passionate about those topics because I am committed to the development and the emancipation of my continent, Africa. I believe that that is one of the ways that I can make a meaningful contribution to the development of the continent by engaging in research and developing knowledge and contributing to dialogues that will help to generate ideas and policies that could assist with the emancipation of the African continent.

The issues that I will say concern me the most actually touch on the key theme of this conference today, are the issues of growing inequality and the effects of global capitalism on the livelihoods of ordinary people particularly in the African continent, who are forced nowadays to go through processes and experiences that actually undermine their dignity as a result of the global processes that actually are geared towards making certain parts of the world and a certain groups of people richer while undermining the ability of others to meet their basic livelihoods.

In your opinion, what do we need to change? Where could we start changing this?

I think fundamentally I believe that the structure of the global economy itself is a starting point. It is from the structure that some of the misery and some of the challenges that people face even in rural areas or in the suburbs or in the townships in most of the big cities. These problems arise because of the way the global economy is structured. I am also cognizant of the fact that those who wield power, those who influence these processes are not willing to give up their privileged position.

I believe that the starting point to start changing things and to start challenging the hegemonic forces is for individuals at the grassroots level to mobilize and work together. Because it is through the collective force of individuals that we can start making any attempt to challenge the forces that undermine the dignity of ordinary people.

What we’ve seen in a number of countries, particularly in Africa, is a tendency for groups to arise and challenge those who hold power. Once those who hold power have been dislodged, we see the emergence of the same tendency that had given rise to the grievances in the first place. I think what is fundamental is to be able to put in place good institutions that are able to curb the excesses of power and to also ensure that the interests and the aspirations of everyone in a particular society are taken on board.

If you focus on change that relies on individuals, such a change can hardly be sustainable. If you have good institutions that are able to ensure that the interests and the aspirations of all individuals in society are taken into account, and that the excesses of power are actually checked, and I think that is a good starting point to be able to effect change in the system.

Sorry, going back to your paper, could you tell me which cities did you analyze and where and what kind of exchanges do they have and why?

I was looking at partnerships between Brazilian cities and their counterparts in Mozambique within the framework of efforts to promote the democratic right to the city. I drew from Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the right to the city, which argues that the city should be made to be a space where every city dweller is able to exercise their right to meet their interests and their aspirations, and not necessarily become a space which is the privilege of only those who own property and those who own capital.

Over the years, particularly in the early 2000s, we’ve seen that in Brazil there have been attempts to try to institutionalize the right to the city. Although the Brazilian experience with the right to the city has been characterized by significant struggles and pushback from property interests and conservative elements of the society, there has been an attempt by cities in Brazil,with the support of international organizations like the World Bank, the UNDP, the ILO, or city-led works like the United Cities and Local Governments, to support Brazilian cities to try to assist their counterparts in other parts of the world, particularly in Africa, and in this case Mozambique, to try to share their experiences with the implementation of the right to the city and help them to adopt more inclusive approaches to urban governance and development.

I think it is a good initiative. I think there is still work that needs to be done. By this, I mean we need to reconceptualize the way we design these partnerships. Because, as I said earlier, for the most part, they have been limited to technical exchanges between city officials or politicians for that matter, without necessarily taking into account the fact that for any significant democratic change to take place in the city you need to start challenging the dominant power relations in the city.

City to city cooperation that is designed from a technocratic perspective does not have the potential to challenge these dominant power relations. That is why I argue in the paper that we need to democratize these partnerships to make them more inclusive. So, instead of just having officials exchange ideas and knowledge and experience, we should also bring civil society and different groups within the city to be part of these exchanges so they can help to transform these partnerships into sites for the renegotiation of power within the city.

What kind of cities do we dream of? What kind of city do we want to have where we globalize them? How do you see it? How can we start doing it?

I think the starting point is to understand the nature of the city within the framework of neoliberal capitalism. If we start seeing the city as the place where the manifestation of the forces of neoliberal capitalism, they acquire a concrete presence. Because it is in the city that we see the manifestation of inequality. It is in the city that we see the manifestation of exclusion, where we see immense wealth existing side by side with abject poverty.

It is from that perspective that we can start looking at the city not as this neat space which speaks to the aspiration of those who wield capital, but rather as a contested space where even those who have traditionally been marginalized are also able to try to express themselves, and they are given space to be able to articulate the kind of city that they want to live in. Because for the most part today, the vision of the city reflects the interests and the aspirations of the elite and those who are in possession of capital. The property owners, they determine how our urban planning should take place to the exclusion of the street vendors who also need to make a living from the city.

I think the starting point, as I said, is to go back to try to democratize the urban space to create space for all city dwellers to be able to express themselves, and to play a role in shaping the city, and in shaping the vision of the city that is reflected in the way the city integrates into the global capitalist economy. Because, again, it is from that perspective that we can start having our grassroots voices challenging the transnational processes that undermine their livelihoods.

Is there a good example, is there a city who is doing well in this?

I think it’s difficult to say there is a poster child of some of those expectations. If you look at the example I gave you in my presentation today of Brazilian cities, like Porto Alegre, that were able to take advantage of the legislation, the statute of the city that sought to institutionalize the right to the city, they were able to adopt certain policies and practices, such as the participatory budgeting exercise that sought to try to create a deliberative space that allows the citizens of the city to play an active role in the way the city was managed.

Again, I mean all the time as the neoliberal forces continue to fight back, I don’t think we can even talk of Porto Alegre today as a shining case of some of these progressive ideas that we’re trying to articulate. Because it’s a process of a continued struggle because there will always be a pushback from those who wield power today who do not want to lose their privileges.

You see, I don’t believe that the state can be the starting point of change, and neither do I believe that the formal processes and institutions that we have today, we can rely on them to engender the kind of progressive policies and processes that we are talking about. I think the starting point for change will be at the level of the individual. We all need to be cognizant of the environment in which we live today. We need to understand the different processes through which power reproduces itself, and we need also to try to work together.

We need that social mobilization, both within and across state boundaries, to be able to work together as individuals that want to see a better world and better communities. I think it is from that point that we can start seeing some concerted efforts to challenge the dominant institutions and processes today. We cannot expect, because to a large extent the states and the institutions that we have today, they’ve been hijacked by those who want to continue to enjoy privileges to the exclusion of the larger population.

I think the starting point is to try to confront the dominant discourses that contribute to the marginalization of our broader communities just to serve the interests of a small elite. It was quite interesting to listen to one of the speakers at the introductory round table on Wednesday, that what we have today, those who are in possession of capital are able to have their way because they are in control of the dominant discourses, that they do not need to use military force to have their way.

All they need to do is to have the ideas become the dominant ideas in society, and as a result, enable them to reproduce their power and their domination. To answer your question directly, if I had the power to change something, it would be firstly to be able to promote education and promote greater sensitization so that people across the world should be able to understand the different processes through which domination is carried out and reinforced.

I think it is through and an awareness and a greater education that we are able to start confronting the hegemonic forces that breed inequality, exclusion, and abject poverty.

I think the most important lesson of late is that change can only happen if we go back to the local level. It is only at the local level that we can start bringing about change. You cannot rely on the government. You cannot rely on the dominant institutions that, as I said, have been captured by those who want to maintain their privileges.

In order for change to be engendered, we need to be able to unearth the power of the people. We need to make people understand that they need to take responsibility for their lives. They need to take responsibility for the better world that we aspire for. You cannot sit back and wait, that that will be handed to you by big corporates, or be handed to you by your government, or even by the global institutions that preach equality and social justice. We need to all start taking action at the grassroots level and draw from our respective strengths to work together to be able to challenge the system.

I think a very important role, because, as I said, domination today takes place predominantly at the level of ideas. If your ideas acquire a hegemonic status, then you are able to dominate those around you. That is why I think research and academia has a significant role to play in this. Unfortunately, to some extent, our institutions of learning and our research institutes have somehow been co-opted into the dominant system.

Those who still believe in a progressive world, I think they have the responsibility to challenge the dominant forms of knowledge and to be able to use what are considered to be their privileged position within the institutions that create knowledge, to be able to articulate alternative and more progressive ideas that can make the world a better place. Without the role of researchers and intellectuals, then those who are at the forefront of some of the adverse processes that we are talking about here will continue to use their ideas, no matter how perverted they may be, to continue to entrench their hegemony.

I want to live in a society where differences are respected. I want to live in a society where it is not just about me, it is about the broader community. As an African, I subscribe to the philosophy of Ubuntu, that I exist as a human being because of the broader community. As such, I want to live in a society where there is that kind of human solidarity and that I do not live only for myself, but my life reflects the value of communalism where we work as a human race collectively to make the world a better place.

I also aspire for a society where nature is not seen as something to be dominated and destroyed just to make a profit, but that we also recognize that our very existence depends on the health of the environment around us.

I think there is a lot that the rest of the world can learn from Africa. As I said, particularly they can learn the humanistic values that are embedded in the concept of Ubuntu, that life is not worth living without taking into account the broader community. I think what has, to a large extent, brought us to where we are today is this individualistic conception of life that it is all about me.

I think if we draw from the philosophy of Ubuntu that teaches us that I am an individual, I am worthy of a human being because of my connection with other human beings, I think that can be a starting point to try to deal away with some of the ills of the capitalist system that have made some lives very, very dispensable just to make profit and enrich other lives.

Thank you so much for this conversation.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you.

Biography:

Fritz Nganje is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg.
Prior to this, he was a researcher in the Africa Programme of the Pretoria-based Institute for Global Dialogue. His research interest is in the areas of the diplomacy of subnational governments, decentralized cooperation, South Africa’s foreign policy and diplomacy in Africa, peace building in Africa, and South-South cooperation.

Sudheesh Ramapurath

Sudheesh Ramapurath
D.Ph. Candidate, Dep. of Int. Development
Biography:

Sudheesh Ramapurath C. is a D.Phil. candidate at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. His research explores the impact of agrarian changes and land policies on landless indigenous peoples in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
His publications have appeared on The Wire, in the Indian Journal of Human Development and in Citizenship Studies.

Land rights, poverty, and hope in Indian indigenous community.

How do the needs of indigenous communities transform over time, and how can these same communities integrate themselves into a rapidly changing society?

We sat down with Sudheesh Ramapurath, an ethnographer and a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, to talk about his research on Land and Livelihood struggles in India, his homeland. More specifically, Sudheesh’s research focuses on the struggles of the Paniyas, a community that is part of India’s indigenous peoples, the Adivasis. Sudheesh analyzes how, over time, starting from pre and post-independence periods right up to the modern day and age, the Paniyas are still living under the poverty line.
Why? What do they want? What do they need? What is the role of research?
What changes are needed?

We met Sudheesh Ramapurath, during the conference: Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilisation, organized by The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

The title of his presentation was :

Persistence of Poverty in an Indigenous Community
in Southern India: Bringing Agrarian Environment to
the Centre of Poverty Analysis.

Find out more about UNRISD here: http://www.unrisd.org

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Biography:

Sudheesh Ramapurath C. is a D.Phil. candidate at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. His research explores the impact of agrarian changes and land policies on landless indigenous peoples in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
His publications have appeared on The Wire, in the Indian Journal of Human Development and in Citizenship Studies.

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