Nostos Salon 09
A monthly gathering of good food, drinks, and conversation—where anthropology meets community in an engaging, accessible way.
The Anthropology of Development, Power, and Decolonisation with Professor Bina Ferandez
In an era marked by contested development agendas, renewed calls to decolonise institutions and disciplines, and growing scrutiny of the relationship between the global North and South, this conversation invites us to reflect on how power operates through the very frameworks meant to advance human wellbeing.
Through the lens of anthropology, development studies, and the social sciences, we'll explore how communities navigate the structures and discourses of "development," and how categories like aid, modernisation, and humanitarianism carry assumptions about culture, agency, and worth. How do gender, migration, and labour reveal the uneven workings of global political economy? What does it mean to decolonise development, both as a field of practice and as a way of knowing? Whose voices and forms of expertise are centred, and whose are displaced? And how might critical, grounded research help us imagine more just and reciprocal futures?
We are delighted to welcome Bina Fernandez, Professor in Development Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research spans migration, gender, and feminist political economy, with a particular focus on the experiences of migrant and refugee women, social reproduction, and collective livelihoods across Ethiopia, the Middle East, and India. A former Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow with more than a decade of prior professional experience in the development sector, working with international NGOs, community organisations, and governments across Asia, her scholarship brings critical and grounded attention to how power, dispossession, and care shape lives in a globalised world.
Special thanks to NON and NOW Wines for supporting this event.
Recommended Reading and Resources via Zine
“The reach of imperialism into ‘our heads’ challenges those who belong to colonized communities to understand how this occurred, partly because we perceive a need to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith