What does degrowth say about gender, race, and social inequality?

Professor Bipasha Baruah, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Women’s Issues at Western University’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies

Economies tend to grow and shrink over time, but the dramatic contraction worldwide in the face of the COVID 19 pandemic offered an unexpected opportunity to study relationships between degrowth or economic contraction, gender, race, and social inequality. How have concepts like basic income support, telecommuting, flexible work, and remote work – all of which were rolled out in industrialized, emerging, and developing economies around the world during the pandemic - created a unique opportunity to understand the potential and policy implications of degrowth under planned circumstances?

Bipasha Baruah is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Women’s Issues at Western University’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Her current research aims to understand how to ensure that a global low-carbon economy will be more gender-equitable and socially just than its fossil-fuel-based predecessor. Author of a book and more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and other works, Dr Baruah serves frequently as an expert reviewer and advisor to Canadian and intergovernmental environmental protection and international development organizations. The Royal Society of Canada named her to The College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists in 2015.

Race Talks is a bi-weekly seminar series that investigates processes and histories of race and gender making. Race Talks is attuned to the ways in which universities as institutions are animated by histories of colonialism, which in turn shape the organisation of knowledge production as well as citational practices. In view of this fact, we are particularly committed to inviting scholars of colour in a feminist effort to honour the radical intellectual work that emerges from the margins.

Organised by Dr Kerry Mackereth, Christina Gaw Research Associate in Gender and Technology, University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and Ola Osman, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. Please direct any queries to Kerry at: kam83@cam.ac.uk.

If you would like to hear more about Race Talks events, please email Vincenzo Paci, Centre Administrative Assistant, vmp34@cam.ac.uk and ask to be placed on the mailing list.