Abstract

Development is likely the wrong name for an otherwise ethically laden academic field. My talk is an invitation to reflect on our positionalities as scholars at both sides of the Atlantic and the tensions and complementarities that I've come across after twenty years of lecturing and conducting research at Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. I´ll be using my field notes and thoughts on what I perceive to be the need to reveal, reimagine and transform rural development research by drawing a few examples from the field and connecting the dots between those and offer a critical gaze upon contested categories such as resilience, sustanability, and development. I´ll be making a case for decentring this conceptual constellation so that alternative categories like vulnerability, justice, and wellbeing find their place in what could be named as critical sustainability. My case studies stem from fieldwork in rural Guatemala on the conservation-by-cultivation approach to nature, agroecology, and the political ecology of land tenure. 

Bio

José Pablo Prado Córdova is a tenured lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences and Rural Development, Faculty of Agronomy at the University of San Carlos of Guatemala. He holds a PhD in Conservation Ecology from the University of Copenhagen, an MSc in Environmental Sustainability from the University of Edinburgh, and a BSc in Renewable Natural Resources from the University of San Carlos of Guatemala. He's been a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, the Central European University in Hungary, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Sweden, the University of Birmingham, and the University of London Birkbeck in the UK. He is a member of the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Guatemala, a member of the Development Studies Association in the UK, and sits on the board of directors of ActionAid-Guatemala and aGter in France. His main research interests hinge on the political ecology of land use, the use of critical theory in agrarian and nature conservation problems, and the emerging tensions stemming from joint efforts of higher education across geographies. He is currently the head of the department and associate researcher on two 5-year projects on social justice and earth observation, and agroecology and human health.