PCON invites you to the lecture, "What Philosophers Can Learn From Poor-led Social Movements" by Dr. Monique Deveaux, Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Ethics & Global Social Change, University of Guelph (Canada).

Poor-led social movements and organizations can enrich normative discussions about chronic poverty and how best to reduce it. Dr. Deveaux argues that such movements politicize poverty, both descriptively and prescriptively, by insisting that their members’ deprivation is caused by social relations and structures of inequality, exploitation, discrimination, and subordination. Far from calling for a simple redistribution of resources from the affluent to the poor that would leave current social, political, and economic structures more or less intact, pro-poor social movements in the global South seek to actively dismantle or reform these. Global justice theorists, Dr. Deveaux suggests, have much to learn from poor-led movements’ insights regarding the causes and correlates of poverty, as well as from the strategies they have undertaken in their quest to transform poverty-producing social structures and relations.

Cosponsored by the Department of Philosophy