Speakers:
Mary Arends-Kuenning
Title: Government Policies and Their Impacts on Women’s Empowerment.
Description: Professor Arends-Kuenning’s talk focuses on Brazil’s conditional cash transfer plan Bolsa Familia and minimum wage increases and how they impact women’s empowerment.
McKenzie Johnson
Title: The Work of Women Environmental Defenders in Extractive Economies
Description: Increasingly, women have taken up the role of serving as human rights and environmental defenders in extractive economies. Given that this role often generates both more work for these women as well as substantial risk to their lives and livelihoods, what motivates this desire for action? Professor McKenzie Johnson draws on her recent work with women environmental defenders in Latin America to consider how and why women do the work of environmental defense in extractive economies.
Elizabeth T. Powers
Title: Deportations and the Care Economy
Description: Undocumented migrants in the US contribute importantly to the care economy, working in occupations like child care providers, health aides, and maids and cleaners. Professor Elizabeth Powers discusses why a policy of mass deportations poses a serious threat to health, wellbeing, and economic growth in the US.
Vernita Pearl Fort
Title: Forging a Human Rights Economy within Planetary Boundaries
Amid Unprecedented Crises and Possibilities
Description: The neoliberal economic model prioritizes growth over human and planetary well-being, often treating environmental and social concerns as externalities. While it has driven innovation and improved living standards for some, it has also deepened poverty, inequality, and ecological harm. In response to these failures, Vernita Pearl Fort advocates for a human rights economy, one that places people, their rights, and the planet at the center of economic systems, highlighting the urgent need for structural reforms that promote democratic agency, sustainability, and equitable prosperity for current and future generations.