The CASID 2023 Conference will take place in person and virtually at York University, Toronto from 29 – 31 May as a part of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Annual Congress

Re-imagining ‘Development’: Reckonings, Resurgences and Reparations

We welcome the Congress 2023 theme ‘Reckonings and Re-Imaginings’, which echoes CASID’s ongoing focus on struggles for social justice (including racial justice), decolonization, and planetary survival in the context of concurrent crises: a persistent pandemic, climate emergency, intensifying economic uncertainty and proliferating conflict. Development studies, therefore, emerges at the centre of the interdisciplinary justice-oriented research which Congress seeks to foreground, but simultaneously remains in urgent need of critical transformation itself.

The CASID 2023 Conference challenges scholars and practitioners to re-imagine ‘development’ and our collective futures to realize a radically different world. CASID 2023 offers us an opportunity to reckon with the field’s harmful legacy and contemporary challenges, to consider what constitutes meaningful repair, to ground our interventions in and draw wisdom and inspiration from the resurgence of historical and contemporary struggles for justice, and to contemplate possibilities for collective liberation. 

We invite CASID 2023 participants to uncover buried histories, engage with any of the many local and global movements for justice, and reconsider our role as researchers, educators, and practitioners in resisting oppressive and exploitative structures in which our work is implicated. What does the future of 'development' studies and practice, which to date has been marked by extreme eurocentrism and neoliberalism/sustained market fundamentalism, look like in a time of overlapping planetary threats? What is the role of development scholars in engaging with new internationalisms and mainstream foreign policy debates around the world? We look forward to gathering for these critical conversations, among others, at CASID 2023.

Looking forward to seeing you at York in May!

The 2023 CASID Conference Committee:

Mustahid Husain, CASID Board Member at Large, Conference Chair
Themrise Khan, CASID Board Member at Large
Adrian Murray, CASID Board Member at Large