Self-Devouring Growth: Julie Livingston in Conversation With Brian Larkin
Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction.
Please join us on the evening of Monday, February 24th at 6:30pm, when Julie Livingston will be joined in conversation by Brian Larkin to discuss Livingston’s new book Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa. This talk will be held in the William P. Kelly Skylight Room beginning at 6:30 p.m., with a reception to follow.
This event is free and open to the public.
Julie Livingston, a 2013 recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012) and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press, 2005).
Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. With Stefan Andriopoulos, Larkin is Co-Director of the Comparative Media Initiative at Columbia University and co-founder of the University Seminar on Media Theory and History. He is a board member of the Institute for African Studies and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and a member of the Committee on Global Thought. Larkin is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008) and, with Lila Abu-Lughod and Faye Ginsburg, co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (University of California Press, 2000).
Where: Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave.
212-817-7000 Price: Free
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Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction.
Please join us on the evening of Monday, February 24th at 6:30pm, when Julie Livingston will be joined in conversation by Brian Larkin to discuss Livingston’s new book Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa. This talk will be held in the William P. Kelly Skylight Room beginning at 6:30 p.m., with a reception to follow.
This event is free and open to the public.
Julie Livingston, a 2013 recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012) and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press, 2005).
Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. With Stefan Andriopoulos, Larkin is Co-Director of the Comparative Media Initiative at Columbia University and co-founder of the University Seminar on Media Theory and History. He is a board member of the Institute for African Studies and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and a member of the Committee on Global Thought. Larkin is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008) and, with Lila Abu-Lughod and Faye Ginsburg, co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (University of California Press, 2000).
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