Mills Alumna to Speak at UCB Sociology Colloquium

MONDAY January 24th 
BLUMER ROOM – 402 BARROWS HALL
2:00-3:30pm

The Berkeley Sociology Colloquium Series
Spring 2011 Presents:

How Poverty Became Capital: Millennial Modernity and its Discontents

Ananya Roy
Department of City and Regional Planning
University of California, Berkeley

The start of the new millennium has been marked by the emergence of a remarkable global conscience about poverty. In this talk, Ananya Roy examines the shift from the "end of history" to the "end of poverty." In particular, she shows how experiments with "bottom billion capitalism" are central to millennial modernity and its frameworks of global liberalism.  The world's bottom billion, now imagined as microentrepreneurs, constitute the new frontiers of global finance capital.  By focusing on a highly popular development technology, microfinance, Roy outlines how such bottom billion markets are constructed in various regions of the world. However, the enterprise of converting poverty into capital is fraught with contradictions.  Drawing on several years of ethnographic research conducted in the circuits of finance capital and in the circuits of expertise, Roy emphasizes the limits of such forms of subprime accumulation. From the World Bank to the Grameen Bank, from Citigroup to Hezbollah, she traces the counter-practices, contestations, and ruptures that haunt the making of millennial modernity.

Ananya Roy is Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in the fields of comparative urban studies and international development.  Roy also serves as Co-Director of the Global Metropolitan Studies initiative and as Chair of the newly established undergraduate minor in Global Poverty and Practice.  Roy is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty and most recently of Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. The research for the latter was funded by a National Science Foundation grant. She is currently completing a book, edited with Aihwa Ong, titled Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global.