The turn of the century has been marked by the emergence of a “kinder and gentler” project of development. From the recalibration of the World Bank as a “knowledge bank” committed to the eradication of poverty to the ambitious campaigns that imagine the “end of poverty,” a new global order is in the making.

Through ethnographic attention to the Washington D.C.-Wall Street complex, this talk examines the circuits of capital and truth that structure “millennial development.” In particular, it focuses on microfinance, which is an active frontier of “creative capitalism.” But microfinance is also the site of important experiments in poverty policy, from the massive civil society institutions of Bangladesh to the Hezbollah militia of Lebanon. It is thus implicated in the emergence of counter-geographies of development.

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted and co-sponsored by the Departments of Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, and the Liu Institute for Global Issues, Ananya Roy is Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning where she teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and international development.

Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, By Ananya Roy

This is a book about poverty but it does not study the poor and the powerless. Instead it studies those who manage poverty. It sheds light on how powerful institutions control “capital,” or circuits of profit and investment, as well as “truth,” or authoritative knowledge about poverty. Such dominant practices are challenged by alternative paradigms of development, and the book details these as well. Using the case of microfinance, the book participates in a set of fierce debates about development ‐ from the role of markets to the secrets of successful pro‐poor institutions. Based on many years of research in Washington D.C., Bangladesh, and the Middle East, Poverty Capital also grows out of the author’s undergraduate teaching to thousands of students on the subject of global poverty and inequality.

About the Author: Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the founding chair of a new undergraduate curriculum in Global Poverty and Practice. At Berkeley, Roy is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award and Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching, the highest teaching honors bestowed by the campus and its students. Roy’s previous research has provided a close look at poverty and inequality in the cities of the global South.

March 2010 | 258 pages | Paperback: 978-0415876735| $29.95