August 31, 2019 :: Call for papers:: Configurações Journal 25/ Thematic Issue “Debate on the Development: issues, dilemmas and alternatives“

Deadline extension - Until  31 August, 2019.

Call for papers – Configurações Journal s n. 25/ 2020

Thematic issue: Debate on the Development: issues, dilemmas and alternatives

Scientific Board: Fernando Bessa Ribeiro (ICS-UM e CICS – Polo da UM); Ivonaldo Leite (UFPB e Centro de Ciências Aplicadas e Educação – Brasil); Joel Felizes (ICS-UM e CICS – Polo da UM).

Multifaceted, complex, polysemic, subject to successive reformulations, adaptations and renewals, the development has a historical path of successes, failures and intense debates. Since there is no theoretical and political consensus on what development means and the policies and practices that can bring it about, the social and environmental problems we face make it the most relevant object for assessing the present and scrutinizing the future of human societies.

The critical approach to development requires that it not only be seen as a technical concept, but also and above all as a political and moral concept. Inseparable from other strong concepts of modernity, such as progress, this means considering it in debate on the development.
Questioning it, is it desirable when, on his behalf, the multiple processes of development have helped bring us closer to environmental collapse without many of the social problems being solved? Anyway, what do we talk about when we talk about development? Is it still relevant and feasible when after so many decades and development plans, international organizations continue to pursue goals as simple but urgent and fundamental as the eradication of hunger and extreme poverty?

By trying to think of them in a dialectical way, in the framework of capitalism, simultaneously as advance and catastrophe, following the readings of Michael Löwy and Fredric Jameson of Marx’s texts, development and progress are concepts and foundations of political action that need to be clarified and clarified. Discussed, notably considering the techno scientific innovations that produced the very real possibility of destruction of the planet (eg., nuclear war). Against the backdrop of a demographic that will bring the human population to nearly ten billion people in the middle of the century, so no outcome can dispense with its call to debate, which is also nourished by the proposals around development. nowadays embodied in the speeches and political agendas of the governments, as well as by the radical proposals of the ungrowth and the post-developmental and post-capitalist alternatives.

We accept papers that based on different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches will contribute to the critical debate on development, allowing the reader to in-deepen their knowledge, in particular on the following topics:

1. Development as a historical, political and sociological object;
2. Development, progress, capitalism and the theoretical confrontations;
3. Economic growth and development;
4. The environmental issue and the role of sustainability in renewing development;
5. The debates on ungrowth and the radical contributions of those who imagine the future without development;
6. Demographics as a matter and (neo) Malthusian polemics.

The papers  should be sent para configuracoes_cics@ics.uminho.pt until August 31,  de 2019.

By admin in News on 25/02/2019