Phi Beta Kappa Speaker: Paige West

Guest speaker Paige West will speak on “Dispossession, Racism, and the Environment.” This lecture will examine some of the ways in which inequalities are produced, lived, and reinforced in today’s globalized world.

Drawing on over 20 years of research in the Pacific Island country of Papua New Guinea, the lecture shows the ways in which representational strategies with regard to nature and culture are complex acts of dispossession, carefully crafted accumulation strategies, and ideologically grounded attempts to persuade and motivate. It also makes clear the relationship between these representations and ideologies and the loss of economic and material wealth within the context of economic development. In it, West argues that there are racist logics of representation that underlie all uneven development and that if we examine the various representational strategies we see every day, we can begin to develop a more robust understanding of the ideological work that underpins uneven development.