Poverty capital: microfinance and the making of development

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. 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…