Join this event

Join the San Francisco Bay Area Alumni Chapter in a virtual discussion with Professors Susanna Hecht and Vinh-Kim Nguyen about this and other theoretical and empirical cases of global synchronous multisystem failure (collapse).

The growing interest in examining "collapse" has until recently been largely driven by environmentalists concerned with the impact of global warming. However, the current COVID-19 pandemic has triggered other forms of collapse that can serve as case studies for thinking about current instabilities.

The event will address common features and pathways leading to the apparent disappearance of stable structures and/or ways of living, and how systems reorganise themselves to recover. Whether social systems recuperate or not remains a question to explore in this discussion.

The discussion will be moderated by Loren Cruz, Head of the San Francisco Alumni Chapter, with welcome remarks from Dr Marie-Laure Salles, Director of the Graduate Institute.

Speakers

Susanna Hecht's research focuses on land use change in the Latin American tropics. She is considered one of the founders of the development approach known as political ecology, which integrates political economy with the environment. Her work blends the natural and social sciences into the study of tropical and planetary change. Dr Hecht has consistently carved out new analytic terrain through active tropical and archival research, and rethought development trajectories. She works with various South American governments, European and US development agencies and NGOs, and is also a Professor at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs as well as their Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Vinh-Kim Nguyen is a medical anthropologist and physician. Along with Suerie Moon, he is Co-Director of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute. He has worked as a researcher and physician in both the West African and Congolese Ebola epidemics, in Yemen with Doctors Without Borders, and most recently treating COVID in hospitals in Montréal and Geneva. Throughout these experiences, he has grown an interest inunderstanding local health systems and what might be considered the global health system, its critical vulnerabilities, and how it might be stabilised in the face of existential threats.