We have two guest speakers - Professor Laura Stark from University of Jyväskylä, and philosopher and writer Vishal Mangalwadi from India and the US. The topic will be: "Why Do Some Societies Flourish? What is needed to give women and the poor a chance and to let all inhabitants flourish? Examples from Eastern Africa, India, USA and Finland."
Laura Stark is a professor of Ethnology and her fields of interest are gender, sexuality and poverty in urban Africa. Using 230 interviews with mostly Muslim women, Stark studies poverty and gender in urban Tanzania, focusing on transactional sex, child marriage and forced marriage, and how the labour of the poor is reproduced in the neoliberal city. Marriage under 18 is common in most of Africa. Many girls themselves want to marry young. Why? Social, economic and cultural pressures together provide an explanation.
Vishal Mangalwadi is a Christian writer and philosopher, travelling around the Nordic countries for a couple of months and will come to Finland in May. In short, Vishal Mangalwadi graduated from the University of Allahabad in 1969 and earned an MA in philosophy from the University of Indore in 1973. In 1976, Mangalwadi and his wife moved to his father's farm and founded a non-profit organization to serve the rural poor and transform their caste-based feudal social system. His work was opposed and violently resisted. In 1980, he was briefly incarcerated where he began writing his second book, “Truth and Social Reform”. During the riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, his organization was burned down. In 1987, he initiated a national movement against the revival of sati, a historical practice in which a widow sacrifices herself by joining her deceased husband's funeral fire. He has written extensively on several topics.
