DSAA Webinar

Welcome to The DSAA monthly webinar series! 

Development is a dynamic space, bringing together research and practice across a range of disciplines. Our webinar series explores this diversity, bringing a new speaker who shares their expertise on a critical theme of interest every month. Each session will explore diverse topics, from building a CV for the international development sector to conducting community-based research and decolonising research practices. Through these interactive webinars, we aim to support HDR and ECR students in expanding their networks, gaining real-world insights, and advancing their academic and professional journeys. 

You can replay previous webinars from our YouTube Channel @DSA_Australia

UPCOMING WEBINAR 

Decolonial Reflections on the Future of African Development

Development in Africa began as a hopeful pathway out of colonialism, poverty, and illiteracy. Yet, decades of global interventions have yielded limited tangible outcomes for the continent’s most vulnerable populations. Instead of empowerment, Africa faces deepening dependency—on foreign technologies, knowledge systems, and financial aid—culminating in a debt-servicing economy that fails to serve its youth.

This webinar brings together prominent African thinkers to critically reflect on the meaning and purpose of development for those who have never truly benefited from it. Is it time to dismantle and reimagine the dominant theories and practices of development studies? What would it mean for Africans to build their own futures rooted in their lived realities, indigenous knowledge, and cultural values?

Join us for a powerful conversation that challenges conventional paradigms and explores pathways toward a truly emancipatory and self-defined African development.

Date: 19 August

Time: 10-11:30 am South Africa Time | 6-7:30 pm AEST

Location: YouTube Channel @DSA_Australia

Speakers:

Prof Geci Karuri-Sebina currently serves as an Associate Professor at the Wits School of Governance coordinating the Tayarisha Centre for Digital Governance and the Civic Tech Innovation Network. She is the ICESCO Chair on Innovation and Futures in Africa;  Principal at the School of International Futures; and Adjunct Professor at UCT’s African Centre for Cities.  She serves as Vice President of Africalics, a director of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project and the Africa Innovation Summit, and is a Desmond Tutu African Leadership Fellow. Geci holds Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Sociology (Iowa); Masters degrees in Architecture and in Urban Planning (UCLA); and a PhD in Planning and Innovation studies (Wits University).

Dr Lehasa Moloi is an Afrocentric Scholar grounded in Afrocentricity. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Development Studies at the University of South Africa. He holds PhD in Development Studies. He is passionate about epistemic decolonization debates and the pursuit for re-humanization in the Global South, in particular Africa is his focus, against the ravages of the colonial past. His intellectual work is grounded in the paradigm of Afrocentricity as a liberatory thinking frameworks to oppose epistemicides created by European colonialism. He broadly reflects and write on Africa, Knowledge, Development and Decolonization. He is the author of the recently scholarly published book titled Developing Africa? New Horizons with Afrocentricity (2024), in which he contests the limitations of Eurocentric thinking in the conceptualization of African Development Discourse.

Dr Eyob Balcha Gebremariam Eyob Balcha Gebremariam is an interdisciplinary scholar who works on the politics of academic knowledge production, decolonial perspectives on development, the political economy of development, and African political economy. He currently works as a Research Associate at the Perivoli Africa Research Centre (PARC), the University of Bristol and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town (UCT). He is a Member of the Council at the Development Studies Association (DSA) of the UK and of the European Association of Development Institutes (EADI) task group on decolonising knowledge in Development Studies.

Facilitator

Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes is Director of Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University. He is a Senior Lecturer, multidisciplinary researcher and award-winning writer. Drawing from the history, philosophy and experiences of marginalised people and diverse communities, Yirga contributes critical insights for reimagining the future and addressing epistemic and racial injustices. He researches African experience and Ethiopian traditions and writes creatively on belonging and diasporic lives. He has won university and industry awards for his teaching, research, and creative writing. His publications include the sole authored book Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence Against Traditions in Ethiopia. (New Jersey: The Red Sea Press, 2017) and co-edited book (with Offord, Fleay, Hartley and Chan) Activating Cultural and Social Change: The Pedagogies of Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2022).

Leave space here