REAL Seminar by Susan Paulson

The REAL-Postgrowth project (Post-growth – REAL – A Post-Growth Deal) is excited to announce the following workshop “Cross-cultural learning to help re-orient dominant gender systems away from facilitating growth and environmental degradation, and toward care and regeneration of abundant life” with Susan Paulson.

Title: "Cross-cultural learning to help re-orient dominant gender systems away from facilitating growth and environmental degradation, and toward care and regeneration of abundant life"

Speaker: Susan Paulson, Professor of Latin American Studies at University of Florida,

• Date: Tuesday 21^st October, 2025
• Time: 11.00-13.00
• Venue: Room Z033 - ICTA-UAB

By celebrating the formidable creativity of human organization through millennia and across cultures, this seminar aims to broaden horizons of possibility for postgrowth provisioning and practice. A new look at deep human history reveals sharp turns in recent centuries with the institutionalization and dissemination of unprecedented gender-kin models instrumental to economic and population growth. Decolonial, ecofeminist, and ecomasculinities perspectives illuminate ways in which sociocultural systems continue to interact to organize and justify unequal ecological and economic exchanges that facilitate profit for some and degradation for others. Ethnography in Indigenous Latin American contexts reveals glimpses of different pathways, including men who enact nurturing human and interspecies care, and feminists who celebrate and politicize collaborative practices for healing and regenerating life. In response to fierce resistance to gender change, the conclusion rallies anthropological understandings of human potential to produce wildly diverse worlds.

Susan Paulson is Professor of Latin American Studies at University of Florida, currently serving as Guest Professor at Sciences Po, Paris. Decades of field research on human-environment relations in Andean and Amazonian communities inform Paulson‘s current work toward global environmental justice. She learns with diverse interlocutors in forums ranging from indigenous workshops to executive summits, and in outlets from Degrowth.info to The Economist. Recent publications include World-making technology entangled with coloniality, racialization, and gender (2024), and co-authored works:  Degrowth and Anthropology  (2024) and The Case for Degrowth (2020).