{"id":2313,"date":"2026-09-15T20:45:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T17:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kehitystutkimus.fi\/?p=2313"},"modified":"2026-09-15T20:45:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T17:45:21","slug":"empowering-development-people-and-nature-in-the-era-of-new-technologies-and-geopolitics-concept-note-and-call-for-working-groups-for-devdays2027","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kehitystutkimus.fi\/?p=2313","title":{"rendered":"Empowering Development: People and Nature in the Era of New Technologies and Geopolitics (Concept Note and Call for Working Groups for DevDays2027)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong>Development Days 2027 Conference
\n<\/strong>CALL FOR WORKING GROUPS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Empowering Development:
\n<\/em><\/strong>People and Nature in the Era of New Technologies and Geopolitics
\n<\/em><\/strong>25-26 February 2027 | Helsinki, Finland<\/p>\n

Concept Note
\n<\/em><\/strong>Development research concerns the well-being of people and nature. So long as there are threats to,
\nand aspirations for, the flourishing of humanity and ecology, development studies will remain relevant. Despite politically motivated pressures to render our field irrelevant, our reason for being and the subjects of our inquiry endure.<\/p>\n

During the previous Development Days 2026 conference, the Finnish Society for Development Research (FSDR) marked its 40th<\/sup> anniversary under the theme \u201cDevelopment in Ruins, Hope in the Cracks,\u201d<\/a> confronting a discipline and a world under siege while insisting that possibility persists within the wreckage. The next Development Days 2027 (DevDays2027) conference takes up that hope under the theme \u201cEmpowering Development: People and Nature in the Era of New Technologies and Geopolitics,\u201d<\/strong> asking what it demands of us in practice.<\/p>\n

To empower development means, first, to resist collectively the pressures that obscure its purpose and reaffirm its necessity and virtues, not as the individualized capacity-building that liberal development discourse has made of \u201cempowerment,\u201d but as collective power to transform structures. It is also to rescue the concept from co-optation by state security agendas and corporate accumulation, reclaiming its original significance as a site of critical inquiry, radical solidarity, and transformative action centered on people, nature, and justice.<\/p>\n

DevDays2027<\/strong> invites scholars, practitioners, activists, and educators to share research, reflections, and advocacy addressing key questions: How do new technologies reconfigure power, precarity, movements, and resistance in the lives of people and nature? Amid shifting geopolitical fault lines, how do we cultivate relations of care, democratic governance, and alternative futures that empower human and ecological flourishing? And how do we defend and advance the ethos and institutions of development against political hostility and governmental retrenchment?<\/p>\n

At this juncture in world history, new dynamics in geopolitics and rapid progress in disruptive technology pose existential challenges to people and nature, and by extension to development studies as a discipline. Climate breakdown, war and the renewed spectre of nuclear annihilation, and a hypercompetitive race for energy, minerals, land, and resources under the banner of innovation, now compounded by public debate over artificial intelligence’s own capacity to inflict catastrophic risks on critical social infrastructures, including by lowering the barriers to engineering biological weapons, make this urgency material rather than rhetorical.<\/p>\n

These dangers may not be unprecedented but can be regarded as capitalism and colonialism reasserting themselves through new technological and geopolitical forms. This moment calls on us to examine the contemporary forces bearing on the day-to-day and future existence of human beings and the natural environment. Dominant political, economic, and cultural trends and practices have disempowered development ideas, institutions, and constituencies. Yet amid the strong negative tendencies wrought by emerging technologies and intensifying geopolitics, this is also the time to reflect on, and act toward, empowering what lies at the heart of development research: people and nature<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Among other objectives of this gathering, our task is to assert our field\u2019s vitality and cooperate with the development community in finding opportunities for collaborative endeavors. In an increasingly volatile world, our responsibility is not only to diagnose contemporary problems but to actively participate in building futures for human dignity, ecological integrity, and global solidarity.<\/p>\n

Sub-Themes for Working Groups
\n<\/em><\/strong>We invite proposals for Working Groups in a range of formats \u2014 academic panels, policy discussions, activist forums, poster sessions, or creative interventions. Submissions are encouraged to engage with the conference theme, including but not limited to the following areas:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. People, Nature, and Technological Change<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n