Information sur l'intervenant

A leading scholar in contemporary pragmatism and institutional innovation studies, Dennis Charles Galvan is Professor of Political Science and International Studies and Vice Provost for International Affairs at the University of Oregon. He has conducted field research since 1988 in a cluster of thirty villages in rural Senegal, and has conducted comparative field research in Central Java, Indonesia, since 1999. His published work examines everyday institutional change, peasant adaptation of property regimes, social capital and democratization, sustainable development, ethnic relations, and grass-roots patterns of nation-building. He is finishing a new book, Everyday Nation Building, which looks at ordinary life ethic and religious cooperation in Senegal and Indonesia. Galvan’s main interest is to trace out what people do in the face of newly arrived vectors of “development,” externally imposed “best practices,” and lofty ideals for global civilization, micro operations of on-the-ground sense-making, requiring dismantling, tinkering and rearrangement of the institutions that are supposed to induce progress.  In this way, Galvan borrows tools from Bruno Latour to document the micro-politics of the creation of many local, vernacular modernities. Galvan’s book The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal (University of California Press, 2004), won the 2005 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association African Politics Conference Group. His 2007 co-edited volume, Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation (Palgrave Macmillan, co-edited with Rudra Sil), tracks similar grass-roots adaptations of state and economy across the developing world.