Unpacking Development

Today I was at the first day of the Ontario HIV Treatment Network’s 2008 Research Conference.  The organization is a big funder of AIDS research in Ontario and it was great to check out what people are doing to learn about the pandemic in my ‘hood. Sometimes I’m amazed at how broad the approach is [...]

In my list of global health and development rock stars (which I should publish here one day), Paul Farmer is pretty close to the top.  Friends and I joke about the celebrity-style worship we direct towards people like him and Stephen Lewis or Alex De Waal, for example.  For some background, Farmer is a maverick [...]

The Student University Network for Social and International Health (SUNSIH) Conference started this Friday with a documentary screening of Angels in the Dust, a film about a group that supports orphans in South Africa.  I’ve seen several heart reandering call-to-action docs over the past few years, but this one stood out because of its focus [...]

At the AIDS Conference in August, one of the speakers in the Lancet Series on HIV Prevention Jeffrey O’Malley said something along the lines of “I’m amazed that the inventors of Safe Sex have yet to win a Nobel Prize.”  Well, it isn’t quite the inventors of safe sex, but it is exciting that some [...]

This weekend I joined two friends and walked in the Toronto AIDS Walk for Life.  Toronto has no shortage of runs for a cause — every couple of weeks I see one on my way to work on a Sunday morning.  There’s the CIBC Run for the Cure, the Super Cities Walk for MS…  Clearly, [...]

One of the questions that I keep getting asked is how the most recent AIDS conference was from the last one. I met some people at the conference who had been to the last 7 or 8, so they’d be better at describing the conference’s evolution, but here are a few thoughts from me. First [...]

The Undercurrent Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Development Studies publishes open source academic papers by Canada’s International Development undergrads, covering topics from indigenous land rights to microcredit to media representation of the developing world. Undercurrent aims to: To raise the profile of undergraduate IDS To establish a venue in which young scholars may undergo constructive review [...]