March 17, 2014

Basu to deliver Vandeveer lecture in economics

Alaka Basu, a professor of development sociology at Cornell University and senior fellow with the United Nations Foundation, will present the 10th annual Vandeveer Chair Public Lecture in Economics on March 26. 

Basu will present “Women’s Empowerment and Reproductive Health: Concepts and Evidence,” at 6 p.m. in the John C. Guyon Auditorium in Morris Library.  The lecture is free and the public is welcome to attend. 

The discussion will develop a framework for understanding empowerment and look at ways in which different aspects and types of empowerment can have varying implications for health outcomes. 

Basu is a social demographer and is published widely in areas dealing with reproductive health and family planning, gender and development, child health and mortality, and the context and politics of population policy. She has served on the governing boards of the Population Association of America, the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and the Population Council in New York. She served for six years as the director of the South Asia Program at Cornell University. She has also taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and at the Harvard School of Public Health.