Second International Conference on Human Dignity and Human Development
In development theory and practice there is broad consensus that attention to aggregate economic growth alone is insufficient to advance people’s well-being. Among the predominant capability, well-being, and happiness approaches and in human development more broadly, human dignity has emerged as a pervasive aim and animating factor for the practice of development.
Less clear is how an emphasis on human dignity relates concretely to the aims and methods of these paths to improving human flourishing. This 2nd Kellogg Institute conference on Human Dignity and Human Development investigates the idea of human dignity as a common connector among a variety of development approaches.
Through a dialogue between scholars and practitioners, participants will consider human dignity in light of development experience in order to identify points of synergy and make viable recommendations for theory and practice. The conference also aims to generate practical guidelines for implementing the emphasis on human dignity explicit in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda.
Conference panels will engage key dimensions of theory and practice, including:
Multidimensional approaches and integral human development: How the integral nature of human development can address persistent gaps in method and practice; how dignity can advance multidimensionality to result in measurable outcomes
Agency and Capability: How human dignity may imply an emphasis on certain forms of agency—e.g., individual vs. collective, or relational vs. autonomous; how such agency accentuates the value of culture and local relationships in development practice
Participation: How diverse models of participation—ranging from community and political engagement and participatory decision-making to “encounter” and “accompaniment”—realize distinct roles for human dignity in international development
Institutions: How legal, political, and market-based institutions help protect and advance human dignity in human development; how macro-level institutional approaches can be reconciled with micro-level indicators of personal flourishing
Hosted by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, this conference is part of an ongoing research initiative on human dignity and human development led by Kellogg Director Paolo Carozza. The conference builds on the First Conference on Human Dignity and Human Development held in Rome in 2014.
Maria Sophia Aguirre
Maria Sophia Aguirre is a professor of economics at the Catholic University of America, where she founded two degree programs in integral economic development. A specialist in international finance and economic development, Aguirre has advised the United Nations as well as governmental bodies in the US, Canada, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on issues related to population, health, family policy, and women’s education...
Jackie Aldrette
Jackie Aldrette is program manager at AVSI-USA, the US branch of the Association of Volunteers in International Service, an international NGO founded in Italy that supports international development with special attention to education and the promotion of the dignity of every human person...
Matt Bloom
Matt Bloom is Associate Professor of Business Management at the University of Notre Dame. Bloom is the Principle Investigator of the Wellbeing at Work Program (wellbeing.nd.edu) in which he and his team studying flourishing among the helping and caring professions. Matt has received over $6.2 million in grant funding to support his research...
Catherine Bolten
Catherine Bolten is associate professor of anthropology and peace studies and director of doctoral studies at the Kroc Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Bolten’s current field research project involves an investigation of wildlife cosmology and bushmeat in rural and urban Sierra Leone...
Wyatt Brooks
Wyatt Brooks is an associate professor of economics in the W.P. Carey School of Business at ASU. He studies development economics and international trade. He has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Nicaragua, Uganda, Rwanda, Brazil and many other countries. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Econometrica, the Journal of Monetary Economics and the International Economic Review...
Luigino Bruni
Luigino Bruni, professor of economics at Libera Università Maria Ss. Assunta (LUMSA) in Rome, Italy, investigates the historical and philosophical foundations of economic thought, with a focus on the interpersonal dimension...
Paolo G. Carozza
Previously the director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies (2012-2022), Paolo Carozza is professor of law and concurrent professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. With expertise in comparative constitutional law, human rights, law and development, and international law, he focuses his research on Latin America, Western Europe, and international themes more broadly...
Michael Coppedge
Michael Coppedge is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a faculty fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. His research interests include democratization and the quality of democracy; Latin American parties and party systems; Venezuelan politics; and comparative politics methodology. He has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 1995...
David A. Crocker
David A. Crocker is senior research scholar at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, where he helped establish and directs the specialization in international development. A philosopher, he focuses his research on international development ethics, sociopolitical philosophy, transitional justice, democracy, and democratization. He directs study-abroad trips to Ethiopia, Peru, and Morocco...
Séverine Deneulin
This profile was current as of 2018, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community. Séverine Deneulin (DPhil, University of Oxford), a Kellogg visiting fellow for the 2017–18 academic year, is associate professor in International Development at the University of Bath, where she teaches in the MSc in International Development and Professional Doctorate in Policy Research and Practice programs...
Rev. Robert Dowd, CSC
Rev. Robert Dowd, CSC, became Notre Dame’s 18th president in June 2024. Professor of political science, Dowd is an Africanist whose research interests include religion, development, and political culture...
Jay Drydyk
Jay Drydyk, professor of philosophy at Carleton University in Canada, studies how human rights, justice, democracy, and development might be understood from global and cross-cultural perspectives. His current project, “Global Ethics, Capabilities, and Human Rights,” examines the capacity of diverse moral outlooks to reach agreement on practical conclusions, including the right to development...
Terence Johnson
This profile was current as of 2019 when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community. Terence Johnson is an industrial organization economist, focused on dynamic game theory and market design. His scholarly work appears in the Journal of Economic Theory and the Oxford Handbook of Market Design...
Joseph Kaboski
Joseph P. Kaboski is the David F. and Erin M. Seng Foundation Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on growth, development and international economics, with an emphasis on structural change, finance and development, schooling and growth, microfinance, explaining international relative price patterns, and the role of inventories in international trade...
Lori Keleher
Lori Keleher is associate professor of philosophy at New Mexico State University. With research that focuses on development ethics, Keleher concentrates on reconciling the theory and practice of human flourishing. The coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics (forthcoming), she is working on another coedited volume “Agency, Democracy, and Participation in Global Development...
Tracy L. Kijewski-Correa
Tracy Kijewski-Correa is the William J. Pulte Director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, where she also serves as Academic Director of the School’s Integration Lab (i-Lab)...
Gerry Mackie
Gerry Mackie is associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, where he codirects the Center on Global Justice. A political theorist, his scholarly interests include contemporary political theory, the history of political thought, and problems of collective action...
Chiara Nava
Chiara Nava is the program director and nutrition advisor for the Association of Volunteers in International Service, AVSI, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since 2010, Nava has worked for AVSI, an international NGO that supports development with special attention to human dignity and education...
Milena Nikolova
Milena Nikolova is a research associate with IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor) in Bonn, Germany and a nonresident fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution. Her research investigates subjective well-being in relation to migration and transition economies...
Rahul Oka
Kellogg Institute Faculty Fellow Rahul Oka is a research associate professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs. Oka is an economic anthropologist and his research interests include the anthropology of urbanism, social network analysis, the development of complex socio-economic systems, applications of agent-based simulation modeling techniques to anthropology and archaeometry/materials analysis...