Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures

Gustavo Esteva is one of Latin America's most brilliant intellectuals and a leading critic of the development paradigm. Active in his own country, Mexico, and on the international scene, he has been by turns public servant, university professor and, for the past twenty years, grassroots activist working with Indian groups, peasants and the urban marginalised. He is the author of a dozen books. The many posts he has held include being President of the 5th World Congress on Rural Sociology, Interim Chairman of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) Board, President of the Mexican Society for Planning and Vice-President of the Inter-American Society for Planning. But the achievement for which he is now most well-known is his role in helping found various Mexican, Latin American and international NGOs and networks. Convinced that only through autonomous, grassroots organizations can social change be genuinely oriented and implemented by the people themselves for their own benefit, he has been very active in building links between communities and grassroots groups. In recent years, he has worked very closely with the Zapatista Army for National Liberation in Chiapas whose exploits have captured the imagination of people everywhere.Madhu Suri Prakash has been Professor-in-Charge of Educational Theory and Practice at Pennsylvania State University since 1994. Educated originally at the University of Delhi, she did her doctorate in the philosophy of education at Syracuse University in 1981. She is the author of numerous chapters in books and articles in scholarly journals, including the American Journal of Education, Philosophy of Education and Teachers College Record. She has also been a guest editor for special issues of Holistic Education Review and Educational Theory. The current book which she is completing is provisionally entitled Gandhi's Educational Thought: Multiculturalism, Ecology and Postmodernism re-examined from a Third World Perspective.