Odyssey of a Filipino Progressive
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 29/09/2022

A lecture by Walden Bello examining his broader experiences as a public intellectual and the four key lessons he learned trying to reconcile his academic work and responsibilities with his own activism: certain truths are realized only through action; one must sometimes resort to unorthodox research methods; one must accept that there is an inevitable and permanent tension between theory/practice, thought/action, truth/power; and the only people you can trust with political power are those ambivalent about it.

This event was co-sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UW-Madison.

Walden Bello is senior analyst of Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines. He is one of the leading critics of the current model of economic globalization, combining the roles of intellectual and activist. As a human rights and peace campaigner, academic, environmentalist and journalist, and through a combination of courage as a dissident, with an extraordinary breadth of published output and personal charisma, he has made a major contribution to the international case against corporate-driven globalization. During the fall 2015 semester, Bello is an Activist-in-Residence Writing Fellow with the Havens Center.