Member Profile
Gareth Olds
About Me
I am a Brown University graduate student pursuing a PhD in economics within the fields of development and growth, and my research interests center mainly on development in the Middle East and Africa. My past projects have dealt with the role of political economy and Islamophobia in Turkey’s financial crisis and exclusion from the EU, issues in Saudi trade policy, the ideological impact of IMF loans, and the role that Orientalism plays in understanding the current discourse on development. I’m also interested in international political economy, industrial policy, and heterodox approaches to economic development.
As an IGERT Fellow at the Watson Institute’s Graduate Program in Development, I’m hoping to broaden my knowledge of non-economic perspectives so that I can help develop holistic, systems-theoretic approaches to development. In doing so I hope to both challenge the neoclassical construction of Homo economicus and place economic development within a broader social context.
