The Division of Professional Education (ProfEd) and the College of Arts and Sciences revived the brown bag discussion with Dr. Eric Gutierrez as the first guest last 22 August 2024 at the Iloilo City campus.
A second round of the pre-pandemic tradition of ProfEd will also be happening at the MILC, UPV Miagao campus today, 27 August, with faculty members from the Division of Social Sciences as participants.
Dr. Gutierrez is a research fellow in Political Ecology and Agrarian Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is also a practitioner-scholar and NGO worker with over 25 years of international experience investigating public policy issues using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Moreover, he is also a specialist in the study of informal and illicit local economies.
In 2017, he received the Philippine National Book Award for Out of the Shadows, published by International Alert. He also got the 1997 Philippine National Book Award for Pork and Other Perks, released by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. In 1994, he won first prize for Best Investigative Report for the newspaper series that uncovered conflicts of interest involving members of the House of Representatives, awarded by the JVO Foundation and the Philippine Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, among others.
During the discussion with ProfEd faculty members, Dr. Gutierrez shared the method he used to gather primary data for his most recent work titled “Rethinking Illicit Economies in Opium and Cocaine: Policy Responses to Drug Crops in the Global South,” published in the Critical Development Studies series, Routledge, London.