🌍 Keynote Speaker Announcement – Glasgow World Community Development Conference 2026

We are honoured to welcome Dr. Antonia Darder as a keynote speaker at the Glasgow World Community Development Conference 2026.

Dr. Darder is an internationally recognized Freirean scholar and Professor Emerita at Loyola Marymount University, where she held the prestigious Leavey Presidential Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership for over a decade. Across her distinguished career, she has also held visiting professorships in South Africa, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association as well as recipient of its Scholars of Color Lifetime Contribution Award.

An award-winning author and editor of more than 20 influential books—including Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love, Freire and Education, and Decolonizing Interpretive Research—Dr. Darder has spent over 50 years challenging social and material inequalities in education and society. Her work bridges critical pedagogy, decolonial thought, and social justice, with a sustained focus on culture, language, racism, political economy, and liberation.

Her scholarship is deeply rooted in lived experience—from her upbringing as a Puerto Rican child in the barrio, to her journey as a single mother and academic. Beyond academia, she is also a poet and visual artist, and has produced award-winning documentary work exploring inequities in higher education.

🎤 Keynote Address

Community Development in the Midst of Global Crisis: Challenges and Transformations

In this powerful keynote, Dr. Darder confronts the urgent political and ethical challenges shaping community development today. Drawing on traditions of critical pedagogy, decolonial theory, and grassroots organizing, she argues that global crises—climate catastrophe, inequality, forced migration, democratic erosion, and war—are not accidental, but rooted in systems of colonialism, racism, and global capitalism.

She calls for a bold reimagining of community development—not as a technical or charitable practice, but as a radical, political space grounded in social movements, collective struggle, and popular education. Highlighting examples of mutual aid, solidarity networks, and community resistance worldwide, her keynote challenges us all to reject neutrality, confront power, and embrace community development as a practice of organized hope, courage, and transformative action.