Biography

Maria (Kas) is a Spanish sociologist with work experience in the associative and the academic sectors. She has worked in youth/adult educational programmes in Angola, Burundi and France and more recently with the Freirean-based network Reflect. She has also worked for women's associations, mainly in a participatory research project with Azorean fisherwomen in Portugal. Since 2009, she has combined international work with teaching and researching on participation at the Technical University of Valencia, Spain. In January 2012, she started her PhD at IDS.

PhD Topic

'Globalising Freire: the case of ActionAid’s HRBA 2.0 Theory of Change'

'Globalising Freire' explores a theory of change that sees society as changing mainly through transformed attitudes & behaviours and through collective action. This happens in a context in which many structural causes of poverty and inequality originate beyond a country’s border – for what a grounded globalisation framework, more than Nation-state and North-South ones, is needed. ActionAid’s “HBRA 2.0” Strategy (2012-2017) aims to connect education and mobilisation through: (1) empowering people living in poverty (reflection-action groups), (2) campaigning for rights and (3) building up solidarity between countries. But, how do locally generated materials reach national and global campaigns? What happens when priorities from local learning groups do not meet those set in campaigns? Inversely, how do local groups learn from global campaigns, global resources (i.e. international law) and global actors hampering/helping their mobilisation? More generally: (1) how are national and international aspects analysed by popular education groups? and (2) what added value does this particular theory of change have? To explore these, ActionAid’s multi-country campaign on tax justice is taken as a case study with fieldwork in Denmark and Nigeria (TBC).

Thematic Interests

popular education, social change, development & alter-globalisation, participatory & rights-based approaches, participatory research, participatory workshops, attitudes & behaviours, gender & power