In the second episode of The Next Question, the Robert Bosch Academy's podcast, Pradnya Bivalkar interviews Ratna Omidvar, former Canadian senator and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow, and historian Dipesh Chakrabarty about who belongs, on what terms, and whether the ideas of belonging we have inherited still fit the societies we are becoming.
Omidvar argues that belonging is neither integration nor citizenship, because you can be a citizen and still be excluded, and that legislation can change behavior, but not attitudes. Chakrabarty argues that the problems we are collectively failing to solve, from climate change to falling birth rates, are at bottom questions of belonging, and that being human always carries the risk of becoming inhuman.
Biographies:
Ratna Omidvar The Honourable Ratna Omidvar has built and led organizations at the intersection of civil society, policy, and research, all aimed at improving immigrants' access to education and the labor market, and she served in the Senate of Canada. She is a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy. She was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011. She received the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2014 in recognition of her work on behalf of immigrants and integration.
Dipesh Chakrabarty Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Born in Kolkata, he taught in Australia for twenty years before moving to the United States. His book "Provincializing Europe" is a foundational text of postcolonial and subaltern studies. His recent work, including "The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and One Planet, Many Worlds," argues that climate change requires us to see ourselves from two perspectives at once, as a global and as a planetary species.
Pradnya Bivalkar Pradnya Bivalkar is Senior Project Manager at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin and works with the Richard von Weizsäcker Fellows. Her areas of work include Identity Conflicts, Political Systems, Modern India, and the Global North-Global South Dynamic. She has hosted the Academy's podcast since January 2023, first as Think. Debate. Inspire. and now as The Next Question.
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