About Anna Malavisi

 

“We all need to be challenged out of our mistakes, stupidities, complacencies – especially when it is our own intellectual blinkers that prevent us from seeing them as such. This is the preeminent role of philosophy.”

Graham Priest, 2006

Anna Malavisi completed her PhD in philosophy  in May 2015 at Michigan State University which is located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. She grew up in Melbourne, Australia but has lived in England and Bolivia prior to coming to the U.S., and traveled extensively. Her interest in pursuing a PhD in philosophy came from a long trajectory working as a development practitioner for 16 years in Bolivia. Over the course of those years having worked in national and international Non-Government Organizations, and coordinated with bilateral governments, multilateral institutions, corporations and community based organizations she became quite skeptical and despondent about the true impact of their work. Bearing witness to the constant shortfalls and limitations of development  successes but also the failures, she began to question development and to think about it more critically. This highlighted the need for more critical analysis and reflection at large, and in particular, ethics, which was not taking place. This disquietude brought her to the United States.

She is  currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Humanistic Studies at Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT. Anna is also a Research Associate with The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, an effort based at Michigan State University that offers a philosophical yet practical enhancement to cross-disciplinary, collaborative research and practice.

In July 2020, Anna joined the Center for Values in International Development as Vice-President; a new non-profit organization founded by Chloe Schwenke comprising both practitioners and ethicists, working together to make secular, universal moral values explicit,  informative, persuasive, and influential in international relief and development policy, programming, advocacy, monitoring, evaluation, and learning.