About

Saville Kushner is Emeritus Professor and recently worked in the Universities of East Anglia and West of England (UK), and the University of Auckland, (New Zealand). He worked for a time for the United Nations in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNICEF) and recently served as Chair of the Evaluation and Research Board for the New Zealand Aid Programme. He is author/co-author of numerous books and many articles, all dealing with democracy and how we value public work. A recent book, in which he was co-author with Barry Kushner, is called Who Needs the Cuts: Myths of Economic Crisis. The book was short-listed for the prestigious Bread and Roses Literary Award, and he and Barry argue in it that we are too easily sold the idea of a single narrative – that ‘there is no alternative’. There are always alternatives – especially to current political ideas such as that public debt and deficit are unsustainable, that austerity is unavoidable, that wealth ‘trickles down’ and that tax is best avoided where possible. Saville’s most recent book, Evaluative Research Methods: meeting the challenge of judgement in the field is written particularly for researchers, but pushes the same theme – that is is democratically healthy and constructive to argue, that any political or cultural assertion should be challenged, and that we can only make our own judgements about events by weighing up alternative arguments.