All of the delegates at DSA2026 came into contact with one of the smiling and helpful conference volunteers at the registration desk – especially those of you trying to find your panel room –  or when joining in online! You may have noticed some of those same volunteers later in the conference, without their conference t-shirts and presenting a paper or even in the discussion of a DSA panel. That’s because our DSA conference volunteers are recruited by the host university from their student body. UCD volunteers were recruited by the supremely helpful UCD PhD candidate Neha Parikh (who also presented a paper!) from across the student body resulting in a fabulous mix of experience, insights, and languages to welcome conference delegates but also to take part in the conference. We got chatting to some of the volunteer team. 

“I generally like volunteering, and I’ve been doing lots of volunteering this summer,” said law student Reshona Bernard, pictured below, left. “The DSA conference was a bit different because it’s outside my coursework, so it was a chance to explore something completely new. The DSA conference introduced me to completely new subjects. Everyone has been so nice, and I’ve really enjoyed meeting people from different backgrounds. I’ve been able to attend sessions on topics I wouldn’t normally come across, like carbon governance, international students, and I’m attending one on the ethics of research in Gaza. I’m really looking forward to that one as it’s very important.”

Conor Hayes (pictured below) studies Politics and History at UCD. “I volunteered because I want to play a small part in supporting academia. It’s my way of contributing by helping researchers and professors, learning from them, and making sure they can share their ideas by providing IT support,” he said .”I think it’s important to support academic research, especially at a time when expertise and evidence are sometimes questioned. I want to do what I can to help create the space for research and evidence to be shared.”

Shayan Basu Roy is undertaking a Master of Public Policy at the University.

“As someone from India now doing an MPP in Dublin, “development” was never an abstract academic category for me; it’s the water I grew up in. So a conference built around reimagining development landed differently. Not development as something done to the Global South, but as a live, contested conversation the Global South is central to authoring,” he said. “Personal highlight I’m still buzzing about: got to meet Kaushik Basu, the former Chief Economist of The World Bank Group and former Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India, now at Cornell University. Genuinely one of the people whose work shaped how I think about development economics in the first place. Not a moment I expected to have as a volunteer at a conference desk.”

“The wider room itself was the real teacher: a genuinely global, diverse cohort, researchers and industry practitioners sitting across the table from each other, theory getting stress-tested against implementation in real time. Decolonising development isn’t a slogan. It’s a methodology question, a funding question, and increasingly, a technology question. Glad I got to spend a few days inside that argument and got a bit starstruck along the way.”

Technically working at the conference, rather than volunteering, delegates couldn’t help but notice the ever-present and energetic Vedansh Arora. Vedansh is an undergraduate studying Economics, Politics & Philosophy, while working as the Communications Officer at the Centre for Sustainable Development. He is the powerhouse behind the posts and images on the Centre’s LinkedIn page. “Being the youngest at a conference can be intimidating. It can also be the best classroom one can have,” he said on attending the conference. “I had the privilege of learning from people whose work I have admired for a long time, while also seeing the amount of care, collaboration and effort that goes into bringing such a gathering to life.”

Thank you to the UCD student body for helping to bring the conference to life, for their energy, smiles and endless solutions to our conference issues!