Current course offerings

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Course description

Course Description: This course examines the politics of development, conceived as a globally and historically constituted project. In particular, we examine development as a contradictory and contested project, both at the global and local levels. In order to appreciate the global to local dynamics of development as well as how the history of development is causally implicated in contemporary struggles over inequalities and injustices, we introduce critical conceptual analytics for understanding and evaluating development policies and practices. We do so especially in relation to understanding resistance and the promotion of alternative projects or outlooks. We combine relational thinking, critical historical analysis, reconstructions of critiques of political economy, and discussions of theoretical and methodological shortcomings in conventional development thinking and apply these in the context of concrete case examples. Among these examples are big issues such as hunger and the food sovereignty movement, indigenous water defender movements, campaigns for `rights to the city¿, labour and movements for social protections, struggles of the landless movement. Included among our topics are how alternative modes of struggle are mobilised to challenging power and transform unequal relations, such as through theatre (`theatre of the oppressed¿). One key objective is to enable us to think about development in new and potentially transformative ways, and to do so through advanced and improved analytical approaches.

Archived offerings