Development Studies

This course explores development and various aspects of development within the themes of migration and gender. The course also features two practitioners working in the field to advise on current field conditions and ongoing problems in the development world.

Academics and practitioners have paid increasing attention to the role that politics plays in development. The course provides students with an introduction to this exciting turn in development theory and practice. Students learn about global development, as well as the fundamentals of politics and political economy. 

This course starts with a critical assessment of development as a particular, historically grounded and morally colored enterprise. The course assesses how changing ideas about gender roles and relations prevalent in the Global North affected efforts to develop societies in the Global South. Students not only scrutinize how certain populations came to be imagined and targeted as objects of development, but also reflect on how women and men in the Global South have understood and expressed their own ideas about social change and their place in the world. To this end, students reflect on different ideological, instrumental, and critical approaches to development and ask what is at stake when gender is constructed as a development concern around discourses of equality, empowerment, and social justice. In the next part of the course, students closely assess the changes and continuities in gender structures during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. In this light, the course broadens the scope from Western-initiated development efforts to social change more generally and discusses the diverse impacts of globalization on gendered realities in different parts of the world. Key themes that are addressed: poverty, sexual and reproductive health and rights, education and empowerment, environmental politics, rural and urban change, as well as work and gender relations inside and outside the home. Whereas for long (Western-trained) academics, policy makers and development professionals equated gender with women's issues, it is now widely recognized that masculinity is as much a social construct as femininity and deserves critical attention too. Therefore, this course gives ample attention to men's issues too.

This course examines key contemporary issues in international agricultural development – including food security, food safety, poverty reduction, climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the effects of the financial crisis on agricultural development, food crises and food aid etc. The agriculture for development highlights two major regional challenges, which are sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Agricultural productivity growth is vital for stimulating growth in other parts of the economy, but accelerated growth requires a sharp productivity increase in small holder farming combined with more effective support to the millions coping as subsistence farmers, many of them in remote areas. The success will also depend on concerted action by the international development community to confront the challenges ahead. We must level the playing field in goods, such as technologies for tropical food staples; help developing countries address climate change; and overcome looming health pandemics for plants, animals, and humans.

This course mainly focuses on the China's development in terms of economy, politics and society after 1987's revolution. Lecture topics include the structure of Chinese Communists Party; organization of Chinese government; rural reforms in China; primary-level democracy in China; SOE reform; relationship between Mainland China and Taiwan; development of private economy; industrial upgrading and factory of the world; land finance and investment by the local government; and establishment of social security system. Assessment: participation in class (10%), midterm report (20%), midterm exam(30%) and final exam (40%).