Entry requirements

This is a continuing course at undergraduate level that requires at least 30 Swedish higher education credits in Development Studies or corresponding knowledge. This course is taught only for exchange students.

Learning outcomes

Objectives of the course

• To understand how contemporary development interventions are shaped by historical processes of imperialism and colonialism.
• To achieve a critical understanding of dominant paradigms of development theory, practice and implementation.
• To achieve an understanding of feminist interventions in development theory and practice.
• To understand how gender shapes development and how development practice shapes local gendered realities.
• To develop in-depth understanding on how structural processes impact on everyday lives of people.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students should have achieved the following:

• Develop a critical approach towards the theory and practice of development.
• Identify the tensions between gender and development.
• Ability to apply their conceptual knowledge to understand empirical case studies in historical and contemporary development contexts.
• Familiarity with different methodological tools and techniques for researching and appraising development issues.
• Gained good knowledge on how development processes, both, alleviate suffering and impoverish livelihoods.

Content

This unit introduces students to the theoretical and conceptual approaches in development theory and its implementation. It critically engages with how gender shapes development theory and how development practice impacts on gender relations and gendered realities. Focusing primarily on the global South, the unit will draw empirical examples from Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America.

The unit commences with an overview of how ‘orientalism’ serves as an effective discourse for the justification and institutionalisation of (neo)-imperialism globally and the ways in which it shapes debates on development in colonial and post-colonial contexts. We then move on to analyse the collusions and contestations between colonialism and nationalism and the important role of the latter as an anti-colonial strategy that was framed in gendered structures. Subsequently, we discuss how feminist theoretical models have challenged ma(le)instream development debates and the inherent ‘male bias’ in discursive structures.

In following lectures and seminars we analyse how (en)gendering processes are at play in development discourse in relation to three issues often regarded as developmental problems: economic structural adjustment, health, and conflict. With the aim to bring developing societies ‘on track’ with the developed world, Structural Adjustment programmes were the key development tool of financial giants such as the IMF and World Bank. In the end, these programmes came at a huge cost to individual livelihoods and contributed to the creation and/or reinforcement of genderimbalances in societies. How was this possible? Looking at examples from discourses about population in relation to gendered health issues coming from different cases from the South, we address the following question: are state and developmental goals compatible with women’s choices and agency? Finally, the course allows the opportunity to look at the changing role of the state in relation to war and violence. The current explosion of ethnic and civil conflicts are not only understood in terms of lack of development, but, problematically, in terms of innate backwardness of (developing) nation-states. How far can we stretch the security-development nexus? Is it possible to identify the agency of subaltern subjects in this discussion? The course will conclude by looking at how development processes, despite their inherent weaknesses, have created pockets of empowerment, which are self-sufficient and self-sustaining and have enabled many societies to recover from debt-led growth.

A distinct feature of this course is that it draws on literature from different sources and is not confined to mainstream academic literature. For example, we will look at news media, documentaries, movies, policy reports, biographical narratives and historical texts together with the assigned mandatory readings.

Instruction

The teaching consists of lectures and seminars. The course is taught in English.

Assessment

Students are examined through a written exam, oral presentation and active participation in seminars. Grades are awarded according the scale “failed”, "pass" or "pass with distinction". If there are special reasons for doing so, an examiner may make an exception from the method of assessment indicated and allow a student to be assessed by another method. An example of special reasons might be a certificate regarding special pedagogical support from the University's disability coordinator.

Other regulations

Further instructions will be given at the start of the course.