Topic: Rural Development

Description: This course surveys selected issues in rural development and natural resource management, and highlights the role of communities, NGOs, the State and indigenous peoples in the form that development takes.

Topic: 'African Renaissance' in Comparative Perspective.

Description:This course evaluates the premises and promises of the African Renaissance. It begins with a critical overview of the history of underdevelopment under colonial and neo-colonial conditions, including through unequal relations in the production of knowledge about Africa (“Africanism”). It then examines a series of specific contemporary development issues and debates leading to reflection on “what next”? These include: public versus private service delivery, the future of colonial borders, the role of tourism, the nature of urbanization, gender and sexual rights, new technologies, and much more.

Topic: The Political Economy of Global Governance: NeoLiberalism, Power and Development

Description: Despite its popularity and centrality to contemporary economic, environmental, social and political life, global governance remains under-theorized. For example, we might ask: Who benefits from global governance? Whose values are being promoted, and why? Who is to be governed, and why? What roles have (neoliberal) states and markets played in the construction and reproduction of global governance? Which interests and “spaces” are excluded, and why? How are we to make sense of global governance in the larger, multi-disciplinary frame of global political economy? And, finally, how are we to understand the relevance of global governance with regard to North-South relations and wider questions of development? This course examines these questions analytically by exploring concrete and pertinent features of the global political economy, including the role played by states in facilitating the growing power of corporations, which in turn shape the wider development agenda.

Topic: Education

Description: Following international conferences in the 1990s, development, research, and governance institutions joined in the call for “Education for All” characterized by a massive institutional push to increase primary school enrolment in the developing world. This course takes a critical and theoretical look at one of the most powerful and enduring ideas of development – that education is the first step to progress and freedom from poverty. A range of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Amartya Sen help explore whether schooling is an inevitable good, a tool for hegemonic domination, or a contradictory resource.

Topic: Migration and Development

Description: This course introduces students to key concepts in global migration and its implications on development for both sending and receiving states. For example, the departure of skilled and experienced professionals has raised concerns about the impacts of the “brain drain” in the developing world. At the same time, migrants are increasingly seen as key agents in facilitating development in their countries of origin. International migration is (re)-shaping societies and politics around the globe.

Topic:Development and the Global Agro-food System

Description: This course examines the micro-and macro-level forces that are both driving and resisting agro-restructuring within the world food system. Topics covered will range from industrialization and corporate control of food and farming, the geography of more “flexible” forms of manufacturing and service provisions, feminization of agricultural labour, non-agricultural uses of agro-food resources, food democracy and sovereignty, changing forms of political organization and protests, and the relationship between food and culture.