Our program builds upon core courses that provide the foundations of research within development studies.
MA students are enrolled in Political Economy of Development (DEVS 801) and Cultural Politics of Development (DEVS 802). These reflect the basic areas of expertise within the Department and provide students with two key pillars for understanding the field of development studies.
All first year MA students are also enrolled in Professional Seminar in Global Development Studies (DEVS 850), which provides a useful forum to meet as a group to discuss how best to move through the program. Meeting once a month across both fall and winter terms, the course provides a discussion forum addressing key themes concerning research, ethics, and debates within the discipline.
In 2023-2024, the Department offers additional elective graduate level courses:
- DEVS 803: Qualitative Research Methods and Fieldwork (Winter)
- DEVS 811: Social Reproduction, Care Work, and Development (Winter)
- DEVS 816: Advanced Topics in Global Health (Winter)
MA students may also enroll in one mixed senior undergraduate/MA-level seminars (e.g. DEVS 862-001). Topics include development and the agro-food industry, global governance, migration among others. Students also have the opportunity to register in Cuban Culture and Society I (DEVS 306) as a directed reading course. Please discuss this option with the course instructor, Karen Dubinsky, and the graduate chair.
Students may take up to two courses offered outside of DEVS and can select from a wide range of courses offered in cognate (related) departments (e.g., History, Political Studies, Sociology, Geography, Gender Studies and Environmental Studies). Permission of the course instructor and DEVS graduate chair is required. Please consult the individual departments and programs website to ascertain the courses being offered and to obtain course outlines and names of instructors. Students should be alert for potential time conflicts with DEVS mandatory courses, DEVS electives, and TA-Ship responsibilities. Please note that students do not have enrollment priority in courses outside of their home department and enrollment in these courses may not be made available until the start of term, and then only if space permits. If you are interested in a course outside of DEVS, please contact the DEVS Academic Assistant for guidance. DEVS students are encouraged to enroll in a DEVS course as a backup in case their enrollment in a course outside of DEVS cannot be accommodated by the other department.
Students may also request the option to take a directed reading course (DEVS 890). This course enables a student or a group of students to explore a body of literature on a selected topic in development. The focus may be by theme, by region or by academic approach and can span the humanities, social sciences and environmental sciences. The student or students are responsible for approaching a faculty member with whom they wish to work and who is willing to undertake this project. The reading list, course schedule and course assignments will be agreed upon by the student/students and professor, but there is an expectation that a minimum of one substantive written assignment will be required.
Please note that graduate students are not permitted to self-enroll in courses in the Student On-Line University System (SOLUS). The Academic Programs Assistant completes all course enrollments, drops and audits.
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the relationship between political economy and the ideas and practices of development. The course grounds students in core theories, both classical and contemporary. It then examines key themes and controversies to illustrate the relationships between political economy and development practice.
This is a mandatory course for all MA and PhD graduate students in Global Development Studies.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the cultural politics of development in historical and contemporary perspective. The course focuses on narratives of development and their relationship to social and political movements in the South and North. Themes include the ideas of tradition, modernity and progress; colonialism, nationalism and liberation; and the gendered and racialised politics of development.
This is a mandatory course for all MA and PhD graduate students in Global Development Studies.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
This course introduces qualitative fieldwork methods including research design, proposal writing, ethics, interviews, and data analysis. It offers a clear pathway towards successful fieldwork design, implementation and reporting and provides core professional skills for working productively within development and community organisations.
This is a mandatory course for all PhD graduate students in Global Development Studies, and highly recommended for all MA graduate students.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
Who cares? And how and where do they do it, under what conditions, and for what purposes? While concepts like “work” and “economy” are usually associated with production or services oriented towards profit generation, a huge proportion of unpaid and paid labour worldwide is oriented towards social reproduction and care. In this seminar, we make these labours the centre of our analysis, and ask how that changes our approach to development. Social reproduction refers to the paid and unpaid labour that maintains and reproduces people and communities on a daily and intergenerational basis. We will ask how social reproduction is structured by local and transnational political economies, and how it shapes these economies, in turn. We will trace contemporary transnational flows of reproductive labour (for example, migrant support workers and childcare workers) and bodily capacities (for example, transnational surrogacy), and how they are shaping social reproduction locally and globally. We will also ask what future economies that privilege care might look like, examining the role of care in confronting racial capitalism, supporting Indigenous resurgence, and the “Just Transitions”/ “Build Back Better” movements.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
This course will introduce students to current global health issues with the aim of providing a solid foundation for future careers in Global Health. The course is structured in three parts. The first part will discuss key theories, concepts, and principles of Global Health. In the second part, students will critically examine health risks, changing trends and distribution of diseases, disease burden and impacts, at individual and population levels in high- and low-income countries. Case studies covering infectious, non-communicable diseases, and mental health will provide good grounds for discussing these aspects of Global Health. The final part of the course will guide students to explore practical ways of addressing contemporary global health challenges in the ever-evolving global political economy. Ultimately, this course will enhance students’ critical thinking about Global Health, global health challenges, and how to contribute towards improving health and wellbeing across the world.
Available only to MA and PhD students
This course provides a monthly forum to discuss practical, ethical and methodological issues in conducting development research and writing, including major research papers, thesis work, and grant applications.
This is a mandatory course for all graduate students in Global Development Studies.
The interdisciplinary field of Political ecology highlights the relevance of power and politics for shaping the relationship between humans and their environments. It first emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with the specific aim of challenging ‘apolitical’ accounts of human-environment relations that rely upon simplistic causal links between population growth, poverty, environmental degradation and social conflicts. In the first part of this course, we will explore core theoretical, conceptual, and methodological trends and debates in the field of political ecology. In the second part, we will cover a range of cases of environmental problems in various socio-ecological contexts including those concerned with forests, agriculture, water, fisheries and range lands. We will also look for inspiration through the transformative work of organizations, communities and movements crafting solutions to environmental problems. The overall goal of this course is thus to introduce students to important contexts and tools for analyzing the complexity of human systems and their relationships to the natural world and for contributing to solutions to environmental problems.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
Popular mainstream “women and environment” development discourses see nature as an ‘unruly’ force that disproportionately impacts women during environmental or climate change crises. Instead of pursuing this line of thinking, this seminar on Feminisms in Environment and Development will foreground “feminist ecologies” highlighting the dynamic interdependencies between society and nature that colonial processes have disrupted. Discussions will shed light on how people dynamically interact with nature through their intersectional subjectivities, embodied knowledges, and care for land, water, forests and the commons. The seminar also recognizes that women’s bodies are their first territory: however, growing neoliberal accumulation and corporate control of resources that extract nature also exploit feminized and racialized bodies, their labor and resources, thus keeping them persistently unequal and marginalized. Students will also familiarize themselves with present efforts to include gender discourses in sustainable development debates and policy prescriptions. They will critically analyze how “gender” has been co-opted or accommodated by ‘smart’ climate and environmental interventions that sidestep justice for exploited segments of nature and society.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
There can be little doubt that the current era is witnessing dramatic change in the global production and consumption of food. In some respects this represents that continuation of previous trends. However, in number of important ways agricultural restructuring in the late twentieth century appears completely new. Using a diverse disciplinary perspective, this course analyses key aspects of contemporary changes in the global agro-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, localized and place-based agriculture, non-agricultural uses of agro-food resources, financialization of food, food sovereignty to new landscapes of consumption, changing forms of political organization and protests and the relationship between food and culture, specifically how communities and societies identify and express themselves through food.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
Energy democracy is a relatively new concept that refers to a transformation of the ways in which we produce and consume energy that are more socially and economically just as well as environmentally sustainable. There are radically different visions for what this means in practice, however, with competing notions of what constitutes democratic engagement, who should own and operate energy facilities, what role new technologies should play, etc. This course will focus on electricity in particular, examining spaces of energy poverty and different strategies for improving electricity access and affordability while at the same time expanding democratic engagement and public ownership. The emphasis will be on renewable forms of electricity, comparing energy democracy struggles in the North and the South, with states and communities employing very different strategies to address local contexts while at the same time fighting global challenges such as climate change. Topics to be covered include the shifting roles of (renewable) electricity in global capitalism, the uneven impacts of disruptive technologies, debates over decentralization and decarbonization, and gendered differentials in electricity access.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
Sustainable livelihoods approaches have become increasingly important in the discussion of development over the past few decades. These approaches are concerned with understanding the various resources and strategies that people draw on to construct, improve and defend their livelihoods in ways they find meaningful. In this course, we will explore a variety of related theoretical perspectives including those focused on social (and other) capital, human capabilities, and agency. After reviewing these approaches, we will evaluate their efficacy for analysing a variety of rural, urban, and peri-urban development case studies. Based on our review of theory and its application to case studies, students will be tasked with developing their own framework for analysing livelihoods and identifying possible avenues for contributing to their enhancement.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
In recent years, the study of migration has moved to the centre stage of development policy and development theorisation. As the movement and numbers of migrants has increased globally, populist backlash against certain classes and categories of migrants has gained momentum with restrictive visa and border control regimes and rhetoric of hate. This has thrown theoretical and practical challenges for development studies, most notably the relationships between migration and urbanization, industrialization, precarious work, remittance economy, family structure, gender roles, ideology. There is a pressing need to understand how migration, restrictive border controls, neoliberal citizenship, and the construction of migrant ‘illegality’ are affecting societies and, (re)shaping work strategies, gender relations, gender roles, and masculinity, among others. This intensive course will challenge you to rethink the interface between development and migration by undertaking an analysis of voluntary or involuntary migratory trajectories of people in the contemporary moment. By keeping at the centre of its inquiry, intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and masculinity, the course will provide cutting-edge theorisation about how these interfaces impact migration patterns, policies, societies, and, most importantly, the lived experiences of the migrants. The focus of the course will be North America and Europe as ‘receiving’ regions. It will adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on literature ranging from migration studies, critical masculinity studies, and gender studies and diverse material including auto-ethnographies, photovoice, documentaries, and films in facilitating a nuanced theoretical grounding on this subject.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
The objective of the course is to provide advanced undergraduate students with an introduction to postcolonial perspective. It is designed to expose students to key readings that will form the foundation for further thinking and exploration of postcolonial thinking.
Postcolonialism is an eclectic body of thought that takes many different shapes and interventions but has a shared fundamental claim: that the world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. In other words, postcolonial theory is concerned with social, political, cultural, and economic impact of European colonial rule over most of the world’s population from the 18th century onwards, with forms of colonial authority still lingering after the formal end of colonial rule in the 20th century.
Postcolonial thinking emerged in the 1980s as newly politicised scholars across humanities and social sciences set to examine the affects of colonial rule, its persistence, and repercussions. Perhaps the single book that was most formative in the emergence of the field is Edward Said’s Orientalism. It is also deeply indebted to anti-colonial thought in South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. The interests of postcolonialism thinking are broad, multifaceted, and committed to those who continue to suffer from the lingering effects of colonialism. It is concerned with forms of political representation; it is invested in reimagining a world after colonialism bereft of imperial remnants; and about theorizing and understanding new forms of human injustices. It has altered the way we understand European philosophy and development theory and the way we read texts and view images. It has made us rethink the ethics and politics of our own knowledge as development studies students.
The purpose of this course is to interrogate the issues listed above through a close reading of scholarly works, as well as focus on some key texts written in earlier decades to tease out the relationship between anti-colonialism and postcolonialism. While the course focuses on foundational works of postcolonialism, it also explores the relationship of postcolonial theory with Marxism.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
This course reviews the theory and practice of public versus private provision of essential services such as water, electricity and health care, with a focus on countries in the South. Part One of the course examines neoclassical conceptions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and the theoretical rationale for privatization. We explore the various ways that services are privatized and commercialized, including a discussion of how these various forms of privatization work in practice and the extent of privatization in countries in the South. Part Two examines alternative conceptualizations of publicness, reviews different critiques of privatization, and explores emerging public alternatives for service delivery, ranging from ‘the commons’ to remunicipalization, as well as the people and organizations driving these developments.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
The course investigates how sport is implicated in various historical processes that shape the cultural politics of global development. Students will consider how sport helps us explore questions of power and agency within development as well as the role of culture as an expedient yet problematic tool for social, economic and political change. Students will learn using a variety of tools, including podcasts, academic literature, social media, film and participant observation.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
This course will cover an extensive – although not exhaustive – array of topics of global governance ranging from forced displacements to the climate crisis. As the class moves through these themes, students will be asked the following questions: who benefits from global governance? Whose values are being promoted, and why? Who is to be governed, and why? How might we make sense of the various scales of power entailed in global governance (local, national, global)? What roles have states, markets and civil society organizations played in shaping the meaning and lived experiences of global governance? And, finally, which interests are excluded from these practices, and why? These questions will be tackled through the broad analytical lens of Global Political Economy (GPE).
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
Students whose proposed research lies outside the realm (thematic or regional) of regular course offerings may choose this option. In consultation with a willing supervisor, students must develop a unifying title, course description, and reading list of 2‐4 key texts for each of 5‐6 set topics leading toward an agreed upon set of assignments. There is an expectation that a minimum of one substantive written assignment will be required.
Students will complete a library‐based major research project (MRP) of 50‐60 pages. The MRP will deal with a specific interdisciplinary question directly relevant to Global Development Studies, which may be thematic or theoretical in nature or focus on peoples or places generally associated with the Global South in the context of relations with the Global North.
PREREQUISITE: Permission of Graduate Chair in consultation with a willing faculty supervisor, plus completion of two mandatory and four elective DEVS or DEVS‐ eligible courses.
Research leading to a dissertation of 75‐100 pages will usually involve the collection and analysis of primary data and be of publishable quality. Such data could include oral interviews, archival and other documentary sources, in some cases collected through field work.
PREREQUISITE: Permission of Graduate Chair in consultation with a willing faculty supervisor, plus completion of two mandatory and four elective DEVS or DEVS‐eligible courses.