Course Description
The dawn of the new millennium was marked by a historic, global resolve to “expand hope and opportunity for people around the world” – in particular, through global commitments to development and education. What is ‘development’, and how is ‘education’ imagined in relation to and shaped by development imperatives? How do we understand and explain – and critically inquire into – such unprecedented global commitments to development/education? What geopolitical, economic and sociocultural arrangements – and actors and institutions – and narratives and discourses – underpin ‘international development education’ policies and projects? Fifteen years later, as nations commit to a new set of ‘Global Goals’, has the millennial euphoria about the ‘largest anti-poverty movement in history’ been justified?
These questions are at the heart of EPS 760: Introduction to International Development Education. Targeted at graduate students with international or local cross-cultural interests, the course considers international development education from a variety of theoretical frames – from human capital to human rights and capabilities; from institutional to critical/neo-Marxist and feminist approaches; and from anthropological and post-structural to post-colonial critiques. EPS 760 is designed as a seminar, structured around instructor-led discussions and student participation, and aims to support students’ pursuit of their geographical and thematic interests.
Same Readings
- Jean and John Comaroff, Theory from the South, Or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa
- Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo
- James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho; Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution
- Cindi Katz, Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives
- Amy Stambach, Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Schooling, Community, and Gender in East Africa
Enrollment Details
Educational Policy Studies 760: Introduction to International Development Education
3 credits
M 9:00am-12:00pm, L150 Education Building
Spring 2016
About the Instructor
Miriam Thangaraj is an advanced graduate student at the Department of Education Policy Studies, in the final throes of dissertation writing. Her dissertation, Reconstructing Childhood: Silk, School, SEZ, is an ethnographic account of how global discourses of ‘childhood’, ‘child rights’, formal education and ‘development’ that underlie compulsory education/anti-child labor policies are negotiated by children and their families in a renowned silk weaving center in southern India. Her research has been supported by the SSRC’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship and the NAEd’s Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, above all, by Nancy Kendall, her advisor.