Dr Sumi Madhok, COL. 5.04A

MSc Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc Gender, MSc Gender (Research), MSc Gender, Media and Culture, and MSc Gender, Policy and Inequalities, MSc Development Studies and MSc Development Management, MSc Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation. Other students welcome in consultation with the teacher responsible.

While there are no specific requirements, it is preferred that students have a background in social science or the humanities.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the growing body of scholarship that critically interrogates gender and development from a postcolonial perspective. It provides an opportunity for students to encounter and engage with canonical works within postcolonial theory in order to examine the historical and contemporary aspects of development thinking, policy and practice in relation to gender. In bringing together postcolonial thinking, gender/feminist theory and development discourse, this course combines a study of the historical/textual/cultural/political and philosophical in relation to and alongside the political-economic. The course will include readings from Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said and Walter Mignolo in order to critically understand coloniality, orientalism and subalternity with a view to identifying these especially within conceptualisations and deployment of agency, human rights and representation in development discourse and practiceFinally, the course will also point to new directions in contemporary theoretical thinking that have arisen in the wake of and in response to postcolonial work for e.g. writings on Empire and Multitude,Cosmopolitics/Cosmopolitanismand Transnationalism with a view to exploring how these might impact upon postcolonialism, gender and development.

1 hour lecture and 1 hour seminar per week in the LT.

1,500 word essay

Bhabha, Homi, Location of Culture (1994) Routledge, London: New York; Crush, Jonathan, ( 1995) The Power of Development, Routledge: London;
Escobar, Arturo, (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, N.J, Princeton University Press; Kapoor, Ilan, (2008) The Postcolonial Politics of Development, Routledge, London: New York; McEwen, Claire, (2009) Postcolonialism and Development, Routledge, London; Mignolo, Walter, (2000), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J; Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity, Duke University Press, Durham; Said, Edward. (1985, 1995) 'Orientalism', Penguin, Harmondsworth; Saunders, Kriemild. (ed.), (2002). Feminist Post-Development Thought: Rethinking Modernity, Post-colonialism and Representation, Zed Books, London: New York; Spivak, Gayatri. Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Harvard University Press.

One 4,000 word essay to be submitted at the beginning of the ST (100%).