GI411 Half Unit
Gender, Post/coloniality and Development: Critical Perspectives and New Directions
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Prof Sumi Madhok
Availability
This course is available on the MPhil/PhD in Gender, MSc in Culture, Justice, and Environment, MSc in Development Management (Political Economy), MSc in Development Management (Political Economy) (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender (Rights and Human Rights), MSc in Gender (Sexuality), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture, MSc in Gender, Peace and Security and MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process.
Students should apply by 10am UK time on Friday 26 September 2025. Offers will be made after 10am on this date and will continue until all places are filled.
Priority is given to home department students and then to those who have the course listed in their programme regulations who apply in the first 24-hours (by 10:00am, Friday 26 September 2025), space permitting. Please note the timing of your request within the first 24-hours will not impact chances of being accepted onto the course. Requests received after this timeframe, or outside option requests, will be allocated randomly if space remains.
Please do not email the Course Convenor with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place. Contact gender@lse.ac.uk with any queries.
Requisites
Additional requisites:
While there are no specific requirements, it is preferred that students have a background in social science or the humanities.
Course content
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the growing body of scholarship that critically interrogates coloniality, gender and developmentalism at various postcolonial sites. It provides an opportunity for students to encounter and critically engage with canonical works within postcolonial and decolonial theories alongside those of gender and feminist theories in order to examine the historical and contemporary policy and practices in relation to coloniality, gender and development. As such, the course combines a study of the historical/textual/cultural/political and philosophical in relation to and alongside the political-economic in order to explore questions of international developmentalism, imperialism, race and racialisation, coloniality, decoloniality, subalternity, orientalism, representation, agency, neoliberalism, extractivism, human rights and humanitarianism. Finally, the course also introduces students to new directions in contemporary theoretical thinking that have emerged either as critiques or in productive engagement with postcolonial scholarship.
Teaching
30 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.
This course runs in the WT. This course has a reading week in week 6 of WT.
Formative assessment
A formative essay (1500 words).
Indicative reading
- Fanon, Frantz. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Inc..
- Rodney, Walter ( 1972) 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa', Verso.
- Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity, Duke University Press, Durham
- 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;
- Mignolo, Walter, (2000), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J;
- Said, Edward. (1985, 1995) 'Orientalism', Penguin, Harmondsworth;;
- Spivak, Gayatri. Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Harvard University Press.
- Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan ( 1994) Scattered Hegemonies
- Mbembe, Achille ‘Postcolony’, University of California Press, Berkeley.
- Mignolo, W.D. and Walsh, C.E., (2018) 'On Decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis' Duke University Press.Moraña,
- M., Dussel, E.D. and Jáuregui, C.A. eds. (2008) Coloniality at large: Latin America and the postcolonial debate. Duke University Press.
- Mahmood, S. ( 2005) The Politics of Piety, Princeton University Press.
Assessment
Essay (100%, 3000 words)
Key facts
Department: Gender Studies
Course Study Period: Winter Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 7
CEFR Level: Null
Total students 2024/25: 22
Average class size 2024/25: 22
Controlled access 2024/25: YesCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.
Personal development skills
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Application of information skills
- Communication
- Specialist skills