Paper short abstract:

This paper charts experiences in co-building a ‘gender and development’ module with a diversity of students in a UK University, which elicited clear calls to prioritise spaces for radical, cutting-edge, and intersectional frames and actions if transformation and equity is what we truly seek.

Paper long abstract:

In mainstream development, gender equality and women’s empowerment are positioned as economic tools. Some concessions exist for rights-based aims, if rarely intersectional or social justice priorities. Regardless, our industries still cater to reductive dominant visions, including Northern universities which facilitate students’ desired careers in development organisations. This involves many students from the Global South and diaspora groups, partly as ‘Western’ degrees are valued for social mobility in Southern societies. However, pursuing radical aims for emancipatory gender equality from within Northern settings prompts reflection: as lecturers, we inescapably populate colonised spaces and can limit decolonisation to a metaphorical realm, bearing complicities with inequalities and imbalances that shape ‘who’ enters our classrooms and ‘what’ we are expected to teach in them.

Grappling with related themes, this paper charts an experience of co-producing (with students) and delivering a ‘gender and development’ module in a UK University. Examining weaknesses, silences, and exclusions arising from how gender can be deployed in development practice, it prompted student hopes on what it may still offer. Yet, it also elicited clear calls to prioritise spaces for radical, cutting-edge, and intersectional frames and actions if transformation and equity is what we truly seek. As such, sharing classroom-based reflections, this paper discusses experiences of working with a diverse cohort of aspiring development professionals in our era of mass systemic inequality on economic, racial, gendered, sexual, and other, oft-intersecting lines. it also shares ideas for future teaching practice, not least my own.