Timetable

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Time zone: Europe/London

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Each successful applicant will have 45 minutes allocated to them in the Masterclass.

This time will be used to give a short presentation (10 mins), engage with feedback from a discussant (5 mins) and participate in a more general discussion around the issues raised. The aim is for participants to receive excellent, focused feedback, from the experts/discussants and audience members, but also to highlight issues that may be common to other researchers in the audience so we can collectively consider how to address them.

Five sessions will run in parallel from 10:00 – 13:00 on the morning of June 25, chaired by members of the committee that selected the abstracts. Successful applicants must submit a four page paper by June 4, 2024 expanding on their abstract for the discussants to comment on and to share with people attending the Masterclass ahead of the conference.

Experts and discussants will be leading academics who are part of the DSA and/or part of the ESRC UBEL Doctoral Training Partnership.

Group 1 led by Dr Surbhi Kesar/Professor Shailaja Fennell in BG01

Group 2 led by Professor Supriya Garikipati in B201

Group 3 led by Dr. Benjamin Hunter in B301

Group 4 led by Dr. Eyob Balcha in B302

Group 5 led by Dr. Sara Stevano in B306



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Closed meeting for Council members only.
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NGOs in development: B204 - Log in to access the online link

Politics & Political Economy: B205 - Log in to access the online link

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All DSA student members welcome.

Enter virtual room

- Reception desk open
Brunei Building Foyer space, ground floor (BG02)
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During this welcome to the conference, Council will introduce the new Decolonising Development database: https://www.devstud.org.uk/the-decolonising-development-directory/
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Chaired by Dr Alessandra Mezzadri 

Shirin M. Rai is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies SOAS, University of London.  She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

She is the Founding Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID)at the University of Warwick. 

Shirin Rai is an interdisciplinary scholar and

has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development and politics and performance. In particular, she has been working on issues of gendered care and work and the costs of this carework, and on developing a framework of politics and performance across the social sciences/humanities boundaries. Her recent books include Performing Representation, a commentary on women MPs in the Indian Parliament as well as co-edited the OUP Handbook of Politics and Performance. Her teaching and research build on this work at both theoretical and empirical levels.


Social Reproduction, Depletion and/in Crisis

Reproduction of life , which is theorized as social reproduction, doesn’t just happen—it is laboured over, in different contexts and with differential resources, unequally. The exploitation of this work of life-giving and maintenance depletes lives and generates crises of care that threatens not just livelihoods but lives. The denial of this work is institutionalized through our methodologies of accounting for work, through our ideological positioning of domestic work, through cultural and social gendered norms. In all countries, in all classes, races, religions, and cultures, women perform these labours more than men.  Building on her book, Depletion: the human costs of caring, Rai will argue that this labour can and does lead to depletion - of individuals, households and communities. But as classed, raced, and located in deeply unequal ways, this depletion is experienced differently and intersectionally. Rai will then address issues of how depletion can be reversed and how transformative politics requires the building of reflexive solidarities.

Enter virtual room

- Panel Session 1
- Refreshments
Senate house Cloister area
- Panel Session 2
- Reception desk open
Brunei Building Foyer space, ground floor (BG02)
- Panel Session 3
- Refreshments
Senate house Cloister area
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Chaired by Prof Navtej Purewal

Professor Naomi Hossain

Naomi is a political sociologist with degrees in philosophy, politics, economics, social anthropology and development studies from the University of Oxford, London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Sussex. She is part-Bangladeshi and part-Irish, and has lived and worked in Bangladesh, at the world’s largest NGO, BRAC; in Indonesia and the UK, while at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University; and in the US, at the Accountability Research Center at American University in Washington DC.

Naomi is interested in the politics of development, particularly in how people living with poverty and precarity get the public services they need, and increasingly in the politics of crises and disasters. Her work enters two distinct but occasionally converging areas: the politics of Bangladesh’s development, and the contentious politics of public services. In both areas, she focuses on issues of state accountability and responsiveness, protest and civic agency, and the role of aid. To both she brings an interest in concepts and frameworks from social history, in particular the ‘moral economy’. Recent work has focused on the politics of complaint, food and fuel riots, and how changing civic space shapes development. Naomi aims to be collaborative, inter-disciplinary and visual in her research, and to make a difference that goes beyond the scholarly, working with researchers from around the world as well as with social movements, civic actors, artists, governments and aid agencies.

On not being poor: bare life and Bangla-futurism in the aid lab

Becoming not-poor is supposed to be the point of development, but as students of the development process, our interest often seems to wane at precisely the point people stop being poor. We rarely reflect on how moving out of poverty changes people and our place in the world, or on the problem (for that is what it is) of new wealth. Perhaps this is due to our disciplinary blinkers, and the enduring marginalization of the arts and humanities in the study of development. Yet these are issues we are grappling with in Bangladesh, former posterchild for Third World misery, site of a thousand development studies theses. This talk will examine the Bangladesh experience of leaving poverty behind. It will analyze some of the catastrophic moments in its history that memorably branded its poverty on the global imagination, mining them for their insights into the political philosophy of aid. Into the more affluent present, it will consider what imaginative new cultural productions and techno-utopian visions say about how Bangladeshis now view themselves and their place in the world. And it will reflect on how the political sovereignty that comes with no longer being poor – the power to do what needs to be done – is now being deployed to manage the effects of the climate crisis. 

Enter virtual room

- Lunch
Senate house Cloister area
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Editors from three journals will be present to provide guidance on the submission, reviewing and publication process. Each Editor will speak for about ten minutes on what they look for in submissions, which are likely to be sent for review (what do you need to do to get beyond desk reject) and how to make best use of opportunities to Revise and Resubmit. The Editors will then be available for a session.

Chaired by Professor Jonathan Fisher, DPhil
International Development Department | University of Birmingham

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Contested Civil Society in Myanmar: Local Change and Global Recognition (Maaike Matelski, Bristol University Press, 2024)

This book discusses the roles, forms and functions of Myanmar civil society actors under military rule. The period from 2010-2020 saw a top-down liberalisation process in which political freedoms increased in parts of the country, resulting in the electoral victory of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. The book describes how various sections of Myanmar’s civil society responded to these increased freedoms, and how some managed to benefit while others saw their situation worsen. The book presentation focuses on the different and sometimes conflicting agendas on Myanmar pursued by civil society actors in transnational advocacy platforms, and the effects of Western donor policies on the local level. Discussant Minn Tent Bo, human rights and democracy analyst on Myanmar, will focus on the worsening situation since the military coup of 2021, and the new forms of organising that have emerged in response to increased military violence and repression. 

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Land, Labour and the Politics of Development: S208 - Log in to access the online link

Women and Development: B204 - Log in to access the online link

Urbanisation and Development: B205 - Log in to access the online link

- Panel Session 4
- Refreshments
Senate house Cloister area
- Panel Session 5
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The Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research, and Policy in International Development Studies book series is the official book series of the Development Studies Association published by Oxford University Press series since 2017. It publishes cutting-edge monographs that promote critical development studies as an interdisciplinary and applied field, and shape the theory, practice, and teaching of international development for a new generation of scholars, students, and practitioners.

OUP Commissioning Editor Adam Swallow and one of the Series’ editors will tell you about the series, including new and upcoming titles, and answer your questions about publishing in the series.

In the meantime, you can find the DSA proposal guidelines: https://www.devstud.org.uk/what-we-do/publications/

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No City for Women: Gurgaon | Millennium City | 2023


Director: Rangan Chakravarty; Editor: Arjun Gourisaria twice winner of the Indian National Film Award for editing. 

The film gives voice to women to recount their experiences and speaks directly to the conference theme of Social Justice and Development, and particularly the sub-theme of Rights and Representation. The film has relevance beyond India for drawing attention to the persistence of gendered violence in modern and modernising cities in the Global South. For instance, a female NGO worker from Bangladesh at a Kolkata screening and  female students and staff from the Middle East at our Oxford screening spoke eloquently about the film’s resonance with their experience.  The film sits at the intersection of SDG 5 that articulates the aspiration to achieve gender equality and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls by 2030, and SDG 11 that enjoins the global community to make cities inclusive and safe for all, including women. 

Set in Gurgaon in the Delhi National Capital Region, the film delves into everyday, normalised forms of explicit and implicit violence, gendered subordination and control in both public and private, amidst India’s techno-modern urbanisation. Through women's own narratives, the film depicts their experience of living and working in the city and illuminates the gendered nature of urban life. Eschewing the notion that lower classes are particularly prone to gendered violence, the film also turns to upper and middle classes, and juxtaposes experiences of violence cutting across class. The film explores throughout how women exercise their agency to make the city their own. 

- Reception desk open
Brunei Building Foyer space, ground floor (BG02)
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Chaired by Prof Christopher Cramer

Jimi Adeṣina is a Professor and the South African Research Chair in Social Policy at the College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa in South Africa. He was educated at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria) and the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). He taught at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), where he was Chair of the Department of Sociology. Subsequently, he was a Professor of Sociology at Rhodes University, and a Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at the University of the Western Cape. He has held visiting appointments at several institutions, including the Ulster University (Derry, Northern Ireland), the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Addis Ababa), the University of Oxford (UK), the Nordic African Institute (Sweden), and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (Geneva, Switzerland).

His areas of research interests include Sociology, Social Policy, and the Political Economy of Africa’s Development. He has published extensively in these areas.

Re-reading the ‘right to development’: The imperative of sovereign national project and policy sovereignty

The ‘rights to development’ discourse has, in recent times, shifted its emphasis to individuals as right-bearers. The party with the primary responsibility for realising the rights is the state. This, we argue, was not always the case. In its earlier iteration, the concern of the ‘right to development’ discourse was on the inequities of the international political economy and the structural disadvantages that most countries of the Global South, emerging from colonialism, faced. The right to development was country-corporate, development understood at growth with structural transformation, and the bearers of the responsibility for redressing the global inequities being the developed countries.

In this address, we explore the changing meaning of the ‘right to development.’ We explore the interface between the state's rights and obligations in the context of the demand for a new international economic order and its anchor on global social justice. We further explore the paradox of a shift in the term's meaning to individual rights precisely with the dominance of neoliberalism. We conclude with an emphasis on the imperative of sovereign national projects and policy autonomy for realising the right to development at the corporate and individual levels. 


Enter virtual room

- Refreshments
Senate house Cloister area
- Panel Session 6
- Lunch
Senate house Cloister area
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Join our expert commissioning editors for a session on everything you need to know about academic book publishing. Helena Hurd, Adam Swallow, and Nick Wolterman lead the Development Studies books programmes at Routledge, OUP, and Bloomsbury, and will share their top tips for a successful submission, with plenty of time for questions.

The session will be particularly useful to early career researchers, but will also provide an opportunity for more senior academics to discuss key issues in Development Studies book publishing.

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Only open to DSA members

Enter virtual room

- Panel Session 7