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- Convenors:
-
Romain Chenet
(University of Warwick)
Maria Gavris (University of Warwick)
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- Format:
- Experimental format
- Stream:
- The Future of Development Studies
- Location:
- CB5.7, Chancellor's Building
- Sessions:
- Thursday 26 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract
This panel considers alternative approaches to conceptualising, pursuing, and expressing ‘development’, seeking to build on legacies of critical development thinking and scholarship while also exploring new ideas emerging out from the crises that mark our era.
Description
Physical, epistemic, and psychological violence inflicted by dominant exertions of power across development eras has prompted repeated attempts to engage constructively with alternatives to the mainstream paradigm, responding to community experiences and diverse cultures.
Working with an overarching theme of ‘polycrisis’ and challenges / opportunities this presents for development studies, this panel invites a playful and generative approach in seeking paths past rightful but disempowering frustrations, desperation, and identity crises that – like in the 1990s – appear to be gripping our sector again. Stepping ‘out’ from what has been called our interregnum or, in Tibetan terms, our bardo, we include contributions from a plurality of sources to explore perspectives that marginalised ontologies, epistemologies, and human groupings can offer into development studies.
Our panel’s aim is to rearticulate and potentially discover new development aspirations for our common but differentiated futures. We share inputs from a diverse and evolving canon of post-development, pluriversal, degrowth, decolonial, ‘alternative’, and otherwise critical approaches to development studies. We encourage participants to also engage with temporal, dialectical, and/or discursive relationships between alternative approaches to development and overlapping crises: how do these crises shape meanings we give ‘development’, and how can these alternative meanings in turn influence our understanding of the polycrisis?
Regarding format, we are open to theoretical, conceptual, artistic, and practical / case-based responses to this panel, which can be experimental or ‘conventional’ in form (depending on proposers’ wishes in terms of how their contributions can best be articulated in the allotted time).
Accepted contributions
Session 1 Thursday 26 June, 2025, -Contribution short abstract
Gathering cultural forms watched by fragments of the global collective worker – and situating them via the global social process of capital, rather than ‘stages of development’ – this paper hopes to probe how they can reveal differences and commonalities in these fragmented workers’ struggles.
Contribution long abstract
This paper seeks to explore the fragmented subjectivities of the global collective worker. Taking case-studies from positions in global value chains, the paper cris-crosses countries in different ‘stages of development’, to bring together cultural forms global workers are watching and reproducing themselves through–from Zambian miners’ preferred TV shows, to Silicon Valley developers’ favoured video games. And, while it firmly situates these cultural forms in relation to each fragment’s global position, it does so by comprehending each fragment as an aspect of a fundamentally global process (Bonefeld and Holloway 1996). In so doing, the paper seeks to step ‘out’ of the methodological statism that can afflict conceptions of ‘development’. Here, we are not dealing with organic national ‘paths of development’ that have been held back or accelerated – either by inter-national (core-periphery / unequal) relations, or national policy successes / mistakes (Iñigo Carrera 2016). Rather, what may appear as ‘under-development’ is simply a result of how that territory has participated in the uneven development of global capital. This is not to deny that inter-national relations have effects – but to stress that the determining relation is between territories and a global capital whose dictates are produced ‘behind the backs’ of all state actors. From this basis, it’s hoped we can probe these forms for the differences and commonalities in how these fragments of the global collective worker are processing their struggles to survive in –and against - a crisis-ridden social process whose only developmental concern is that ‘money beget more money’.
Contribution short abstract
This paper explores UN policy's decade-long decays, mirroring losses of progressive capacity visible in lived experience. Considering ‘enthrallment’ thus enables playful exploration of necrotic maxims, while encouraging site-work to seek cultivable rumblings of renewal.
Contribution long abstract
This paper adopts a discursive playfulness in charting decade-long decays implied by United Nations (and relatedly intertextual) development policies. Focusing on ‘receding horizons’ (Nederveen Pieterse, 2012), I discuss high-level policy shifts that mirror losses of progressive capacity visible in more everyday experiences (e.g., climate, gender inequality, and economic oppression).
Critiquing such policies for flattening development into a technical problem with only technical solutions (Telleria, 2017), it is widely posited that inherent flaws are discursively occluded to reduce development into a structure of slim expertise, re-enabling liberal economics to retain a long-discredited supremacy. Such analysis of ‘enthralled’ policies can thus be interpreted to show our era occupying an inter-reigning limbo state, where ‘Gramsci’s monsters’ are zombified maxims which cling to deathly existence and harm scope for flourishing. My paper however highlights that we do have schematics for inclusive futures, galvanising scope to return into the ‘bestial belly’ and seek cultivable rumblings for renewal amidst a miasma of necrotic rationalities.
I thus hope to show how accumulations of new vitalising norms and modalities of experience may reshape 'development', offering escape from the material/psychic violences inflicted by decaying structures in our shared times.
Contribution short abstract
This presentation will be an overview of critical analyses of the polycrisis (ranging from intersectional feminism to critical scholarship in international relations from the Global South) and their implications for doing development differently.
Contribution long abstract
The global polycrisis reawakened debates around the limitations of our current mode of development. While conventional accounts of the polycrisis assert that business as usual can continue if we implement a few technical tweaks, a wide range of alternative perspectives of the polycrisis recognise that what is needed for sustainable development is nothing short of systemic transformation.
This presentation will explore critical accounts of the polycrisis across three main dimensions: social reproduction, global capitalism and its institutions, and multiple intersecting systems of oppression. By exploring these perspectives, we can begin to understand how we could do development differently. They highlight that genuine development must recognise the dependence of the economy on the environment and on the care sector, challenge existing power relations in the global system, uncover systems of oppression and learn from the perspectives of those most affected, and acknowledge an draw on diverse forms of knowledge.