2024/25 Undergraduate Module Catalogue

PIED2235 Politics of Development

20 creditsClass Size: 40

Module manager: Dr Lata Narayanswamy
Email: L.Narayanswamy@leeds.ac.uk

Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable

Year running 2024/25

This module is not approved as a discovery module

Module summary

This module challenges students to think critically about the possibility and utility of ‘global goals’ and ‘global development challenges’ from the perspective of politics and power within and across spaces in the Global North and South. The module asks students to engage with how history, politics and power produce specific ‘development’ dynamics and outcomes e.g.: patterns of poverty and inequality, or access to basic services. Students will understand how different actors shape and influence development outcomes from the global to the local. The module draws on insights from various academic disciplines to provide students with interdisciplinary frameworks to analyse ‘development’ dynamics and outcomes. Students will ground analysis of power and politics in empirical place-based case studies. Case studies will examine particular development outcomes in specific places e.g. access to water and sanitation in Nairobi. Cases will be selected based on the expertise of teaching staff. This will enable students to understand the necessity of deep holistic analysis of the politics of development.

Objectives

This module aims to give students a thorough grounding in the politics of ‘development’, a term representing a constellation of ideas and assumptions that is both contested and also foundational to the social, political and economic underpinnings of ‘modernity’. This module will equip students with the skills, insights and knowledge to undertake critical, contextual and comparative analyses of power, conflict and place in those change processes that are labelled as ‘development’. The module will combine a critical focus on how societies and places – and respective social orders (and their power relations, practices of power and rule, etc.) - develop and change, with an analysis of how actors and institutions advance specific interests (political, economic, social, cultural) and produce particular outcomes that are typically contested (for various reasons, as the module will explore), and more general, are ‘political’/have a political character as well. The module aims to enable students to examine, challenge and critique universalising presentations of ‘development’ such as the Sustainable Development Goals.

Learning outcomes
SUBJECT SPECIFIC OUTCOMES

On successful completion of this module students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate critical knowledge of multiple forms of ‘development’, dynamics and outcomes in particular places.
2. Combine insights from various academic disciplines to analyse contextual ‘development’ dynamics with holistic and specific depth, and going beyond distinct thematic focus.
3. Rehearse and critically analyse core contemporary academic debates in the politics of development, particularly in relation to the role of the state, corporations and civil society; to the politics of inclusion/exclusion in basic service provision and politics of knowledge; and explain how global, regional, national and local institutions shape development dynamics and outcomes.

SKILLS SPECIFIC OUTCOMES

On successful completion of this module students will be able to:
Apply theories to empirical data to produce situated critical analysis of a particular context.
Apply holistic analysis of power to empirical cases and identify and explain commonalities and differences between cases examined through a comparative lens, working as a group.

Syllabus

Teaching methods

Delivery type	Number	Length hours	Student hours
Lecture	11	1.00	11.00
Practical	11	1.00	11.00
Private study hours			178.00
Total Contact hours			22.00
Total hours (100hr per 10 credits)			200.00

Opportunities for Formative Feedback

Students will receive formative feedback each week through the production of critical reflections for their seminar classes.
Students will also discuss have formative feedback on their group work during seminars before their presentation, and in week 11 will have the opportunity to discuss an essay.

Methods of assessment

Coursework

Assessment type	Notes	% of formal assessment
Assignment	1 x 3,000 Words	100.00
Total percentage (Assessment Coursework)		100.00

Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated

Reading list

There is no reading list for this module

Last updated: 11/09/2024

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