DEVT 2101 - Community, Gender and Critical Development

This course critically explores some of the ways in which community and gender influence and are transformed by contemporary development policies, processes and programs. Students will evaluate key concepts and frameworks in terms of the anthropology of development and critique international development and planned culture change from modernist, gender-based and poststructuralist perspectives.

The course takes an actor-oriented perspective, grounding applied practices in macro-economic, historical and socio-political contexts of local people's development experiences. It privileges the ways in which development beneficiaries perceive, understand and feel about the imposition of development and culture change and to what extent they can gain knowledge and/or power over this process through the analysis of several community-based case studies. The course also looks at some of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are needed to seek practical solutions in these settings, exploring various participatory field methods concerned with generating shared information, ensuring community empowerment and participation and in eliciting community/ local views.