Cultural, Feminist, and Critical Approaches to International Development.

Catalog description

Development aid is rarely a neutral process. Alongside innovations in technology and income generation, the flow of technical support and financial assistance affects/is affected by local values, customs and power relations, to name a few. This course equips students with the analytic tools and historical, political and ethnographic perspectives with which to develop an understanding of international aid from a cultural, feminist and critical perspective (postcolonial and post-structuralist). A combination of theoretical frameworks and case-studies is used to demonstrate how the efficacy of socioeconomic development projects is strengthened, or conversely, weakened at the local level when culture, gender and other considerations are not adequately incorporated into the development process.