Currently, I teach undergraduate courses entitled Culture and Development, Development Dramas, and Education: A Contradictory Resource in the Department of Global Development Studies.
Culture and Development: In the 1950s and 1960s conventional development ideology assumed that culture and development described antithetical engagements with the social world—one representing tradition and the other modernity. Taking culture into account meant seeing culture as straightforward explanation for the poverty of particular nations and people. The possibility that modernity might be steeped in cultural values and assumptions was neglected. Today, rather than viewing culture as a hindrance to development, culture is viewed as a crucial conduit of a situated and more holistically imagined development. Yet, the relation between culture and development, tradition and modernity remains a complicated one. Since the neoliberal turn of global development, on the one hand, culture continues to be seen as a distinct entity—separate from the fundamentally political-economic sphere of development, progress, and poverty alleviation. On the other hand, culture continues to be perceived as a fundamental explanation, resource, and capacity for development and democracy. In this course we study the ongoing constitution of the relation between ‘culture’ and ‘development’ as concepts and practices. Questioning the assumption that culture is bounded and belongs to ‘others’ we explore the possibility that development and modernity are themselves fundamentally material and cultural constructs. We examine different theoretical and descriptive analyses of how modernization ideals articulate with lived realities of colonized, ‘Third World’, or ‘underdeveloped’ people.
Development Dramas: Theatre acts as a powerful lens on and vehicle of power relations and social change. In its capacity to imagine, construct, and disseminate modes of being and becoming, theatre has shaped and reworked colonialism and national liberation, postcolonial citizenship and subjectivities, nationalism and neoliberal globalization. It is therefore important to underline that this course does not focus on ‘drama in development’ to learn how best to apply theatre in development projects. Rather we ask, when theatre has been used for development and social change, how has it been used, by whom, for what purpose, and with what consequences on representational and material inequality. We will also ask what a sphere of creative and imaginative action, presumed to be fictional, teaches us about real-life power relations and social change. In the first part of the course, we trace the use of theatre as vehicle of domination and resistance, from anti-colonial nationalist struggles to theatre as service-delivery mechanism in an era of neoliberal globalization. In the second part of the course, we unsettle a series of commonsense categories which development thinking assumes to be bounded separations: such as male/female, fiction/reality, city/country, cultural and national boundaries, victims/victimizers. We look through the lens of theatre to consider the maintenance of these bounded separations as well as struggles to disrupt and redefine them as central to postcolonial politics of development.
Education: A Contradictory Resource: Following international conferences in the 1990s, development research and governance institutions joined in the call for Education for All characterized by a massive institutional push to increase primary school enrollment in the developing world. This course takes a critical and theoretical look at one of the most powerful and enduring ideas of development - that education is a first step to progress and freedom from poverty. A range of theorists such as Paul Willis, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire, and Amartya Sen help explore whether schooling is an inevitable good, a tool for hegemonic domination, or a contradictory resource. Rather than view education as an autonomous historical force we situate education in social and subjective power relations. We read accounts of various contexts of schooling from working class British schools, Dalit schooled men in north India, postcolonial schooling, and educating development workers. Each context and experience of schooling generates questions about the multiple ideological and practical purposes, uses, and outcomes of education—from learning to divide the world to producing the good citizen and worker. Understanding the significant role of education in reproducing inequality and imperialism is juxtaposed with explorations of philosophies and existing practices of critical, transformative pedagogies.
Previously Taught Courses at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, NY (2004-2007):
Introduction to Sociology
New Social Futures
Gender and Development
Dramatic Worlds of South Asia
Introduction to Women’s Studies
Sociology of Art and Culture
Sociology of Sustainable Development
