What does it mean to “develop”? Who decides what progress looks like, and how are our ideas of manhood and womanhood woven into these visions? This course invites you to step into the role of an anthropologist—to explore how global ideals of growth, justice, and empowerment are lived, reshaped, and sometimes resisted in everyday life around the world.
Rather than studying policies or statistics alone, we’ll examine development as a cultural force: a way of seeing, measuring, and intervening in the world that carries its own histories, assumptions, and silent politics. We’ll ask how concepts like “empowerment,” “participation,” and even “the household” travel across borders, and what happens when they land in specific places, with specific people.
Over six sessions, we’ll trace the human stories behind the headlines. We’ll analyze visual and written narratives about “help” and “change,” listening closely to whose voices are amplified and whose are quieted. Through case studies from different continents, we’ll explore how gender roles are reshaped by shifts in agriculture, health initiatives, and environmental change—not as abstract trends, but as lived experiences. We’ll practice seeing like an anthropologist: paying attention to context, contradiction, and meaning.
This is a course built on dialogue, reflection, and curiosity. You’ll leave not with a blueprint for solving global problems, but with a more nuanced lens for understanding them: a sharper sense of how culture and power shape—and are shaped by—the world-making project we call “development.” No prior expertise is required—only an open mind and a willingness to ask, “What’s really going on here?”