Blockseminar mit Vorbereitungssitzung en Development as an anthropological space Institutions projects and governance of international development cooperation

Development cooperation is a powerful undertaking. Development projects often seek to foster the -big push- (Jeffrey Sachs), for instance by poverty eradication, battling climate change or by implementing the Millennium Development Goals. Besides these forms of -thinking big-, development projects also create meaning through specific forms of (non-directive) governance and participation or by the construction of particular identities. This poses the question of how development cooperation produces powerful effects at the local and socio-ecological level, how it transforms social interaction and how it fails. Institutions of development cooperation, nature-society relations, governmental practices and mentalities stand at the center of analysis. Authors such as James Ferguson, Ilan Kapoor, David Mosse or Tanya Murray Li have devoted their research interests to these dynamics of international development cooperation. All have carried out critical inquiries of development cooperation based on long-time experience as -development experts-, e.g. for the World Bank or the Department for International Development. Since the 1990s their social anthropological encounters with 'development' have enriched critical development theory and have provoked a number of passionate debates on the very meaning, power structures, eurocentric and depoliticizing effects of 'development'. The first four sessions of the seminar will introduce analytical and methodological approaches for critical encounters with 'development', e.g. governmentality, ethnography and social anthropology. In the following compact course (6.2 2015 4-8 p.m., 7.2. 2015 10 a.m.-3 p.m. and 13.2. 2015 10a.m.-3 p.m.) we will discuss the works of James Ferguson, Tanya Murray Li and David Mosse in closer detail. FB 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften Uni Kassel WiSe 2014/15 Lehrveranstaltungspool FB 05 Dr. Müller Franziska