Core courses

Anthropology of Development Placement
This is a practical course in which you find and negotiate a work placement with a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) with offices in London. The placements involve you working half a day a week for an agency, carrying out a project useful to the organisation. You will gain an understanding of the demands, constraints and concerns of NGO-sector development work and will be able to draw out connections between the practical issues of concern to the organisation in your applied work and the theoretical issues addressed in the rest of the course.

Anthropology of Rights
This course encourages you to engage critically with the rights discourses that underpin development agendas in the contemporary world. You will consider the historical evolution of rights discourses, the institutions that have been established to uphold rights, the language of Human Rights used in international law, as well as the concept of rights as understood by development organisations, governments and multilaterals (such as the UN). You will also analyse the cross-cutting – and often competing – claims made in the name of, for example, gender and child rights, indigenous rights, intellectual property rights, animal and environmental rights, customary law and bioethics. The course provides an opportunity to explore the concept and discourses of rights in relation to numerous contemporary social issues (such as natural disasters, constitutional reform, war crimes tribunals, environmental disputes and gender politics), and consider the purchase of the rights concept (and its limitations) within development discourses and practices, as well as in relation to patterns of governance and social justice.

Critical Voices in Development
This core course of the MA in Development and Rights will enable you to explore the theoretical concepts underpinning development, the history of development and its institutions – from NGOs to the World Bank and the IMF, while considering diverse case studies from around the world. You will also explore the historical role of anthropology’s involvement in development, as official mediators between ‘the West and the rest’ through imperial conquest, colonial administration and a post-war development industry. As a central component of the course you will critically analyse current trends that have emerged to dominate the field of global political and economic interventions and/or policies – ‘participation and empowerment’, ‘gender awareness’, ’sustainable development’, ‘community development’, ‘NGOs’, and ‘environmental conservation’.