Stockholm University and Gothenburg University offer a course at the National Doctoral College (NDC), which is also open to PhD students in other social sciences and other European countries (given the partially hybrid format of the sessions).
About the course “Development Geographies: Current Debates”
We live in unprecedented times, when ‘normality’, including around development processes, is perforated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also become a moment for reflection on the harms (to people’s livelihoods, for instance) and recompense (the environment) of this pause, with this awkward phase rightfully nudging us to revisit questions on the nature of the global economy and development processes itself. This course is on development geographies. Yet, instead of revisiting the depth and richness of the development paradigm and its contested nature, we use COVID-19 as a point of departure to focus on current debates around feminism and social reproduction, degrowth, political ecology, and decoloniality. These contemporary discussions will help us disrupt development geography, as we have known it – and hopefully, help craft a toolbox that brings to the forefront the need for regenerating state that recognizes the depletion and social harm four decades of the market-centric global economy has wrought.
We will organise the course around three pivot points:
- depletion, social reproduction and regeneration – to make feminist and gender debates central to contemporary contributions to global development;
- political ecology and the calls for degrowth in rebalancing the global economy;
- decoloniality and urban life – the calls for disrupting and uprooting the development
- paradigm from its colonial past and the contested nature of claim-making
Course admissions and information
This course is directed to geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and economic historians who are pursuing research that relates to development geography in some way. The course is conducted as a Swedish national PhD-course in Human Geography, which means that in case of a large number of applications, priority will be given to PhD-students at member departments, ie human geography departments in Sweden. However, the course is also open to doctoral students in cognate disciplines both from Sweden and beyond; as well as in rare cases to early career researchers.
There is no course fee, but participants will have to cover travel, accommodation etc. by their own
arrangements. PhD candidates from the Departments of Human geography in Sweden make the
arrangements with their home institutions.
The course will be held via two online sessions and a final one together as a group. The course assessments will consist of continuous evaluation of class participation and engagement, along with an obligatory 4,000-word essay framed alongside viewpoints, critical reviews, and research notes (including references). The assessment details will be distributed and discussed in further detail at the first meeting (September 2022).
National PhD research courses
The National Research Program in Human Geography was established in 1997. It aims at:
- Providing all doctoral students with access to research courses at the Swedish geographic departments;
- give all PhD students the opportunity to gain access to research skills outside their own institution;
- offer courses with lectures by invited scholars from Sweden and abroad;
- offer doctoral students the opportunity to meet other PhD students and researchers.
Should you have further information, please refer to Kanchana Ruwanpura or Lowe Borjeson.
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