DEVS Undergraduate Course Offerings 2025/2026

The following courses will be offered in the Fall of 2025/2026

For detailed course information please visit the Faculty of Arts and Science website. Topic course descriptions are outlined below. 

Please note that course information listed in the Arts and Science Course Calendar supersedes information listed within the DEVS website.

Placed within Political Economy, the concept of debt reveals the power and the politics surrounding the relations between a creditor and a debtor. Seen thus, debt can be viewed as a moral obligation and as a method of disciplining populations within the structures of neoliberal governance. This course, therefore, presents an opportunity to engage with the social practices and the economic structures that frame the historical instances of debt as well as the modern-day manifestation of debt in society. We hope to ask several pertinent questions that relate to the political economy of debt: What are the forms of debt that we encounter in contemporary development processes? who benefits and why from the creation of debt? what roles do social institutions such as nation states, global governance institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, play in the mediation of debt? how does debt-led development affect the organisation of social life? In which case, who are the victims of the forms of debt and how do the relations of debt create different experiences of dispossession for individuals and communities along the lines of gender, race, and class?

Global Development Studies aims to equip students with practical skills for making positive impacts in an evolving world of public institutions. This course in Community Activism aligns with that goal by teaching the dynamics of social change, collective action, and leadership. Activism carries risks, both for individuals and for institutions managing dissent. Students will explore activism levels, tactics, counter-insurgency strategies, and conflict resolution methods. Students will learn how NGOs, social movements, and other groups use activism for social and political goals. A mix of theory and skills will prepare  them for roles in NGOs, social movements, policing, and more. An experiential assignment will enhance teamwork, decision-making, and risk management skills.

In the context of global neoliberalism, non-profit organizations have become central to the provision of social services, humanitarian aid, and advocacy, often filling gaps left by a retreating welfare state. This course critically examines the rise and role of non-profit organizations and volunteer labour through the lens of feminist political economy, with a particular focus on the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of care work.

Students will explore the theoretical foundations of social reproduction and care work, beginning with key feminist scholars such as Tithi Bhattacharya. They will reflect on their own everyday contributions to social reproduction and examine how neoliberal reforms have offloaded responsibilities from the state onto individuals and the non-profit sector.

This course delves into the complex landscape of global health, encouraging students to critically examine contemporary health issues and systems that transcend borders. It explores the intersections of health with ‘globalization’ and ‘development’, discussing how these intersections are anchored on systemic structures that shape health disparities across different populations. The course is organized into four main parts. The first part covers key theories, concepts, and principles of Global Health. The second part examines global health challenges, unpacking the trends, risks, and burdens of contemporary health issues, including infectious and non-communicable diseases, environmental health, mental health, and maternal and child health across diverse contexts. The third part interrogates the institutional, political and policy environments within which health delivery is organized and governed globally. The final part explores innovations, and a future direction for Global Health that promotes health equity and improves health outcomes of diverse groups. Ultimately, this course will enhance students’ critical thinking about Global Health and equip them with the knowledge and skills to contribute meaningfully to the field, advocating for equitable and sustainable health solutions across diverse contexts.

Through time and across borders, critical feminist theories and practices have sought to do far more than insert women higher in the echelons of global power structures: they have sought to dismantle these power structures, and to imagine and practice a different world. Grounded in the insights of critical feminist theory, this course will focus on sites of feminist struggle, examining both transnational continuities and differences in an unequal world. The first half of the course will be devoted to building students’ theoretical toolkit by engaging in foundational feminist texts. In the second half of the course, students will apply these theories to a deep analysis of three case studies: 1) domestic labour in East Africa; 2) Activism and kin work in Black communities in the United States; and 3) the transnational politics of sex work.  

This is a seminar course with a strong focus on in-class learning and discussion. Students will be assessed through a range of assignments. These will include in-class participation and journal writing; one in-class test; one research paper; and the collaborative curation of an exhibit: The Museum of our Feminist Future.

Sustainable livelihoods approaches have become increasingly important in the discussion of development over the past few decades. These approaches are concerned with understanding the various resources and strategies that people draw on to construct, improve and defend their livelihoods in ways they find meaningful. In this course, we will explore a variety of related theoretical perspectives including those focused on social (and other) capital, human capabilities, and agency. After reviewing these approaches, we will evaluate their efficacy for analysing a variety of rural, urban, and peri-urban development case studies. Based on our review of theory and its application to case studies, students will be tasked with developing their own framework for analysing livelihoods and identifying possible avenues for contributing to their enhancement.

Popular mainstream “women and environment” development discourses see nature as an ‘unruly’ force that disproportionately impacts women during environmental or climate change crises. Instead of pursuing this line of thinking, this seminar on Feminisms in Environment and Development will foreground “feminist ecologies” highlighting the dynamic interdependencies between society and nature that colonial processes have disrupted. Discussions will shed light on how people dynamically interact with nature through their intersectional subjectivities, embodied knowledges, and care for land, water, forests and the commons. The seminar also recognizes that women’s bodies are their first territory: however, growing neoliberal accumulation and corporate control of resources that extract nature also exploit feminized and racialized bodies, their labor and resources, thus keeping them persistently unequal and marginalized. Students will also familiarize themselves with present efforts to include gender discourses in sustainable development debates and policy prescriptions. They will critically analyze how “gender” has been co-opted or accommodated by ‘smart’ climate and environmental interventions that sidestep justice for exploited segments of nature and society.

In 2019, tourism accounted for 10-11% of employment globally. For some countries, its promotion was the principal development strategy, with noteworthy successes achieved over the past few decades. Compelling critiques of tourism’s environmental, cultural, unequal economic and other harmful impacts, as well as rapid changes in technology and in tourist demography, were giving rise both to new harms and new strategies to mitigate them including, notably, “eco-tourism.” COVID-19 largely shut down the industry with devastating impacts in tourism-dependent economies. But it also sparked creative initiatives to re-think tourism as a sustainable, social justice-oriented development strategy. This course critically assesses the history and contemporary practices of tourism planning for a post-pandemic, climate crisis, “new normal” world.

In recent years, the study of migration has moved to the centre stage of development policy and development theorisation. As the movement and numbers of migrants has increased globally, populist backlash against certain classes and categories of migrants has gained momentum with restrictive visa and border control regimes and rhetoric of hate. Migrant workers are faced with increased precarity and exploitation despite their labour being vital for local economies. Using the theoretical lens of racial capitalism, this intensive seminar course will challenge you to rethink the interface between migration, unfree labour, and migration by undertaking an intersectional analysis of precarious work, racialization, and migration in the contemporary moment. Racial capitalism is recognised both as a conceptual framework and a theory to show how differentiation of people along racial categories, and other markers of ‘difference’ to accumulate value. The course will debate how racialized hierarchy of (non)citizenship accentuates social inequalities and increases labour exploitation. We will discuss how the state aids racial capitalism by maintaining a racialized, gendered, and segmented labour market through neoliberal migration regimes. By examining the intersections of gender, race, class, and masculinity, the course will provide cutting-edge theorisation about how these interfaces impact migration patterns, policies, societies, and, most importantly, the lived experiences of the migrants. The focus of the course will be North America and Europe as ‘receiving’ regions. It will adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on literature ranging from political economy, migration studies, critical masculinity studies, and gender studies and diverse material including auto-ethnographies, photovoice, documentaries, and films in facilitating a nuanced theoretical grounding on this subject. 
 

 

 

“There can be little doubt that the current era is witnessing dramatic changes in the global production and consumption of food. In some respects, this represents the continuation of previous trends. However, in a several significant ways, agricultural restructuring in the late twentieth century and early twenty first century appears completely new. The concentration and centralisation of capital within agricultural sphere is now being reinforced through intensified global competition, inn innovations in biotechnology, transportation, and the social organisation of labour. The effect is the subsumption by industry of the once autonomous agricultural sphere, along with the continued destruction of the peasantry in ‘third world’ societies. As a result, we see evidence daily of the rapid transformation of agriculture, including: (1) the decline of subsistence agriculture in favour of luxury crops produced for export to affluent niche markets; (2) the proletarianisation of independent farmers; (3) rising food insecurity and hunger amidst growing food stocks; (4) an increase in the pace of agro-ecological degradation; and, (5) even greater levels of corporate appropriation in the areas of indigenous knowledge, farming practices and genetic plant and animal resources. In response to these developments, new grassroots movements both in the countries of the North and South are emerging in order to promote sustainable agriculture, to fight hunger and to protect food from genetic manipulation.
 
The purpose of this course is to examine the micro- and macro-level forces that are both driving and resisting agro-restructuring within the world food system.  The course will begin with a brief overview of events that constitute the recent economic, political, social and geographic changes mentioned above. We will then establish a theoretical background to agrarian transitions. A diverse disciplinary perspective is then employed to analyse selected aspects of contemporary changes in agrarian sectors. Topics covered will range from industrialization and corporate control of food and farming, the geography of more ‘flexible’ forms of manufacturing and service provisions, feminization of agricultural labour, localized and place-based agriculture, non-agricultural uses of agro-food resources, food democracy and sovereignty to changing forms of political organisation and protests and the relationship between food and culture, specially how communities and societies identify and express themselves through food.”

 

This course is designed for students interested in understanding the complexities of rural Latin America from the theoretical approach of agrarian political economy. This approach attempts to analyze the processes of agrarian change, that is, the social relations and dynamics of production and reproduction, property and power in agrarian formations and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary”

The course topics are organized into two sections.