Join the Bristol Poverty Institute's Education and Inequalities Research Cluster and the Arts, Law and Social Sciences International Development Faculty Research Group for this fantastic talk from Professor Barbara Crossouard (University of Sussex) on deconstructing discourses of development and gender. 

Abstract

The struggles for international development often refer to the economic and social excesses of neoliberalism and the ways these produce, sustain and deepen inequalities globally. Gender has been highlighted as a key dimension of these inequalities that has been used as a significant indicator of development over decades. 

While neoliberalism has been widely critiqued, liberal thought, on which neoliberalism is founded, has evaded critical scrutiny. In this presentation, we focus on gender to explore how the foundational principles of liberalism frame, shape and inform development. Our discussion will refer to decolonial critiques of development, its liberal assumptions of western superiority and linear models of social and economic progress. Returning to gender, we critique how liberal assumptions of the human agent as autonomous, masculine and agentic remain entrenched within development discourse. 

We argue that while gender has been recognised as a social construction, the SDGs and development discourses continue to assume and reinscribe gender as a decontextualised female/male dichotomy. Further, these understandings of gender are deployed as an indicator of progress, becoming technologies of power used to define and measure development. Against these liberal notions, we call for development to embrace theories of gender that attend to its production within specific social and cultural contexts, and to the interdependencies that are integral to the social and material conditions of everyday lives.

 

Further details can be found on the BPI Education and Inequalities Research Cluster sharepoint page.

 

For queries, please contact our Research Cluster co-lead William Baker will.baker@bristol.ac.uk