Part A :

Good morning, everyone,

and welcome to your first lecture in Development Studies.

Development Studies, as a discipline,

can be boiled down to a couple of core objectives.

Basically, we are trying to understand how it is that societies experience particular kinds of change and how they progress as they develop.

We're also trying to go beyond that, however,

and work out how different sorts of action can facilitate or even encourage these changes to happen.

To achieve these objectives, there are two key approaches that underpin Development Studies.

Firstly, there's a theoretical approach,

which is all about the 'how' of change.

with theory we can explore some of the big questions: What kind of change should we aspire to,

and how can this be achieved?

But we don't just talk;

we've also got to apply some of this thinking.

So through the applied approach we're looking at specific policies,

and trying to understand how they can most effectively be put into place.

Although we try not to limit ourselves, we do focus on a few key areas.

Due to our location, for example,

the Asia-Pacific region is an important area of research for us.

At the moment we're doing a lot of work on urbanisation, and there are two elements to this.

One is employment, as urbanisation leads to major employment problems,

and the other is housing -with so many people moving to cities,

many of them struggle to find a place to live.

Other issues of particular interest to our staff are migration and, of course, trade.

So what will you be able to do with a degree in Development Studies?

Well, firstly, you'll develop a full working knowledge of all aspects of development.

You'll also learn how to gather data.

We include sessions on how to gather statistics,

but we mostly focus on textual data,

that is, policy briefings, research reports, and so on.

Once you've done your research,

you need to know what it all means;

after all,

there's not much point in collecting a whole lot of data if you don't know whether it is significant or not - so we're going to teach you how to critically evaluate your findings.

And finally, teamwork is a big part of development work -your major piece of research work for this class is done in groups of four,

so you're going to learn how to cooperate as a team in order to plan and conduct this research assignment.

I want to move on now to give you a brief overview of how Development Studies has evolved as a discipline since it was first established.

The first thing to note is that, unlike other subjects, such as mathematics or philosophy,

Development Studies is very young.

It began taking shape as a formal discipline only in the 1950s.

At that stage, economic concerns were at the forefront of nearly all research efforts.

Researchers assumed that development in general could be measured by indicators such as Gross Domestic Product {GDP), or unemployment levels.

In the 1970s, a new set of scholars took charge.

These researchers,informed by the social movements of the 1960s,

brought a new set of issues to the table.

At that time, Development Studies grew increasingly critical of established practices,

and the assumptions that lay behind these practices.

Questions were raised in three areas: the role of power in creating policy,

the importance of environmentally sustainable change, and problems with inequalities in terms of gender.

From the 1980s onwards, the economy staged a comeback as a centrepiece of development practice.

A key factor here was the reduced significance of national governments due to a number of market-led reforms in many countries around the world.

In contrast to the 1950s, however, researchers have recently shown a heightened interest in smaller-scale economic projects.

One significant innovation here is the idea of making tiny loans, sometimes only a few dollars, to help women, in particular, to start up a small business.

And that brings us today.

So let's finish now by talking about...