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Course Overview
This course is closing after 2024, however, most of the content covered on the course will be available to students taking our BA Global Development course from September 2025.
This degree examines the big issues of our time through the lens of diverse human experience and agency. With a focus on knowledge and practice, and the cultures in which they exist, the degree challenges dominant forms of knowing. Students examine a range of social concerns: how, for example, does ritual and ceremonial activity ensure social solidarity on the one hand, and compliance on the other? What happens when ‘alien’ customs are enforced, or when cultural groups lose (through colonisation, missionisation, modernisation etc.) their ritual traditions? How can ‘alternative’ forms of knowledge (such as Indigenous knowledge) help us better tackle climate change, global inequality, warfare and poverty? How can an understanding of ‘alternative’ forms of exchange (such as non-market exchange) help us better understand human sociality and address multi-level inequalities?
This critical overview of ‘social development’ in our BA International Development with Anthropology provides the skills needed to ethically engage on a multi- and inter-cultural level.
Please note we are changing our name to the School of Global Development from 1 August 2023, as we mark our 50th Anniversary.
This innovative course combines a strong interdisciplinary foundation with a specialist anthropological lens in the study of international development. You’ll take core modules that seek to understand critical contemporary issues from an anthropological perspective – including poverty, inequality, gender, corruption and conflict – focusing specifically on the diversity of peoples and cultures, and how different social relationships, structures and beliefs around the world can shape lives and processes of social change. You’ll develop practical skills in key anthropological methods, and you’ll have the opportunity to study material culture in the world-renowned Sainsburys Centre for Visual Arts.
In addition to this anthropological focus, you’ll gain a broad grounding in the key issues, organisations and practices of development, fusing insights from anthropology with those from across the social sciences, including economics, environmental sciences, geography, media, and politics. You can develop your understanding of particular regions in the world, through area modules relating to sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, or Latin America, and you can pursue your emerging interests in other aspects and perspectives of development.
In your third year, you’ll study abroad at one of our partner Universities, taking courses that complement what you are studying in the School.
The result is an extremely flexible degree programme that you can tailor to suit your particular interests, and that allows you to combine an interdisciplinary foundation with your niche specialism.
By studying with us, you’ll join our close-knit academic community, made up of experts from across multiple disciplines, all housed within the School of International Development. As such, you will not only learn from our world-renowned anthropologists within the school, but you can benefit from a truly vibrant, interdisciplinary environment.
We are ranked No. 1 in the UK amongst development institutions for overall quality of research, impact and outputs in Anthropology and Development studies and are in the top 15 in the world for researching, teaching, and practicing development.
Come and study with us and help us to create a fairer world.