Our program builds upon core courses that provide the foundations of research within development studies.
MA students are enrolled in Political Economy of Development (DEVS 801), Cultural Politics of Development (DEVS 802), and Qualitative Research Design (DEVS 803). These reflect the basic areas of expertise within the Department and provide students with two key pillars for understanding the field of development studies.
All first year MA students are also enrolled in Professional Seminar in Global Development Studies (DEVS 850), which provides a useful forum to meet as a group to discuss how best to move through the program. Meeting once a month across both fall and winter terms, the course provides a discussion forum addressing key themes concerning research, ethics, and debates within the discipline.
In 2025-2026, the Department offers additional elective graduate level courses:
- DEVS 812: Africa in the Anthropocene (Winter)
- DEVS 813: 'Empire is not a Metaphor': Power, Sovereignty and Global Justice (Winter)
MA students may also enroll in one mixed senior undergraduate/MA-level seminars (e.g. DEVS 862-001). Topics include development and the agro-food industry, global governance, migration among others.
Students may take up to one course offered outside of DEVS and can select from a wide range of courses offered in cognate (related) departments (e.g., History, Political Studies, Sociology, Geography, Gender Studies and Environmental Studies). Permission of the course instructor and DEVS graduate chair is required. Please consult the individual departments and programs website to ascertain the courses being offered and to obtain course outlines and names of instructors. Students should be alert for potential time conflicts with DEVS mandatory courses, DEVS electives, and TA-Ship responsibilities. Please note that students do not have enrollment priority in courses outside of their home department and enrollment in these courses may not be made available until the start of term, and then only if space permits. If you are interested in a course outside of DEVS, please contact the DEVS Academic Assistant for guidance. DEVS students are encouraged to enroll in a DEVS course as a backup in case their enrollment in a course outside of DEVS cannot be accommodated by the other department.
Students may also request the option to take a directed reading course (DEVS 890). This course enables a student or a group of students to explore a body of literature on a selected topic in development. The focus may be by theme, by region or by academic approach and can span the humanities, social sciences and environmental sciences. The student or students are responsible for approaching a faculty member with whom they wish to work and who is willing to undertake this project. The reading list, course schedule and course assignments will be agreed upon by the student/students and professor, but there is an expectation that a minimum of one substantive written assignment will be required.
Please note that graduate students are not permitted to self-enroll in courses in the Student On-Line University System (). The Academic Programs Assistant completes all course enrollments, drops and audits.
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the relationship between political economy and the ideas and practices of development. The course grounds students in core theories, both classical and contemporary. It then examines key themes and controversies to illustrate the relationships between political economy and development practice.
This is a mandatory course for all MA and PhD graduate students in Global Development Studies.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the cultural politics of development in historical and contemporary perspective. The course focuses on narratives of development and their relationship to social and political movements in the South and North. Themes include the ideas of tradition, modernity and progress; colonialism, nationalism and liberation; and the gendered and racialised politics of development.
This is a mandatory course for all MA and PhD graduate students in Global Development Studies.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
This course introduces qualitative fieldwork methods including research design, proposal writing, ethics, interviews, and data analysis. It offers a clear pathway towards successful fieldwork design, implementation and reporting and provides core professional skills for working productively within development and community organisations.
This is a mandatory course for all MA and PhD graduate students in Global Development Studies.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
Africa south of the Sahara contributes least to the global climate emergency but is already bearing a disproportionate burden of impacts. This course historicizes environmental management and mis-management on the continent since the onset of the capitalist era, key manifestations of the climate crisis, and activism, technologies and transnational normative frameworks that offer hope to mitigate the worst impacts of environmental change.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
Building on to the seminal works of Tuck and Yang (2012) and Wolfe (2006), this course focuses on empire as a persistent structure of domination that shapes global development, power relations, sovereignty, and justice. Drawing on structural critiques informed by settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperial violence, the course examines how empire maintains itself and operates through institutions, borders, aid regimes, debt relations, and systemic violence. The course puts a careful emphasis on the ideological and material foundations and continuities of the empire -from colonial conquest to contemporary development and security regimes- while also centering liberatory frameworks for global justice and collective struggle.
Available only to MA and PhD students.
This course provides a monthly forum to discuss practical, ethical and methodological issues in conducting development research and writing, including major research papers, thesis work, and grant applications.
This is a mandatory course for all graduate students in Global Development Studies.
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 âglobalizationâ and âdevelopmentâ, 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 studentsâ 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.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
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 studentsâ 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.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
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.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
Popular mainstream âwomen and environmentâ development discourses see nature as an âunrulyâ 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 âfeminist ecologiesâ 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 womenâs 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 âgenderâ has been co-opted or accommodated by âsmartâ climate and environmental interventions that sidestep justice for exploited segments of nature and society.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
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 âdifferenceâ 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 âreceivingâ 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.
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
âThere 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 âthird worldâ 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 âflexibleâ 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.â
A mixed senior undergraduate/graduate level course with limited space for DEVS MA graduate students who may not take more than one such mixed course.
Students whose proposed research lies outside the realm (thematic or regional) of regular course offerings may choose this option. In consultation with a willing supervisor, students must develop a unifying title, course description, and reading list of 2â4 key texts for each of 5â6 set topics leading toward an agreed upon set of assignments. There is an expectation that a minimum of one substantive written assignment will be required.
Students will complete a libraryâbased major research project (MRP) of 50â60 pages. The MRP will deal with a specific interdisciplinary question directly relevant to Global Development Studies, which may be thematic or theoretical in nature or focus on peoples or places generally associated with the Global South in the context of relations with the Global North.
PREREQUISITE: Permission of Graduate Chair in consultation with a willing faculty supervisor, plus completion of four mandatory (DEVS 801, DEVS 802, DEVS 803, DEVS 850) and two elective courses.
Research leading to a dissertation of 75â100 pages will usually involve the collection and analysis of primary data and be of publishable quality. Such data could include oral interviews, archival and other documentary sources, in some cases collected through field work.
PREREQUISITE: Permission of Graduate Chair in consultation with a willing faculty supervisor, plus completion of four mandatory (DEVS 801, DEVS 802, DEVS 803, DEVS 850) and two elective courses.