AIT Virtual Learning Environment

This Course overviews the different influential theoretical approaches within the field of Development Communication, paying attention to origin, application and strengths and weaknesses of various strategies & development campaigns in different parts of the world and current theoretical debates. Throughout the semester we will be considering how gender is linked to notions of power, identity visibility, voice, participation and other important elements of identity formation and how these are reflected in different kinds of development communication campaigns. Students will gain gain insights on how “development communication” both influence and are influenced by gender/ class/ race/ ethnicity/ nationality and other social categories and impact norms, cultural formations and development agendas.. Concurrently we will also be examining how having a gendered lens helps address or orient issues in media and development praxis. The purpose is to provide a foundational understanding of the field that students can apply to critiquing, analyzing and designing social change and development programs in their own capacities as professionals, development planners, community activists, advocates, etc.

This course aims to examine how understandings of gender, and sexuality are culturally constructed through social structures and global ideological systems, and how economic, political, and cultural structures enforce distinctions between women and men and its implications for development. The course draws from the interdisciplinary fields of feminist/gender studies, development studies and cultural studies. It has three main objectives, the first to review fundamental approaches on gender, culture and development and the related role of culture in understanding gender and development. The second to examine how understanding of gender and sexuality are reproduced, negotiated and deployed in the context of development, globalization and transnational flows. And finally informed by approaches to culture that place power at the center of the concept (Schech & Haggis, 2002) to critically examine response to current issues (policies, debates and theoretical approaches) in gender and development – including neoliberalism, citizenship, social justice, gender equality, migration - and its effects on women’s and men’s subjectivities.

This course aims to examine gender through power, contested in State institutions and the public sphere and exercised through various legal and policy instruments. It attempts to contextualize our knowledge of gender in its political past, underlining the important role the Nation-State has had in engendering spaces and identities while committing, condoning, or suppressing gender-based violence. In contrast, the course aims to assess political participation and examine the role of the women’s movement, since such civil society mobilization is reinventing gender discourse, realigning power struggles, and consequently the locus of political action and development. The course will end with an examination of norms and human rights instruments that both foster and inhibit political participation and gender equality.

The course aims to take a gender approach to studying various forms of migration, exploitative migration and trafficking in persons in Asia, including forced labor migration, sex slavery and other form of involuntary servitude. It will examine why women tend to be particularly vulnerable to involuntary servitude and trafficking, while the gender division of labor resulting from migration usually leads to more exploitation and less protection for women migrants by labor and immigration laws. After a survey of migration theories, the course aims to look at structural and social determinants that enables such transnational migration and trafficking to take place, the gendered impact of such movements, and the range of measures and legal instruments that exist locally, regionally and internationally that cover, control and protect migrants and trafficked persons. We will end the course with a session on conducting research on migration.

Course objective:  In the recent decades of economic development and continued environmental degradation, gender and development studies have become a major concern. This course provides an overview of the history of gender and development, and discusses key concepts in gender and development and its relevance in development in the region. The course aims to familiarize students with social science thinking and writing, and gender perspectives.

Learning outcomes: By the end of the course, the students are able to

- apply concepts and theories in ways that make gender and development issues more comprehensible,

- identify and analyze the relevance of gender issues in contemporary development problems,

- trace the historical development of gender and development thinking and identify relevant schools/authors.

Course Discription/Syllabus

This course takes a bottom-up approach based on grassroots women's experienes to increase participation of both women and men at the community level in the processes of decision and negotiation with the state and market on issues related to their livelihood. How to integrate gender perspectives in policy and planning, as well as facilitating meaningful participation of women and men, and through this, transform the planning process is the focus of discussion in this course.  

This course offers an examination of gender implications from technological change in the context of industrialization.