ED75.06 Gender Culture & Human Development

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.