In Conversation: Uma Kothari on Stories of Place
To mark the publication of Professor Uma Kothari’s new co-authored book, Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, we interviewed Uma about the story behind the book and the relationship between stories and the places from which they emerge. In the conversation below, Uma and Louisa Hann, GDI’s Research Communications Officer, discuss everything from the slippery definition of the story to the ethics of storytelling within academic contexts.
Think you can’t change the world? You matter more than ever
Yesterday I was sad to read of even further declines in UK giving over the past year. Today I am furious to hear what UK aid cuts will look like in practice. And if you’re following global development headlines, you might feel the same way.
Such devastating stories are an indictment of where we are and where we’re heading. So let me take my ‘Professor’ hat off and say a little about what we’ve learned in these past days and what that means for some of the most vulnerable populations in the world.
Paul Mosley (05 April 1947 – 18 February 2026) – An Appreciation
It is with great sadness that we report the death of Professor Paul Mosley, Director of the Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM), University of Manchester, from 1986 to 1992. Professor David Hulme, who worked closely with Paul, reflects on his immense contribution to Development Studies.
GDI Digest: Forget the hype – how is AI really changing the world?
by Louisa Hann
If today’s Silicon Valley billionaires are to be believed, AI is about to supercharge your quality of life, boost your productivity, and provide access to “wildly abundant” intelligence. As Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI puts it, the future “can be vastly better than the present”, with the world “getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before”.
Empowering Human Potential: Rethinking Employability in the New Collar Era
By Lujia Feng, Programme Director: MSc Human Resource Management (International Development)
Call for Workshop Contributions: Resilient Amazon Futures: Strengthening Food, Water, Forest, and Land Governance for Sustainable Development
Workshop Title: Resilient Amazon Futures: Strengthening Food, Water, Forest, and Land Governance for Sustainable Development
UK Principal Instructor: José A. Puppim de Oliveira, University of Manchester
Brazil Principal Instructor: Claudio Szlafsztein, Federal University of Pará (UFPA)
Mentors: Maria Julia Ferreira, National Institute of Amazon Research (INPA); Aarti Krishnan, University of Manchester (UoM); João Campos-Silva, Instituto Juruá; John James Loomis, University of Manchester (UoM)
Discipline: Business Studies
Dates and place: 25–29 May 2026, Belem, Brazil
Venue: Federal University of Pará (UFPA)
Deadline for application submission: 31 March 2026 to the email: resilientamazonfutures@gmail.com
Looking for the AI in inclusive AI
by Anuradha Ganapathy, PhD Researcher at the Global Development Institute
Can you write about AI without ever once referring to it?
These were my first thoughts when I came back from the field, learning from and with communities in rural India who were experimenting with a new AI tool. Built on geospatial data and machine learning algorithms, the tool provided data on socio-ecological indicators such as water stress, forest health, soil type, flora fauna biodiversity, etc., to enable communities to develop a shared understanding of their landscape.
What an Urban Lens Can Tell Us About Venezuela
by Dr Erika Garcia Fermin, Honorary Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute
Last week I had a really energising conversation with Tom Goodfellow and Beth Perry on Urban Radar, a podcast by Sheffield Urbanism that discuss current events through the lens of cities and urban life. This time, we talked about Venezuela, and about my city, Caracas. The conversation stayed with me after we wrapped up, so here I am thinking through some of what we discussed, and to clarify a few points that, in hindsight, I’d like to have expressed more clearly.
Communities of Practice: How are different kinds of resilience connected?
On Tuesday, 27th January, we held our final community of practice in a series exploring the role of resilience in maintaining a thriving and impactful development sector. Over the past few months, we’ve been bringing together development practitioners, academics, and students to talk through the difficulties of operating within a development space often troubled by crisis, stagnation, and obstruction. From aid cuts to burnt out workers, there was much to discuss during our one-hour online sessions.
Call for Papers: Services and the Global South: Structural Transformation, Inequality and Development
Call for Workshop Papers
Services have become the dominant source of employment and value added across most low‑ and middle‑income countries. Unlike the historical pattern of agriculture to manufacturing to services, the contemporary trajectory of many countries in the Global South involves a direct transition from agriculture into low‑productivity, often informal, services. At the same time, the prospects for export‑led industrialisation in MICs have weakened, prompting renewed interest in whether service‑led pathways can deliver inclusive, employment‑intensive, and productivity‑enhancing development.