GDI Lecture: Property, institutions, and social stratification in Africa with Franklin Obeng-Odoom
Listen or watch Associate Professor Franklin Obeng-Odoom, University of Helsinki, discuss his upcoming book on property, institutions, and social stratification in Africa.
Listen or watch to the lecture in full below. read more…
GDI Lecture: Blood Bricks: modern slavery & climate change in Cambodia with Katherine Brickell
Listen or watch Professor Katherine Brickell, Royal Holloway, University of London, discuss her ESRC-DFID funded study on the relationship between modern slavery and climate change in Cambodian brick kilns. Find out more about her Blood Bricks project.
Listen or watch to the lecture in full below. read more…
Global Development Institute Merit Awards
The Global Development Institute Merit Awards provide six full scholarships for academically excellent professionals studying a GDI campus-based master’s course commencing in September 2019. The scholarship covers the tuition fees, living expenses, flights to the UK and visa costs.
The Global Development Institute is where critical thinking meets social justice. Researchers at the Global Development Institute are addressing some of the biggest challenges the world faces, from inequality and the politics of development to globalisation. We strive to address specific problems and make an impact in the real world. Cutting-edge insights from our research are incorporated in our postgraduate teaching and many of our 10,000 alumni become development leaders. For the last 60 years, The University of Manchester has been at the forefront of Development Studies and The Global Development Institute continues to drive forward new ideas promoting sustainable development and social justice for all.
For the next academic year we’re able to offer six fully funded scholarships for resident citizens of Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe, who have not previously studied outside Africa. read more…
Call for papers: Technologies of Bordering: creating, contesting and resisting borders
Technologies of Bordering: creating, contesting and resisting borders conference
3 – 5 July 2019
Sidney Myer Room, University of Melbourne, Australia
Conference convenors: Elise Klein, University of Melbourne and Uma Kothari, University of Manchester
Borders are pervasive spatial, political and social features in contemporary society. Materially and symbolically manifest, borders are shaped by history, politics and power. They take various forms, have multiple functions and are ceaselessly changing. Through a wide array of material, digital and virtual technologies borders divide, exclude, contain, categorise, control, govern and protect people. For example, the presence or absence of documents such as passports, permits and identity cards control the movement of people across borders as do security and surveillance technologies like gamma ray scanners that can reveal undocumented bodies hiding in trucks that are attempting to cross borders. Such technologies are a material manifestation of bureaucratic systems that are mobilised to assign identities to people and ascertain their associated rights as citizens or non-citizens.
PhD studentship on South-South Migration
Project Description
This full time 3 year PhD studentship, starting in September 2019, is fully funded by The University of Manchester and based at Global Development Institute.
As a doctoral candidate, you will be part of the Migration, Refugees and Asylum research group and the Migration Lab. There will also be opportunities to contribute to current teaching programmes by working as a Teaching Assistant on migration-related modules.
You will be supervised by Dr Tanja Bastia and Dr Oliver Bakewell. read more…
In Conversation: Armando Barrientos on social assistance
In this episode Chris Jordan, GDI’s Communications & impact Manager, talks to social assistance expert Professor Armando Barrientos. They discuss why Armando decided to specialise in social assistance and how it has changed over the last 20 years. Professor Barrientos also explains his new social assistance explorer which is the first database to bring together data on low and middle income countries and allow researchers to study and compare programmes at a cross-national, regional and global basis. Finally Armando looks forward to how he thinks social assistance will develop over the next five to ten years.
Digitally removing the middleman for development: Trouble brewing in East African tea?
Chris Foster, Presidential Fellow at the Global Development Institute,
One of the benefits often associated with digital technologies is the potential for disintermediation – or put more simply “cutting out the middleman”. This concept forms the basis for many hopes for development around digital technologies [1].
In the early days of digital technologies, it was found that they often failed to cut out the middleman due to the “digital divide” where digital skills, infrastructure quality and cost limited the use of technologies in smaller firms. But as firms have adopted technologies and with appropriate applications these foundational claims for digital development are important to revisit. read more…
The “global Britain” report: rule-breaking in foreign aid will not strengthen UK soft power
By Heiner Janus, German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) and PhD researcher at the Global Development Institute and Dr. Niels Keijzer, DIE
A new report on the future of “Global Britain” proposes several radical reforms of the UK’s spending on international development. Apart from suggesting major cuts in the aid budget, the report calls for broadening the definition of aid, diverting funds to peacekeeping and integrating the Department for International Development (DfID) into the Foreign Office.
The report, “Global Britain: A Twenty-First Century Vision”, was written by Bob Seely, a Tory MP and James Rogers, a member of the Henry Jackson Society think tank. It informs a Foreign Office review headed by Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt on the UK’s geopolitical role after leaving the European Union. In a foreword, Boris Johnson states that it is time to “turbo charge” Britain’s global reach and influence.
Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarships
The Global Development Institute (GDI) is pleased to announce the availability of ten scholarships for distance learning, funded by the Commonwealth Scholarships Commission (CSC).
These are for applicants from developing Commonwealth countries, covering all tuition fee costs for the MSc in Management and Information Systems (Distance Learning), commencing in January 2020. read more…
GDI Lecture: development states with Stephan Haggard
Listen or watch Professor Stephan Haggard, UC SanDiego, discusses development states. You can download Stephan’s new book on developmental states for free until 14 Feb.
Listen or watch to the lecture in full below. read more…