Annual Tobias Center Research Symposium
Histories of Global Development Since the 1970s Tobias Center Research Workshop, February 2024
The Randall L. and Deborah F. Tobias Center for Innovation in International Development will host a research workshop on Friday, February 23rd, 2024. The workshop brings together scholars studying the evolution and consequences of global development from the 1970s to the present.
The history of global development has become a major subject of interest over the previous two decades. Historians have excavated the colonial origins of modern international development thought and practice, the way the Cold War superpowers integrated development into their foreign policies, and the intellectual history of economic, political, and social theories of developmental change (especially modernization theory and its offshoots).
Yet few histories of development have analyzed in great depth the transformations of development practice and the material circumstances of the world during and after the collapsing faith in modernization theory during the 1960s and 1970s. Our aim is to provide a venue to discuss how scholars should study this era in the history of development and its relationship to existing narratives about the meaning of development across the long twentieth century.
The event will feature pre-circulated papers. Presenters will give a 5-10 minute overview of their paper, then each panel respondent will have 15 minutes total to provide comments on each paper. We will dedicate the remaining time for general discussion. The event will take place in GISB 1060.