February 2024
The Randall L. and Deborah F. Tobias Center for Innovation in International Development hosted a research workshop on Friday, February 23rd, 2024. The workshop brought 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 was 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.
Schedule
- Panel 1 (9:00-10:30am): The Rise of “Human-Centered” Development
- Tehila Sasson, Emory University: “NGOs and People-Centered Development in the 1980s and the 1990s”
- David Engerman, Yale University: “Developing Humans: An Intellectual and Political History of the Origins of Human Development”
- Comments: Amanda Waterhouse, Butler University
- Panel 2 (10:30am - 12:30pm): National and Regional Transformations
- Liz Chatterjee, University of Chicago: ““The New Great Game: Thatcher’s Britain, Gandhi’s India, and the 1980s Aid for Trade Rush.”
- Alden Young, UCLA: " "The rise of the Arab Gulf States and the explosion of inequality across the Red Sea, 1975-2005."
- Timothy Nunan, University of Regensburg – “Reinventing Islamism in the Age of Neoliberalism: The Islamic Republic of Iran’s ‘Age of Construction’ in Global Perspective, 1989-1997”
- Comments: Michael De Groot, Indiana University
- Lunch for Panelists and Commentators – 12:30 – 2:00pm, GISB 1060
- Panel 3: Activists and Reform Movements (2:15pm-4pm)
- Agnieszka Sobocinska, King’s College London: “Grassroots Resistance and Global Movements: Challenges to International Development, 1970s to 1990s”
- Sheyda Jahanbani, University of Kansas: “A Woman Who Wanted to Feed the World: Corporate Philanthropy, Faith-Based Advocacy, and the Global War on Hunger in the 1970s”
- Sara Lorenzini, University of Bologna: “Female Leaders and the Concept of Sustainable Development in the 1970s and 1980s”
- Comments: Nick Cullather, Indiana University
