 OK, well, thanks for joining today. And this is not the first time I'm doing this, but actually in this format it is. So it's nice for me to be able to get to present what we do in terms of development studies and our online program in particular. But I teach on campus development studies programs. And I just thought I would give a very broad topic today, the politics of development in an increasingly unequal world. And first of all, this is who I am. Navtej, or Tej as I'm called, for a while. I am a professor of political sociology at SOAS. And I have been in the Department of Development Studies. This is my second year in development studies before that. I actually was a graduate of SOAS in 1992. I came from the US to study kind of development studies, area studies then. And then after all these years, I came back in 2014 and became the Deputy Director of the South Asia Institute at SOAS. And we have a number of regional institutes and that one. And I now am the convener of the MSc International Development Program in Development Studies, which is a new program, but is one of the larger, I believe, programs in SOAS, where I teach the core module, political economy and sociology of development online. Also, actually, I don't have that here, but I'm also committing a new module in October, which is going to be on the politics of gender and feminism in development, which is actually going to be leading into some of the things I'll be talking about today. And on campus, I also teach the undergraduate first year module, Introduction to Global Development, and then our on-campus gender and development. I'm involved in a lot of kind of team modules at SOAS as well. So you can see there's a breadth that we offer, and we kind of do a lot of that kind of team teaching, which I think adds a lot of richness to the kinds of materials that you, those of you who are thinking of coming to SOAS or already at SOAS, can get an idea of my work on structural violence and inequality. So I'm really interested in the structural factors and what uses inequality and not seeing inequality as a byproduct of development. And so it's actually asking questions like why does the 1%, you'll see this data around, why does the wealthiest 1% of the world own 50% of the world's assets and resources. We might even, in the coming year, we're going to be looking much more at race, racialization processes. And I also teach on racial capitalism. And this last year, obviously Black Lives Matter is not something new where we looked at the 13th Amendment and histories of migration, of slavery and how they become embedded into how places that you think are developed like the United States actually are shaping international development policy. And those are the kinds of interesting ways that we like to think about it, that it's not just about this formally colonized third world global south, but looking at the dominant as well and hegemonic parts of the world and how they actually structure inequality too. So I'm interested in a number of different questions, biopolitics, reproductive rights, population, structural violence, race. I've written a book you can see here in the bottom that came out last year, which was on the India-Bakistan border and looking at religion and caste. So I'm quite interdisciplinary. And I hope those of you who are interested in the online program can see that actually, how that comes into the teaching on the core module. So here are some debates in development studies that you might find interesting, or just to give you an idea of how I approached this in the module in particular of the MSE international development. And I might do this by, and you might wanna ask at the end or in between, is what some of the debates in development studies, how they get presented in a kind of more mainstream, I will say, way and how we might think critical about it through structures. So it's rather than being an outcome about it in terms of structures. So the first question is, what do different measurements and indicators of poverty and inequality tell us? And importantly, what do they conceal? So I'll be showing you a couple of graphs in a moment to kind of give you an idea. What are we looking for? What the people who produce this data and this graph, what are they trying to communicate to us? And what does it say? And what might it not be showing? The second point is, does neoliberalism represent the triumph of capitalism? And if so, what is neoliberal development? Is it an oxymoron? How can you put capital development to side by side? And what does it produce? Third is development by definition colonial and can it be decolonized? And if you're aware about the decolonized, the curriculum movement, of course, the statues, mobilizations around bringing down statues is all connected to the coloniality of this idea of what development also is. And we're engaging with that actively too in our curriculum. And then finally, how is gender instrumentalized in development discourse and policy? So these are questions which aren't necessarily round thing, but when we could look at all of these kinds of areas in slightly different ways, we might look at them in terms of thinking more practically about using a particular policy instrument to measure. We might look at why is gender important or why is gender equality important as opposed to why how and why is gender instrumentalized? And I'll hopefully be hinting to you here why the way we've posed these questions, why that, how that actually gets down to the next level of the structures. So our core module in the MSE International Development covers a range of topics. And I'm not going to go through those here. I just want to give you a background and idea around how we don't take the idea of development at base value. It's actually questioning what it means. And actually there's a huge emphasis on ideology as well. So our asses know the critical perspectives and we have to do that. And it's not to say we only will show supposedly radical approaches. We'll also talk about neoclassical and other kinds of more mainstream approaches. And we also look at capitalism as a system. But of course, we analyze it very critically. And we also look at it in terms of global institutions, in terms of policies, in terms of social movements and change. And then of course kind of unpacking it for in terms of the colonial backdrops of development, which of course, so has is known for also having very strong ties to it, having been set up as a colonial training school. And now in its contemporary context of 21st century, Sawas is playing a different kind of role now in terms of that we have a lot of peace students coming from all over the world, faculty who've come from all over the world who come from the countries that we're actually studying also. So there's that way of approaching development that we pride ourselves on the diversity of perspectives. So what I wanted to do today was actually highlight an area of mine, which is looking at gender and development. And you might have heard of all of the acronyms of women in development, women and development, gender and development, so weird, bad, bad, lots of acronyms, which actually show how institutionalized gender policies have become. It's become what many people have called a common sense that gender equality makes sense for everyone, that it should be something that every country, all policies should be implementing and working towards. So I'm just gonna highlight a few ways in which we might up this. One is thinking about how gender has historically featured in development interventions, which has a slightly more cynical or maybe a sinister view on gender as in terms of how it's mobilized. The second is actually questioning and challenging universal principles. The universalization of those kinds of high level. So for instance, the final point here I have on CDOM, Platform for Action 1995, trying to ratify, trying to get countries to sign up to universal principles is can on the one hand sound very good for global agendas in terms of local agendas and also for local progressive movements or women's organizations or feminist movements who are trying to question the status quo that can also have detrimental impacts. And those are kinds of places that we would like to also engage with. What does mainstreaming gender signify in the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals? What does it mean to mainstream gender across the goals that we see? Yeah, they've kind of seen ubiquitously globally. And then the fourth point here is trying to understand the backdrop of neoliberalism and the West rising to this position harmony within international institutions. Very interestingly, as you can see as the COVID situation is evolving, we've seen international institutions like the WHO, being questioned, funding, threatening, member countries who have been historically funding and were part of the establishment of organizations are now threatening to cut funding. And that says a lot about the kind of ways in which the kind of post World War II context of development and the development of those institutions like the World Bank, WHO, the World Food Program, so many different institutions that emerged as being the kind of agents of development or coordinated international development are now finding themselves being marginalized by the nation-states who have been funding them. And it says a lot about how the global stage is not, it's not an empty kind of canvas. It's a place where ideological battles are also fought. And gender is very much a part of that. Can you see the next slide? There we go. Okay, so if we look at gender across time and think about capitalism and policy discourse, this is an important kind of, I think three images to maybe consider what this would mean. The first is obviously on the left looking at the advertisement from the Ceylon Tea Company. And here it's, you know, you can see, you can obviously, this is, we're not doing a kind of analysis of the image in itself, but if you look at the kind of rhetoric and the kind of ways it's trying to mark two cups in one, it's kind of marketing the, and also looking at the worker, I'm looking at the female worker here, who someplace in, you know, what is now Ceylon, you know, produce strength, flavor, aroma and purity is celebrating these products that are being produced, the resources, the raw materials that are emerging out of the imperial colonial plantation economy. To the right-hand side of the women who, again, working, you can see the tea leaves in their hands are showing and looking as though they're having a good time working, but they're also working in the tea plantations and looking at that regime of production, the way that it's almost a seamless kind of continuity across, which is in both of these images, instrumentalizing gender, where capitalism, you know, was driving the colonial endeavor to go and find new resources, new markets, and women were not always seen as victims. They were being included through the civilizing mission, of course, in terms of banning certain cultural practices. So in this context, in the South Asian context, we'd see the banning of practices such as child marriage or dowry or bride burning or female infanticide. The late 19th century had many kinds of legal interventions that were there to kind of show that the British colonial state was bringing civilization to these parts of the world while the economy was being reshaped and it was being reshaped and molded for the global political economy, which was, of course, under the colonial direction. Now, if we say that these two may show some continuities, if you look on the bottom right, we look at this as being this, this is also part of the Unilever advert as the same as above, which is also tagging on the SDGs. So a company of multinational corporation like Unilever is simultaneously tapping into, and it's part of the continuity of the colonial economy, as we know, but it's also part of global discourse on sustainability. It's not talking about gender explicitly here in terms of the SDGs it mentions, but it's certainly instrumentalizing the idea of gender and women as workers and bringing them into the economy as active contributors to the economy. Now, in another context, we might look at biopolitics and these are kind of some theoretical ideas which we apply to different places in the world. Okay, so this is an area of research that I've done, which is looking at the sex ratio, and behind that is this idea that sex selection, the performance of sex selective abortions might be resulting in increasing masculine sex ratio and this line here shows us on the bottom in the graph that as the total population average is kind of showing an improvement in terms of the sex ratio, we can see that at the age of zero to six, it's going down. Now, why am I showing you this? The reason I'm showing it, because it's actually a very stark example of individual sex ratio, it's a very stark example of intervention. So when we think about development and intervention, oftentimes you'll think, okay, this is social policy. We're looking at a post 2000 Washington consensus point where the human face of capitalism was being implemented through social ministries of social development. So most countries ended up setting up in some form or another some form of social development if they didn't already have these bodies. And in the Indian context, the ministries of social development and the departments for women and child welfare became part of the kind of projection of this idea of the girl child. And it dated back to 1990 when UNICEF, you can see the stamp there, set up the decade for the girl child where it was identified that the girl child is the most deprived, the most excluded, whose life chances were the most depleted. And therefore the state came in and said, we will do a number of different regimes, we can't have time here to explain, but to come in and make certain interventions. And the places at which this intervention took place were in 1994 and 2003. And those are the point where we see the two lines crossing is where we see the interventions actually having a negative effect. So as the state comes in and criminalizes, for instance, sex-selective abortion, you can see that in fact, the practice is likely to have occurred in more underground pathways. On the other hand, we see on the top, there's a banking scheme that the government introduced. It started in 2015, which is called, say, the girl child, educate the girl child, which brought in the private banking system as natural partners. And so this is an example of neoliberalism so it's bringing together biopolitics, the state control population, but it's also bringing in private actors, such as the private banking sector in India, to incentivize the birth of girl children by giving a payment at the time of birth to the parents at the point when she would be carrying on with her education from the age of 10, 11, before she'd go, which is the dropout rate where it's the highest at the age of 10, 11. And then finally, age of 18, when girls would be either at 18 or 21 when they'd be at the age of marriage. And the scheme very clearly showed that this is going to be the state's contribution to the dowry, which is a kind of cultural, or the gendered kind of ways in which women are tied to patrimony. So it's not progressive. It's not arguing we're gonna end dowry. It's actually working culture and very gendered notions of the half-family and womanhood all into capitalism. And this is really what we're looking at now. And so the picture becomes very muddled when we see that neoliberal development is now a thing. It's now a concept, which is here, there and everywhere. So when corporations are also on board, NGOs are having to look for funding. We can see that it's a very mixed picture. And when we think about neoliberal development, to just give you a definition about what that is in neoliberal turn, it's the withdrawal of the state from welfare and a shrinking role of the state in terms of provision in a public health care education and social services. So the state over the last few decades through structural adjustment, there are a number of other packages which have seen a real overhauling of the post-colonial state, the state that post-colonial state that had been struggling in many ways to recover from colonialism and to build national economies is now being shrunk even further. And so here we see a heightened presence of private forces in traditionally public realms. And it's here that the neoliberal state can often also take on repressive features. So another example, and I'm sure most of you would have heard of this before, the number of corporate social responsibility campaigns where the corporations are actually required to show that they're doing something for a society. And so corporate social responsibility, CSR, is people would say is a way for corporations or otherwise doing things very unethically are able to funnel their profits into work that is doing good for society. So on the left, you can see the kind of sweatshop with many documentaries on that. The clean clothes campaign, for instance, is another which highlight the ways in which trainers, other kinds of apparel are produced in sweatshop contexts in special economic zones where labor laws are not abided to, where trade unions are illegal. And where labor is seen, feminine labor is further feminized but also undervalued. And these are the places where corporations are also maximizing their profits. But simultaneously also be seen to be engaging in the campaign that common sense I mentioned before, girls being likely, and this image here on the right as being the key symbol for development. Not all of the slides are showing here. I'm sorry there, I had another image but it's not there. Okay, that's all right. So there are a number of things when we look at them. I've given you some examples that are out there in the world in terms of corporations and the neoliberal context that is really everywhere. Neoliberalism as a concept is capitalism in its kind of sharpened heightened state but it is the system. And so for those of us who are studying development and we do study dependency theory and structuralism, a number of different competing frameworks. But what we're finding increasingly is that we are operating within a neoliberal global context and therefore we need to share our tools and our skills in order to be able to understand, how do we work in this system in addressing structures that underlie the politics of development? So there are historical connections and relations of power between what's so-called global north and global south and lots of different other terminologies depending on how you are mapping whatever dynamics you're looking at. So empire, coloniality, they haven't gone away. And many economies are still locked into producing raw materials on very unfair and uneven terms of trade. We also see economic and political institutions that have been historically aligned to states that benefited from colonization and we can see the ways in which many countries are still paying back debts that are tied to those histories which are accumulating interest and how that impacts the ways in which any country is able to do its own planning. We also are interested then in looking at the social dynamics. So class, race, gender and how social dynamics are also a key site for the reproduction of inequality. We can see a persistence of systemic processes as a result. So when we don't question the underlying politics or the underlying structures, then we're all we're doing is making a superficial kind of intervention which will just continue to reproduce and perpetuate those. And I think that probably if I wanted to say in a nutshell kind of talks about how and why doing a critical approach towards development and not just doing development studies but doing understanding it through the political economy and the politics of development is absolutely essential. So I'm just gonna now briefly just talk about the program in particular. Why study development studies as class and why do it online? I've got an image here of our lovely Senate House and we're hoping well it's going to be due to be opening again soon in the next couple of weeks is that our online programs reflect the kinds of critical approaches and perspectives in the same way that our programs on campus do. We have a really good pedagogy I think in terms of the distance learning which I mean you're free to ask afterwards about how it works with distance learning is that people are all over the world and we work with an assumption that people are based and might be busy at different times or available at different times so that you are able to benefit from being in that kind of in that learning space. So we have a global network of students many of whom are already working in international development and are working while they're studying also. And I think that also enriches the engagements and interactions in terms of our discussion forums that you participated. The people are coming from lots of different geographical places but also from very different points of perception in terms of understanding the problems at hand that we think about. Overall, it's a guided curriculum if I had to just in any way with flexible self-learning and it's through this then that we set up a kind of structure through our virtual learning environment where it's activities which are basically assignments or assessments which are broken down as kind of building blocks and they eventually, as we've seen very successfully that students become equipped very quickly with very good analytical and written skills. Okay, so I've kind of rushed through that. I wanted to just give you a taste of some of the kinds of questions that we look at but I'd be more than happy to answer any questions if anyone has.