Our experts
Dr Anna Laing
Lecturer in International Development
Research interests
Conflict and resources, Development studies, environmental movements, indigenous peoples, Latin America, Political geography, Postcolonial/Decolonial theory, Social movements
Dr Pedram Rowhani
Senior Lecturer in Geography
Research interests
Climate Impact, Food Security, GIS Mapping, Land Cover Change, Land Use Change, Remote Sensing & Earth Observation
Course enquiries
+44 (0)1273 877686
globalstudiespg@sussex.ac.uk
Dissertation (Food and Development)
- 45 credits
- Summer Teaching, Year 1
Critical Debates in Development Theory
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1
During this module you will examine the theories associated with modernisation, dependency, participatory approaches, post-modernism and all-encompassing 'globalisation'.
You will explore how our thinking about development has changed over time and why it has changed. While theoretical in orientation, you will consider through seminar discussions that the division between 'theory' and 'practice' is to some extent misleading.
Food Politics and Development
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1
This module introduces you to food as an outstanding development issue that concerns hunger, food insecurity, malnutrition, sustainability, power politics, social justice and cultural identity. Food is about the hard trade-offs that the globalisation era has brought about. The module highlights its political nature that stems from the unequal organisation of food systems and distribution of resources and from contestations over ways to address food challenges that give rise to competing paradigms. It draws on distinct theoretical and empirical contributions to analyse food challenges, from a development perspective. Following a critical approach that considers alternative narratives and framings, the module engages with a range of contemporary issues on food and development, at global and local levels and across North and South.
Research Methods and Professional Skills (Int Dev)
- 15 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
This module provides you with training in social science research methods (generic as well as specific to your dissertation research) as well as with a set of professional skills that prepare you for a professional career. The module is run as a series of half-day workshops from which you select three workshops to match your specific needs depending on disciplinary orientation, previous training and experience, future employment plans and personal interests. The workshops will cover a wide range of topics. The social research methods workshops will include interviewing, ethnographic methods, participatory research techniques and questionnaire design. The professional skills workshops will include, for example, stakeholder engagement, sustainable livelihoods analysis, environmental impact assessment, project planning and private sector consulting. The professional skills will also help to prepare you if you plan to take a work placement over the summer. As part of the module, you will also receive a workshop on dissertation planning and design.
Dissertation with Placement (Global Studies)
- 45 credits
- Summer Teaching, Year 1
This module is designed to allow you to apply theories and concepts, as well as practical and research skills learned during the MA programme, to a work context in the UK or internationally. It takes the form of a 12-week work placement with an organisation working in a field relevant to the degree programme, normally undertaken from May-July after assessments on other courses are completed.
Anthropologies of Food
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
You will focus on diverse aspects of anthropological approaches to food, encompassing production, exchange and consumption.
You will cover topics as diverse as agrarian transformations, organics, certifications and traceability, markets, class differentiation through consumption, health, and the body.
You'll use anthropological perspectives to unpack how food has come to symbolise sociality and cultural difference, and consider the tensions, conflicts and debates that have emerged – both in private and public life – over the values and moralities attached to food.
Climate Change and Development
- 15 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
This course provides you with an understanding of the science, politics and developmental implications of climate change and disasters, focusing on the perspectives of poor households, communities and developing countries. You will assess the overlaps between disasters, climate change and poverty, focusing on climate change adaptation and disaster risk-reduction approaches, critically analysing options to reduce negative effects and harness opportunities. You will also examine the social, political and economic drivers of vulnerability, considering how policy processes at different scales influence risk management activities and local coping strategies.
Climate Resilient Development
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
The course analyses the overlaps between disasters, climate change and poverty, focusing on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction approaches and their contribution to achieving climate resilient development. This course introduces you to key concepts underpinning climate resilient development, including vulnerability, risk, uncertainty, and resilience, as well as the role of climate and disasters science in informing policy and practice. Lectures will balance theoretical debates with issues in international policy, particularly the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and practical case study examples from development policy and practice.
Topics include: downscaling global climate data and dealing with uncertainty; impact modelling and sectoral planning approaches; seasonal forecasts and early warning; conceptual insights: vulnerability, risk, uncertainty and resilience; climate resilient development and international policy; community-based adaptation and national adaptation planning; climate change, migration and conflict; disaster risk reduction; mainstreaming and organisational change; adaptation delivery instruments; economics of adaptation and adaptation finance; and low carbon climate resilient development.
Critical Debates in Environment and Development
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
The aim of this module is to gain familiarity with cutting edge debates linking environment and development. A subsidiary aim is to develop research skills and in particular to develop skills in establishing analytical frameworks and the use of evidence. You should think critically about cutting edge topics. Current research has questioned much of the mainstream analysis of environmental problems and their social causes that now informs development policy and practice. This research emerges from environmental history, anthropology, remote-sensing, geography and non-equilibrium ecology, and from methods reflecting different social values (eg taking a pro-poor or politically marginalised perspective). It forces us to expose relations between power, environmental knowledge and environmental policy. This module considers and evaluates these challenges. We explore their significance for understanding the relationship between poverty, environmental science and policy, and consider how these relations are changing given the globalisation of environmental science and policy.
Topics vary each year as different issues arise. Issues addressed by the module are currently: forest policy and REDD+; biofuels and the land grabs; neoliberal approaches and ecosystem services; conflict and environmental change; coastal hazards and pollution; biotechnology and food security; 9 billion people and the resource crunch; and low carbon technology.
Fair Trade, Ethical Business & New Moral Economies
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
Where and under what conditions are our T-shirts produced? How does Fair Trade impact on the livelihoods of small farmers in the Global South? Is Corporate Social Responsibility just a marketing ploy? Has ethics become only a matter of personal consumption behaviour?
This module familiarises you with discourses and practices around ethics and engagement in the global economy. It covers some of the ways in which ethics in markets, trade and global production networks are phrased and expressed in the contemporary world, and explores what sorts of mobilisations have emerged in the light of new ethical concerns. You will explore the ways in which ethical issues within the sphere of the economy have long been articulated in terms of moral economy, philanthropic giving, and relationships of patronage and dependency. The module goes on to discusses the contemporary shift towards global trade and production networks, and the ways in which this shift has produced new ethical concerns around economic behaviour.
These concerns are increasingly (and differentially) expressed in terms of CSR, fair trade and ethical consumption. They also give rise to a series of engagements in terms of CSR interventions, ethical trade initiatives, civil society activism and critical consumption practices. You will assesses each of these initiatives from both a theoretical and an ethnographic perspective. You will also critically consider the implications of such engagements in terms of power, equality and gender, and the ways in which they emerge from and reproduce complex global interdependencies.
Nutrition
- 15 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
This module is intended to equip you with an understanding of: the causes, extent and distribution of global undernutrition and its consequences; what works in terms of direct and indirect interventions to address undernutrition; and mechanisms designed to raise the political profile, commitment and leadership behind undernutrition reduction.
The module will be taught by a mixture of lectures and seminars and will be grouped under the following topics:
- Introduction to course: the nature of undernutrition - determinants and consequences
- What works: immediate level interventions
- What works: underlying indirect interventions
- Addressing the basic causes - approaches to the politics and economics of undernutrition
- The enabling environment: transforming leadership, commitment and resources, the role of metrics, accountability mechanisms and real time surveillance
You will be encouraged to participate actively and reflect on your learning throughout the module through non-assessed groupwork. To assess individual progress a final assessment will be held at the end of the course.
Sustainability and Policy Processes: Issues in Agriculture, Environment and Health
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
Delivered jointly with SPRU, this course provides you with an in-depth analysis of the relationship between knowledge, power and policy processes. Initially you will examine the historical and philosophical roots of key environmental, science and policy debates. A case study approach explores real-life examples from forestry, pastoral development, health service delivery, vaccines, occupational disease, agricultural biotechnology, water resources and biodiversity conservation. In exploring the cases, the focus is on the interrelationships between local contexts, community involvement and wider national and international policy processes influencing livelihood outcomes.