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Welcome to Gender and Development. This free open course is part Deakin University unit ADH714: Gender and Development. It will provide you with a taste of the broader Masters of …
Course: Gender and Development
Rostow’s theory of growth
Is economic growth a framework for change or a single narrative? Development as it is known today (whether envisaged as an ideology or an aspiration) emerged as a priority following …
Gender inequity and the change imperative
Deep in the heart of development work is a desire to change, and to realise social justice. It’s that impulse that banker Sheryl WuDunn and her partner, journalist Nicholas Kristof, …
Narratives, theories and their impact
Welcome to Week 2 of Gender and Development. Building on our learning from last week, this week we’ll focus on: different ways in which a single story focus may arise …
Week 1 summary
This week we set-out to investigate some of the threshold concepts related to gender and development. These relate back to the key questions we started the course with, including: how …
Putting gender and development together
As we’ve discussed across this week, there’s a danger in presenting a single story about gender and/or development. Assumptions about gender and sexuality intersect with assumed knowledge about different cultures, …
How do gender norms create inequality?
Gender categories and norms are dynamic, but difference is often a disadvantage. Gender is not shorthand for women. Men are also trapped by gender norms as are other groups perceived …
What is gender?
Assumptions and biases distort how we think about and perceive experiences of gender. So, how can we think critically about the concept of gender? From the 1960s feminists, drawing on …
Assumptions and Gender
Our assumptions and assumed ‘truths’ create single stories of gender. Children are still mostly dressed in ways deemed appropriate to their biological sex. While we may think we have shaken …
Single stories
Certain narratives gain traction and narrow our thinking. Stories are powerful. They can present a complex situation in an engaging human way. Sometimes they are too simple and a particular …
So, what is development?
Development is an industry, a sector, a set of institutions, a mode of practice, a set of aspirations. It is also a concept that emanated from the so-called ‘developed’ world …
Colonialism: origins of a development narrative
Colonialism created a development context based on foreign expansion. So where did the story, ie the narrative, of development come from? To discover this, we need to go back to …
Potential of gender and development: a practitioner’s perspective
Gender and development practitioners experience successes and challenges, but where might we be heading and how could development and gender equity be integrated in practice? This video features a case …
Learning online with Deakin
Deakin’s online courses are based on a few, but important, learning principles. To get the most out of this course, we encourage you to keep in mind the following. Our …
Reflect on your learning
Reflecting on the problems of a single story has created a rich conversation. In this course we’ve explored how the construction of a single story affects the way we think …
