The highlight of 2024 was undoubtedly the annual conference DSA2024, which was organised and hosted by SOAS, University of London. This was our second hybrid format conference which allowed people to attend both in-person and online, allowing for greater inclusion. The conference attracted a record-breaking number of delegates, with 694 delegates attending to enjoy 461 paper presentations and three plenary sessions. If you missed out you can read about the highlights of the keynotes at DSA2024. Many thanks to our journal sponsors, the Journal of Development Studies, Oxford Development Studies and the Journal of International Development, and to SOAS, University of London, whose generous support enabled us to extend fee waivers and funding to colleagues based in the global South. 

Post-conference, the DSA provided a space for reflection and discussion of three clusters of critiques in relation to the risk the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism poses to scholars and practitioners in the field of development.

We hosted a public webinar: on Decolonising Development Studies and the Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations which explored how research collaborations require us all to go beyond the standard terms and conditions.  Following this webinar, we were proud to become signatories to the Africa Charter and we continue working with stakeholders to ensure transformative research collaborations.

At DSA2024, we launched DSA’s online Decolonising Development Directory, which already has over 50 members and is a place for a global network of scholars who take decolonised approaches to development studies. The Directory is open access and members are free to contact one another independently regarding potential collaborations.

DSA won funding from the Academy of Social Sciences to continue its ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ audit of the development studies sector. The next phase will look to focus support on early career academics of colour.

We awarded our PhD thesis and Master’s dissertation prizes at the annual conference with congratulations to Ana Palma Garcia and Francesca Chiu. The prizes are a great opportunity to increase the profile of graduate students’ work and also an demonstration of the inspiring quality of new researchers coming into development studies.

In order to continue to improve connectivity with students and ECRs of our institutional members, additional student representatives from several more of our institutional members were selected in 2024. There are currently 17 reps across 14 institutions liaising with our two Council student representatives to reinvigorate initiatives for students and ECRs. 

Our Study Groups continue to organise online and in-person events. This past year saw events outside of the annual conference for the study groups focusing on Land; Urbanisation; Scotland; and Politics & Political Economy. Additionally many study groups developed special issues and compilations for books from earlier DSA panels.

There have been two further publications within the DSA-OUP book series: The Spectre of State Capitalism and Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governance.

DSA has three new DSA Council members elected at the last AGM. Claire Mcloughlin, Kamna Patel and Ibrahim Natil are now working on the key areas of communications, governance and study groups respectively with the DSA. You can always find our governance documents, including AGM minutes and last year end accounts on the website.

The DSA held its annual meeting online with many of our institutional member Heads in October to create a community amongst Heads of Centres facing similar challenges and opportunities. We have held one-to-one meetings with many of our members to help you get to know them better as well as learn more about them; you can read about: CDS Bath, IDD Birmingham, IGDC York, IGHD Edinburgh, SOAS Development, and Sussex, that we spoke to in 2024. All other spotlights can be found on our Members page.

2025 looks set to be just as diverse and interesting for the DSA. A highlight will be the June DSA2025 annual conference. This will be a hybrid event, offering online and in-person attendance and is hosted and organised by DSA foundation member, the University of Bath‘s Centre for Development Studies as they celebrate their 50th anniversary.

We hope to release new ways for members to engage with DSA Council on issues that matter to members as well as provide more opportunities for members to contribute blogs on our website. The DSA is your membership association, so let us know if you have ideas for articles, blogs, events or webinars.