Our Aims and Objectives
We are the UK association for all those who research, study and teach global development issues
Find Out MorePhD students are invited to apply for one of 16 places to participate in a Masterclass preceding the DSA2025 conference, where they will receive expert feedback on their PhD project and key issues emanating from their work.
They are required to submit a long abstract (up to 500 words) briefly outlining their PhD project and the key challenge to focus on (for example, gender and development, methodologies such as decolonising development, labour, work and precarity, international organisations and agenda setting, environment and climate change).
N.B. This is only open to current PhD students.
Please do not send anything longer than 500 words.
Application process
Deadline for applications: 1 April, 2025
All those wishing to participate in the PhD Masterclass MUST also register and pay to attend the DSA2025 conference. As PhD students you are eligible to apply for funding to assist with registration and participation costs at the conference. The call for funding closes on 13 March – you can apply via our website before you receive the decision on your Masterclass application.
Applicants will be notified by 28 April with the committee’s decision.
The masterclass sessions are highly popular and demand exceeds the number of places available. The DSA regrets that not everyone who applies will be allocated a place and priority will be given to those applicants whose work aligns closely with the conference theme.
Each successful applicant will have 45 minutes allocated to them in the Masterclass.
This time will be used to give a short presentation (10 mins), engage with feedback from a discussant (5 mins) and participate in a more general discussion around the issues raised. The aim is for participants to receive excellent, focused feedback, from the experts/discussants and audience members, but also to highlight issues that may be common to other researchers in the audience so we can collectively consider how to address them.
Five sessions will run in parallel from 10:00 – 13:00 on the morning of June 24, chaired by members of the committee that selected the abstracts. Successful applicants must submit a four page paper by June 3, 2024 expanding on their abstract for the discussants to comment on and to share with people attending the Masterclass ahead of the conference.
Experts and discussants will be leading academics who are part of the DSA and/or the University of Bath.