Our Aims and Objectives
We are the UK association for all those who research, study and teach global development issues
Find Out MoreThe conference theme is detailed below. However, the conference is also open to submissions outside the conference theme of relevance to current development theory and practice, or topics covered by DSA Study Groups, even if these are not strongly aligned to the theme.
Theme summary: The DSA2025 conference explores ways in which development theories and practices, contested epistemologies and methodological challenges confront crises and uncertainty, and contribute (or not) to new opportunities for positive change.
The world has been experiencing profoundly unsettling times and compounding experiences of crisis in the continual unfolding of capitalist development. Alongside rising inequalities, inflation, and enforced austerity, people have been subjected to an admixture of dangers: escalating wars, polarised politics, recurring health emergencies, and deepening ecological crises. Policy makers are increasingly referring to a ‘polycrisis’, where global risks come together to exceed the sum of their parts. Yet, alongside profound dangers, crises always generate commensurate opportunities for transformation and positive change. We invite reflections on how this danger/opportunity dialectic at the heart of crisis and capitalism is playing out in the field of development.
The world has been experiencing profoundly unsettling times and compounding experiences of crisis in the continual unfolding of capitalist development. Alongside rising inequalities, inflation, and enforced austerity, people have been subjected to an admixture of dangers: escalating wars, polarised politics, recurring health emergencies, and deepening ecological crises. Policy makers are increasingly referring to a ‘polycrisis’, where global risks come together to exceed the sum of their parts. Yet, alongside profound dangers, crises always generate commensurate opportunities for transformation and positive change. We invite reflections on how this danger/opportunity dialectic at the heart of crisis and capitalism is playing out in the field of development.
Crisis, uncertainty, and opportunities can all be defined and monitored in multiple ways, but also retain more elusive normative and emotional content. To identify a crisis is to emphasise some aspects of change over others. To highlight uncertainty is to challenge the certainty of others. Governments’ and policy makers’ new interest in the polycrisis, for many, problematically assumes a prior baseline of certainty and stability. For marginalised communities around the world – especially but not only in the Global South – experiences of overlapping, compounding crises are nothing novel.
To plan is to prioritise. Hope may be a wellspring of collective action, but does it also reflect shared cognitive bias towards optimism – a need to believe? And what are the implications of dystopian views that challenge the hopes of others? Whose interests do they serve? Who is best positioned to find solutions to the polycrisis? What can we learn from marginalised communities who have long experienced the uncertainty of overlapping problems?
Development Studies builds in part on normative expectations of improvement, as well as belief in rational action to address historical challenges and to dispel uncertainty. It also encourages critical analysis, deconstruction, and reflexivity in assessing both past and future processes of change, not least as an input into new ways of thinking, of framing expectations, generating hope, and inspiring new forms of collective action.
At DSA 2025, we invite colleagues to wrestle with the ways in which development theories and practices, contested epistemologies and methodological challenges confront crises and uncertainty, and contribute (or not) to new opportunities for positive change.
Questions that might arise from this theme and be addressed in papers and panels include: