240090 KU GM3 - Development Theories and Paradigms from a Transdisciplinary Perspective (2025W)

Interventions in gender relations and social gender orders are an essential aspect of the politics of development. Since the UN World Women Conferences in the 1980s and 1990s, gender has also become a category that is taken into account in development concepts and practices, such as development planning, the formulation of goals, and the design of measures. At the same time, feminist thinkers and activists in many regions of the world are agents of social change and initiatives for social, economic, ecological, and global justice. The criticism of Western-dominated knowledge production by non-Western feminist theorists points to a number of important issues, such as the plurality of identities/differences; the intersectionality of race, class, and gender; the question of the universalizability of the concept of gender; the significance of religion and spirituality; the question of communal versus individualistic values and practices; questions of distributive justice and the hegemony of the Western world (economically, politically, academically); the coloniality of knowledge and the question of the situatedness of knowledge.
The aim of this course is to familiarize students with feminist thought and debates outside Europe and North America and to learn to think development theories and paradigms through the lens of intercultural feminist theory and gender studies. To this end, we will examine key topics, concepts, and analyses of feminist theories in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Arab-Islamic world.
The following topics will be addressed using selected authors and texts:
- Approaches to gender and development in the field of development studies
- Postcolonial theory, feminism and decolonization, critical whiteness
- Feminist theory in Africa
- Feminist theory in Latin America
- Feminist theory and Islam
- Coloniality of gender and alternative sexualities
- Connections between ecology, gender justice, and global justice
In addition to structured inputs by the course leaders, the students will study basic positions through text analysis. The aim of this text analysis is to go beyond simply engaging with content and to familiarize students with basic positions, apply and practice methods of critical analysis and interpretation, practice argumentation, and thoroughly engage with a concept.