Matt Baillie Smith

Mediating the World: Development, Education and Global Citizenship.

Academic debate around transnational concepts such as globalization and development has not been matched by interrogation of their public roles in the ‘North’. Despite this, a range of governmental policies are emerging in the UK focused on engendering global citizenship and educating about ‘global’ and ‘development’ issues. This paper explores the connections between discourses of development and citizenship. Focusing particularly on the roles of International Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs) in engendering understanding of development it explores the processes of mediation within and outside NGDOs that shape this understanding and hence the possibilities for global citizenship that follow. For development is much more than just a socio-economic endeavour; it is a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions. (Sachs, 1992a, pp. 1–2)Academic debate around transnational concepts such as globalization and development has not been matched by interrogation of their public roles in the ‘North’. Despite this, a range of governmental policies are emerging in the UK focused on engendering global citizenship and educating about ‘global’ and ‘development’ issues. This paper explores the connections between discourses of development and citizenship. Focusing particularly on the roles of International Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs) in engendering understanding of development it explores the processes of mediation within and outside NGDOs that shape this understanding and hence the possibilities for global citizenship that follow. For development is much more than just a socio-economic endeavour; it is a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions. (Sachs, 1992a, pp. 1–2)

What Counts as Development Research

This chapter explores what counts as research on development and argues for a challenge to conceptions which continue to define it geographically rather than systemically. It is argued that, despite an apparent openness and fluidity, qualitative research on development tends to be understood as referring to ‘field research’ in the South.1 This can constrain the boundaries of development research, what is understood to be development and also the critical capacity of qualitative approaches to development. Challenging the traditional definitions and boundaries of development research will open spaces for critical analysis and research, which can reshape development theory. It also allows for engagement with the widening set of practices, policies and social relations which have a bearing on development, but which have so far been largely excluded from qualitative research on development. However, for qualitative research to play a critical role in challenging these boundaries, we need to acknowledge the roles qualitative research on development already plays and has played, and the ways this is shaped by the contemporary and historical contexts, traditions and preoccupations of development research.

POWER, INEQUALITY, CHANGE AND UNCERTAINTY: VIEWING THE WORLD THROUGH THE DEVELOPMENT PRISM

In order to sustain our argument that a blending of visual sociology and the sociology of development can be productive and politically engaged, we need to locate the debate in the wider developmental context into which sociological interventions can be made. As this chapter will demonstrate, popular understandings of development, mostly mediated by visual imagery, reflect a rapidly changing development industry, as well as affording significant social theoretical insights. Thus, we need to briefly consider some of the key features of the development landscape, and the ways in which sociologists might engage in this, particularly in the context of the globalisation of development; the ways in which processes of globalisation are transforming the actors and agents involved in development, the roots of development authority and legitimacy and the changing ways in which development is defined and understood. This already hints at an important link with the visual; “development” must be understood as being linked to the same processes and relationships which underpin a world increasingly shaped by the visual image.

Negotiating Boundaries and Borders: Qualitative Methodology and Development Research

Section Contents Section 1: Negotiating boundaries of knowledge, authority and space Section 2: Negotiating boundaries of ethics and morality Section 3: Negotiating boundaries of research, practice and change

Her2 challenge contest: a detailed assessment of automated her2 scoring algorithms in whole slide images of breast cancer tissues

Evaluating expression of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) by visual examination of immunohistochemistry (IHC) on invasive breast cancer (BCa) is a key part of the diagnostic assessment of BCa due to its recognized importance as a predictive and prognostic marker in clinical practice. However, visual scoring of HER2 is subjective, and consequently prone to interobserver variability. Given the prognostic and therapeutic implications of HER2 scoring, a more objective method is required. In this paper, we report on a recent automated HER2 scoring contest, held in conjunction with the annual PathSoc meeting held in Nottingham in June 2016, aimed at systematically comparing and advancing the state‐of‐the‐art artificial intelligence (AI)‐based automated methods for HER2 scoring.

Civil society activists and vulnerability in South India: the relational politics of life history methods and development research

Abstract Life history methods are gaining popularity in Development research, linked to attempts to capture narratives marginalised by dominant accounts of Development. In this paper, we reflect on using life history methods with NGO activists in India. We explore how this approach led us to develop particular understandings of the participants as ‘vulnerable’, and the implications of this for the research process and the knowledges it produced. We explore how activists’ individual biographies were interwoven with institutional narratives, complicating but also enriching our understanding of activists’ experiences of Development. Secondly, we analyse the relationality of our subjects’ vulnerability and our own positionality as global North Development scholars. We reflect on how our engagement with Development actors we consider as vulnerable takes place through and against the relational histories and presents that brought us together. We explore the implications of this for the ways the research created both discursive and physical spaces for meeting and talking, and what this means for our approach to vulnerability. This requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement that Development research may reproduce vulnerabilities, even as it seeks to challenge them. The paper contributes to broader theorising of vulnerability, recognising vulnerability as embedded in the relationalities of the research moment.

Global citizenship and development: from benevolence to global justice

This chapter presents a critical challenge to the celebration of global citizenship and its role in development. Exploring how ideas of global citizenship have played a key role in the recent popularisation of development, I show how its mainstreaming can reinforce citizenships rooted in ideas of benevolent responsibility for the other. Using research on development education and international volunteering, I demonstrate how global citizenship has become depoliticised, and how development is used to achieve wider personal, corporate, and state objectives in relation to citizenship. In this chapter, I argue that looking beyond popular global citizenship initiatives reveals a range of emerging and existent global citizenships of importance to redefining development in terms of global justice.

Globalisation and local experience : encounters with difference in a UK school

This paper explores issues of identity, difference and globalisation in the micro-political context of a UK school. Drawing on ethnographic data and theoretical perspectives from the sociology of education, development and globalisation, the paper takes the communication of the ‘Third World’ in the curriculum as a case study of the ways in which UK schools engage with difference. Thus, the paper goes beyond the traditional focus on ‘race’ and ethnicity, emphasising the importance of distant difference in the context of globalisation. It is suggested that whilst teachers may identify local and global factors as underpinning the need to engender critical engagements with difference, the realisation of this is complex; the communication of the ‘Third World’ in the school is characterised by contradiction, reinforcing as well as unsettling ethnocentrism. To understand this situation, we need to locate these contradictions in terms of the complex interplay of restructuring processes, policy frameworks and the micro-politics of the school. The paper highlights the impacts of increased assessment and measurement in education alongside policy contradictions around curriculum authority. Teacher empowerment in the articulation of an appropriate curriculum is identified as a priority.