Graduate Programs
DS Department Undergraduate Group
Internships
Career Services
DS Reading List
The Department Undergraduate Group (DUG)
The DS DUG is an organization lead by undergraduate DS concentrators serving the dual purpose of organizing DS-related campus-wide events and advocating for increased university resources to continue the expansion of the DS program.
In recent years, the DS DUG has organized debates, comparative panels, peer academic advising forums, student-faculty socials and mentoring for graduate and career opportunities in development. For the 2008-2009 academic year, we are proud to launch a Development Studies Colloquium Series.
The DS Colloquium Series aims to bring together scholars and practitioners in panel form to share their expertise on a diverse range of pertinent development issues, including the impact of our nation's financial crisis on lesser developed countries, rapid urbanization, institutional corruption and the impact of migration on brain drain. The Series is unique in its engagement of both development scholars and practitioners to discuss topics of shared interest. Further, it will provide an unparalleled opportunity for students interested in development to share perspectives on their own personal research and receive simultaneous feedback from both ends of the development spectrum. More details to come soon!
Accomplishments of the DS DUG’s campus outreach and advocacy include the expansion of both faculty and course selections, including the permanent creation of the DS Program Director position and DS-specific courses in methodology, economics and a sophomore seminar.
The DS DUG leaders for the 2008-09 academic year are:
Alison Fairbrother (’09)
Rebecca Kim (’10)
Caroline Mailloux (‘08.5)
Thane Richard (’09)
Yasmine Yu (’10)
For more information on upcoming events, getting involved, donating, suggesting or collaborating on an event and receiving peer concentration advising, please contact:
BrownDSDUG@gmail.com
- DS DUG
- Brown Journal of World Affairs
- Office of International Affairs (OIA)
- Watson Institute Internships
- International Scholars Program
- Research at Brown (RAB) Grants
- Brown Internship Award Program (BIAP/AIO)
- Pembroke Center Research Grants/Internships
- Career Development Center
- Swearer Center for Public Service Fellowships
- DS Reading List
Career Services
Career Development at BrownA Development Studies Reading List
What books do students of development read? A small and somewhat arbitrary list, to be updated.
Amartya Sen. Development as Freedom . 1999.
An argument for focusing on improving human capabilities (rather than just growth) in promoting development by the Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher.
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyn Huber and John Stephens. Capitalist Development and Democracy . 1992.
The definitive study of the social and historical roots of democracy, with case studies of Europe , Latin America and the Carribean. It's the working class, stupid!
John Harriss. Depoliticizing Development . 2002.
How the World Bank appropriated and made a mess of an important social science concept - social capital.
Peter Evans. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation . 1999.
Why and how states matter for economic development, with case studies of Brazil , India and South Korea .
Arturo Escobar. Encountering Development: the making and unmaking of the Third World . 1995.
The seminal post-colonial critique of development as discourse and power.
James Ferguson. The Anti-politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho . 1994.
Foucault goes to Lesotho . A brilliant case study of a development project gone amuck, and why cattle aren't just cattle.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil . 1992.
Poverty is violence: a powerful and searing ethnography of gender, class and why babies die in the Northeast of Brazil.
James Scott. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance . 1985.
The ravages of capitalism as seen from below, and how peasants fight back and lose. In Malaysia .
James Scott. Seeing Like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed . 1998.
The subtitle says it all. Beware the technocrats and weak civil societies.
Mahmood Mamdani. Citizen and Subject: decentralized despotism and the legacy of late colonialism . 1997.
Award winning exploration of the colonial roots of the democratic problem in sub-Saharan Africa .
Barrington Moore . Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. 1967.
The classic study of the social origins of democracy. It's the peasantry, stupid!
Joel Migdal. Strong Societies and Weak States : state-society relations and state capabilities in the Third World . 1988.
Why is it so difficult to make the state work in much of the developing world? Paradigmatic.
Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. 1944.
What happens when markets are not restrained by social institutions?
The most important book of our times?
