2014-2015 Academic Catalog

Apr 30, 2024

2014-2015 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

IDCE 30254 - Gender, Power and the Challenge of Measuring Social Change

This seven-week module explores the development practitioner’s challenge in seeking to understand, and measure, changes in women’s empowerment. As such, it will explore how practitioners seeking to carry out rights-based research engage (often for the first time) deeply contested ideas on gender, justice, and social change in their work, and equally contested ideas of measurement, proof, and persuasion in the world of impact research. Woven through the case material and readings is the inescapable theme of power – how it operates in the lives of women in poor societies, in the concepts and constructs of the development enterprise, and in the exercise of research and impact assessment. The seminar will require students to tack back and forth between academic and political discourses around aid effectiveness and accountability, and the choices, challenges, and tradeoffs a practitioner makes in trying to build credible, robust, and transformational impact research.