Kamna Patel

University College London | UCL · Development Planning Unit

Kalpana Wilson’s (2023) article highlights pivotal moves in discourses to decolonise development, focusing on how essentialist and racist readings of decoloniality circulate in development spaces and in Brahmanical Hindu supremacist discourse. Building upon Wilson’s insights, this reply delves into the body-politics of race where diversity in devel...

In considering how knowledge reproduces the dynamics of coloniality in Geography, scholars have looked beyond the Global North and Global South as cartographical sites, instead seeing them as conceptual frameworks and epistemic positions. Building on this rich work, we draw attention to specific issues obscured within it. Whilst geographical schola...

The short chapter traces the racial hierarchy of development drawing on critical discussions of eugenics in Britain and its colonies to illuminate how and where eugenics-inspired thinking permeate in the normative pursuit of development.

We are at a moment of growing critical self-reflection in the field of development studies—heightened by debates on decolonization—that is opening up difficult conversations on teaching, learning and knowledge production for development studies education. This special issue augments these conversations and revisits development studies education wit...

This article unpacks how ‘development’ is represented and sold in postgraduate development studies courses at two UK universities, based on a close reading of the course’s marketing materials and interviews with professional marketing staff within the university, academic leads on development studies courses and current development studies students...

In this Viewpoint we explore and speculate on the value of development researchers at what is an extraordinary moment in the relationship between UK universities and public research funding from UK Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) in the period following massive cuts to the state aid budget in March 2021. We anchor our exploration in structura...

This paper reviews and revives a longstanding conversation about race and development studies, which was prominently explored in a collection of papers on race and racism in the journal Progress in Development Studies back in 2006. This revival is timely in the context of a global call to decolonise higher education. Given the central logic of race...

‘Housing’ is a concept, and so means much more than a structure that we call a house, flat, apartment, bungalow, condominium or room. Housing is closely related to ideas on basic standards of living (such as the services that ought to accompany a structure, including water, electricity and security of tenure); quality of life (i.e. does housing ena...

Patel, Desai, Kothari … to those literate in the workings of caste these names describe a network and its power in relation to other networks, they infer the rules of engagement within and between network members, and they ascribe a geographical terrain to home. In research, rules of behaviour and assumptions of place that are coded into names can...

UK higher education institutions (HEIs) are in competition with each other and HEIs across the globe for fee-paying students within a higher education model that promotes neoliberal values of individualism and competition in a global free market. This creates the conditions for the neoliberal university to actively market itself and its products in...

Tenure security systems—which determine who lives where and under what terms and conditions—are processes of governance that make and effect the relationship between those who confer tenure security and those on who tenure security is conferred. Yet, in dominant analyses of land and housing tenure security, and in policy recommendations for propert...

Development studies employs theories, tools and methods often found in geography, including the international field trip to a “developing” country. In 2013 and 2014, I led a two-week trip to Ethiopia. To better comprehend the effects of “the field” on students’ learning, I introduced an assessed reflexive field diary to understand what the field tr...

The delivery of housing to low income citizens across South Africa reflects the state’s realisation of citizens’ social rights to housing and can help to strengthen a citizen’s sense of belonging. Additionally, through the very processes of housing delivery, such as decentralised mechanisms with strong community participation, principles of inclusi...

In situ slum upgrades implemented through community participation are widely considered global best practice in efforts to significantly improve the lives of at least 100 million shack dwellers. This paper scrutinises the process and impact of community participation in a slum upgrade in Durban. Based on data from an ethnographic study of Zwelisha,...

Studies of tenure security and insecurity tend to focus on the lack of tenure rights for certain groups in society. This discourse of rights is often legalistic and engenders a logical relationship between tenure security and formal tenure rights. The legal guarantee of tenure security through a title deed, for example, is couched in theories of a...