Development Studies

Entry requirements

The equivalent of at least a high 2:1 degree in the British university system. The Admissions Committee takes into account factors in addition to academic qualifications, and attainment of the minimum academic requirement does not guarantee admission to the programme.

Months of entry

October

Course content

The MPhil in Development Studies seeks to provide students with a critical and reflexive program that eschews the norm. This approach to development enables a rethinking of who benefits from explicit and implicit contemporary approaches, allowing for a repositioning of who development is for. This MPhil aims, then, to give students a rich and inspired program that will allow them to build an approach to development that is grounded in thoughtfulness and reflection of the historical, racial and political terms of the paradigm as it stands.

The MPhil in Development Studies is taught within the Centre of Development Studies and in collaboration with the Centres of African Studies, South Asian Studies, and Latin American Studies, as well as the Faculty of Economics, the Departments of Land Economy, Geography, Politics and International Studies, Social Anthropology, and the Judge Business School. It, therefore, provides a framework within which students can construct a pathway suited to a wide range of different interests and needs, drawn from different institutional locations.

Learning Outcomes

The MPhil in Development Studies allows space for students to capture what they desire. Our emphasis on critical reflection privileges analytical approaches to development as opposed to more practice-based or vocational strategies. Students will come away from the MPhil will a broad and incisive understanding of development, its institutions, actors and interests. In doing so, the MPhil seeks to provide students with a solid foundation for consistent future growth through various fields of development, whether in scholarship or practice. Classes on quantitative and qualitative data analysis are taught separately to the MPhil, by the Social Sciences Research Methods Centre at the University.