Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 6

What would I teach? Let me back up and describe the issues I think it would be interesting and fun to explore at this point, sitting in South India. In no particular order.

• This year, we were struck by urban renewal/conservation issues. Particularly because we were visiting heritage sites that were once an integral part of planned urban centres.
• I think models of 'development' are interesting. What do people do towards developing specific areas? Whether it is a school or propagating a particular kind of farming. These lend themselves to larger questions about 'development' and about globalization both.
• Although we decided not to rehearse the nationalism course, I think identity politics is still interesting, particularly in its interface with a rapidly changing political economy.
• I think that nature and direction of change is always interesting to think about.
• I remain very concerned about governance issues.
• And of course, gender.
• How could we be in Chennai and not think of the role of technology, particularly ICT?
  

If we did a course on all this, to me the common factor is change. How to change on purpose? How to imagine change and make that come true? What are the sources of such imagination? And also, how to cope with unintended change? What is the politics of change? What is the politics of making a particular change? And what is the politics of change that catches you unawares? How do you manage change politically?

To me, it is the debates surrounding particular choices that are interesting. But the teacher in me is conservative, wanting also to furnish information even as we teach students how to think about particular issues. As Professor Malapur would have put it, to come up with the right questions... because there are no answers.

So I want to design a course whose framework will set us all up to ask the right questions, and whose cases will give us a chance to debate the answers and the discourse itself.

What would I call such a course? "The Politics of Change"? "The Politics of Socio-Economic Change"?

I would lose the 'Third World,' 'Emerging Nations,' 'Development' tags for sure. 'Change' is more open-ended. And not necessarily linear.

And I think I would build the discussion in the course around what now seem to me to be false binaries, but that have been juxtaposed as critical binaries by different schools of thought:

• Growth versus Equity
• Small versus Big
• Liberty versus Equality
• Market versus State, Civil Society versus State
  
• Global versus National versus Regional versus Local
• Indigenous versus Foreign
• Modern versus Traditional
  and of course,
• Third World versus Advanced Industrial,
  to list just a few....
  

Or maybe not.