Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies KU Leuven

Overview

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The advanced Master of Cultural Anthropology and development Studies (CADES) draws on anthropology's unique vantage point to enhance students’ intercultural expertise, understanding and skills. Based on cutting-edge research conducted at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, the programme counters the universalising Western master narrative of modernisation and promotes an integrated approach to development issues, transnational solidarity and social change. In taking this tack, rather than offering a ready-made toolkit, CADES explores the bigger questions underlying current development practices.

More specifically, CADES seeks to demonstrate how local actors resist and/or respond to the omnipresent forces of economic globalisation and social change. Only a profound intercultural understanding of, and engagement with, development can open up innovative avenues towards equality. It is for this reason that the programme addresses a wealth of topics ranging from the history of development (theory) to contemporary debates on social exclusion, ecology and climate change in the anthropocene, urbanisation, migration and mobility, social transformation, solidarity, global policy and many others.

The programme will offer you concepts and a theoretical framework embedded in anthropology to acquire a better grasp of the complexity of international development. You will also learn how to translate aspects of this complexity into research questions and appropriate research methods. Designing individual ethnographic field work in combination with in-depth courses is at the core of the programm. Our partners, network and the extended research networks of staff members will provide you with ample opportunities for organising the ethnographic research required for your master thesis.

Anthropology

By focusing on the social dimension, anthropology, more so than any other discipline, intends to uncover the hidden transcripts and power dynamics that lie beneath the surface of many development issues.  Knowledge acquired mainly through fieldwork and participant observation enhances our understanding of the rich diversity of knowledge systems, worldviews, and modes of living from within. Anthropologists avoid approaching a given culture in light of their own standards of knowledge, truth, values or technological development.

Development

Development is only sustainable when it fully acknowledges the culture-specific ways in which societies or networks deal with what are often increasingly scarce life resources. Most often, communities view change or development as desirable only when it meaningfully coalesces with the cultural values that inspire their heritages of knowledge, religion and art, networks of communication, deliberation and decision-making, or notions of responsibility, parenthood, nutrition and health. However, rather than view this as an obstacle, it should be understood as the way for any lasting and meaningful change for development to take root. Development is, for that matter, always mediated by a community's common-sense knowledge and pragmatic motives, along with how its members think about and practice kinship, gender, identity, ethics, politics, justice, and so on. 

Career perspectives

Holders of a CADES degree have a scientific, critical, reflective and culture-sensitive understanding of development. They are able to relate their field-specific knowledge to the ongoing evolution of development debates, and in organisations that defend, promote or assess collective and cultural interests, expectations, and movements.

Graduates possess the tools to understand development from the viewpoint of local realities and epistemologies and can relate these to anthropological theories and paradigms.

CADES offers students a large international and interdisciplinary background that allows them to approach and interact with development issues from an anthropological perspective. Graduates may obtain access to a variety of jobs in NGOs, international organisations, development cooperation, education, social and medical services, advisory organisations, international relations, enterprises and research.