IDSB07: Confronting Development's Racist Past and Present - Key Concepts

Vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts, theories, scholars, and structural critiques presented in the IDSB07 Week 1 lecture.

Big 'D' Development

Deliberate development interventions, improvement schemes, and development/aid packages directed from the Global North to poor countries in the Global South.

Little 'd' development

The actual processes of capitalist development that lead to uneven development and underdevelopment, operating outside the boundaries of deliberate aid packages.

Anishinaabe Creation Story

An Indigenous worldview teaching that land is alive and thinking, providing humans with life-giving relations, obligations, and duties rather than being an object of human domination.

Heather Dorries (2022)

Indigenous scholar who emphasizes that human agency is an extension of the agency already possessed by land and the more-than-human world.

Gillian Hart (2009)

Marxist geographer who distinguished between Big 'D' Development (post-Cold War deliberate interventions) and Little 'd' development (capitalist, uneven development and underdevelopment).

Race (Colonial Construction)

A social and political construct created during European colonialism to establish colonial control, justify slavery, exploitation, and social hierarchy, and erase sovereign identities.

Ideology (Althusser 1971)

Defined by Louis Althusser as a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

Colonial Classification in Latin America (Mollett, 2006)

The creation of distinct colonial legal categories separating Spanish elites from dark-skinned Indians who were reduced to a tributary laboring caste.

Racial Ordering

Ideological binary categorizations (such as civilized/primitive, developed/backward, white/non-white, and customary/formal) grounded in assumptions of non-Western deficiency or inferiority.

Non-Western Economies Framing (Chakrabarty, 2000)

The perspective within development narratives that presents non-Western economic and cultural practices and institutions as inadequate or lacking in development.

Global South Land Rights Disparity

The global condition where 2.5 billion people depend on indigenous and community lands, but currently hold legal rights to only 1/5 of that land.

Subjects of Projects Model

A critique of aid structures where power to define problems and solutions remains with donors and technical experts, while local communities are consulted minimally and sidelined as unequal partners.

Prof Kariũki Kĩrigia

Guest lecturer scheduled for Week 9 (Nov 3) to present on green colonialism through conservation in Eastern Africa.