New Mediums, Better Messages?: How Innovations in Translation, Engagement, and Advocacy are Changing International Development

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The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places.

As international development has become more quantitative and economics-centred, there is an enduring sense that what is measured (and thus 'valued' and prioritized) may have become too narrow, that the powers of prediction claimed by some areas of economics and management may have overreached, and that the human dimension is in danger of being lost.

Reflecting this concern, New Mediums, Better Messages? contributes to new conversations between science, social science, and the humanities around the roles of different kinds of knowledge, stories, and data play in relation to global development. It brings together a team of multidisciplinary contributors to explore popular representions of development, including music, blogs, and fiction.

David Lewis, Professor of Anthropology and Development, Department of International Development, London School of Economics, Dennis Rodgers, Research Professor in Anthropology and Sociology, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Michael Woolcock, Lead Social Scientist, Development Research Group, World Bank

David Lewis teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he has specialized in development issues in South Asia, with a particular focus on Bangladesh. An anthropologist by background, he is author of Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Non-Governmental Organizations, Management and Development (Routledge, 2014) and co-author with Katy Gardner of Anthropology and Development: Challenges for the Twenty First Century (Pluto, 2015).


Dennis Rodgers is Research Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. His research focuses principally on issues relating to the dynamics of conflict and violence in cities, with tangents on the historiography of urban theory and popular representations of development. In 2018, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for a project on "Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Comparative Global Ethnography" (GANGS), which aims to systematically compare gang dynamics in Nicaragua, South Africa, and France. He previously held appointments at the Universities of Amsterdam, Glasgow, Manchester, and the London School of Economics.


Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Scientist in the World Bank's Development Research Group, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He has published numerous articles and books across several sub-fields of international development, including conflict dynamics, social theory, legal reform, research methods, state capability, and popular culture. An Australian national, he has a PhD in comparative historical sociology from Brown University.