Our Aims and Objectives

We are the UK association for all those who research, study and teach global development issues

Find Out More

What is Development Studies

What is development studies and decolonising development.

Find Out More

Our Members

We have around 1,000 members, made up of individuals and around 40 institutions

Find Out More

Governance

Find out about our constitution, how we are run and meet our Council

Find Out More

People

Meet our Council members and other staff who support the running of DSA

Find Out More

About

The DSA Conference is an annual event which brings together the development studies community

Find Out More

DSA2025

Our conference this year is themed "Navigating crisis: dangers and opportunities in development"

Find Out More

Past Conferences

Find out about our previous conferences

Find Out More

Study Groups

Our Study Groups offer a chance to connect with others who share your areas of interest

Find Out More

Students and ECRs

Students and early career researchers are an important part of our community

Find Out More

Publications

Our book series with OUP and our relationship with other publishers

Find Out More

Decolonising Development

The initiatives we are undertaking that work towards decolonising development studies

Find Out More

Membership Directory

Find out who our members are, where they are based and the issues they work on

Find Out More

KCL: Using archive material to create inclusive classroom discussion

Lotus was a trilingual political and cultural journal which existed between 1968 and 1991, published in Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia and the German Democratic Republic. The magazine was established by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association which emerged from the 1955 Bandung Conference, to support Afro-Asian solidarity and nonalignment. Lotus provided the means for cultural producers across anticolonial struggles to share knowledge, theorise, and build relations.

The Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Department of International Development at Kings College London asked how inclusive pedagogy can be imagined differently through cultural production and anticolonial archives. As a starting point for their conversations, they focused on material produced by the writers and visual artists within Lotus.

The result is a toolkit, co-created with students, exploring how to productively use literary and artistic archives in the classroom to question past and ongoing colonial structures and racialised discrimination.

Using the journal gave students the experience of working with non-academic materials and formats, responding to them creatively and in different languages.

To find out more, visit the KCL website.