DSA2025 will again feature compelling keynote speakers to address the themes of the conference – Navigating crisis: dangers and opportunities in development. 

Thanks to our three sponsors, Oxford Development Studies, the Journal of International Development and Journal of Development Studies for making these keynote speeches possible. Find out when these speeches are happening on the conference timetable.

Sponsored by the Journal of International Development 

Jean Drèze studied Mathematical Economics at the University of Essex and did his PhD at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.  He has taught at the London School of Economics and the Delhi School of Economics, and is currently Visiting Professor at Ranchi University, Jharkhand. He has made wide-ranging contributions to development economics and public policy, with special reference to India. His research interests include rural development, social inequality, elementary education, child nutrition, health care, food security, employment guarantee and economic democracy. His books include Hunger and Public Action (with Amartya Sen, 1989), An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (with Amartya Sen, 2013) and Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone (2017). Drèze is also active in various campaigns for economic and social rights in India. 

Akosua Adomako Ampofo is a Professor of African and gender studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana (UG), and a leading international scholar and public intellectual with over 30 years of expertise, known for her commitment to social justice and activism. With a strong focus on the intersectionality of gender, race, and culture, her scholarship integrates critical theory with artistic expressions, highlighting the transformative power of the arts in advocating for marginalized voices.  Her areas of interest include African Knowledge systems (especially ‘decolonizing’ knowledge and praxis); Higher education; Race and Identity Politics; Gender relations; Masculinities; and questions of the aesthetics of Popular Culture as expressed in art, music, the built environment and so forth. She describes herself as an activist scholar, and her work is informed by among other things, her faith and an eclectic disciplinary background (a BSc in Architectural Design and an MSc in Development Planning from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Kumasi; a PG Dip. in Spatial Planning from the University of Dortmund; and a PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University.

In 2005 she became the foundation Director of the University of Ghana’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy and from 2010-2015 she was the Director of the Institute of African Studies.

Adomako Ampofo is the founding vice-president and immediate past President of the African Studies Association of Africa and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been an honorary Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Birmingham and in 2023-2024 was the Wangari Maathai Visiting Professor at the University of Kassel.

In her current work on black masculinities, she explores the shifting nature of identities among young men in Africa and the diaspora. Earlier work on masculinities has explored the ways in which the discourse of “men of God” (i.e religious leaders) becomes a meta knowledge and (re)defines femininity. Her most recent book, co-edited with Josephine Beoku-Betts, is titled Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South (Bingley: Emerald Publishing 2021). She co-produced the documentary When Women Speak with Kate Skinner (and directed by Aseye Tamakloe © 2022) as part of a project titled, an “Archive of Activism: Gender and Public History in Postcolonial Ghana”. Adomako Ampofo’s work has been variously recognized: in 2010 she was awarded the Feminist Activism Award by Sociologists for Women and Society (SWS) and in 2019 she delivered the Audrey Richards Distinguished Public Lecture at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cambridge.

In the classroom and through public lectures, publications, and community engagement, she challenges prevailing narratives and fosters dialogue on issues of equity, representation, and healing, making significant contributions to both academic discourse and public awareness. In 2024 she established 715House, a creative media company, with her daughter, Akosua-Asamoabea Ampofo, a filmmaker, and is currently pursuing a certificate course in the Business of Entertainment at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She enjoys a good meal, with kindred spirits, accompanied by music for the soul, and is energised when planning productive disruptions, especially with young people.

Sponsored by the Journal of Development Studies

Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for 35 years, and is now Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She has authored/edited 21 books and more than 220 scholarly articles and also writes for popular media. She received the ILO’s Decent Work Research Prize 2011; the 2023 Galbraith award of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association; and the International Economics Association Fellow Award for 2023. She has advised governments in India and other countries and consulted for many international organizations. She is a member of the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All and the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, and Co-Chair of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation.

Diego Sánchez-Ancochea is Associate Head for People of Oxford’s Social Science Division, sub-Warden of St Antony´s College and professor of the Political Economy of Development. His research aims to identify the best ways to reduce income inequality through the use of social and productive policies, with particular attention to the Latin American experience. In 2020 he published The Costs of Inequality: Lessons and Warnings for the Rest of the World (Bloomsbury). Together with Juliana Martínez Franzoni, he is the author of The Quest for Universal Social Policy in the South. Actors, Ideas and Architectures (CUP, 2016) and Good Jobs and Social Services: How Costa Rica Achieved the Elusive Double Incorporation (Palgrave McMillan, 2013). Diego Sánchez-Ancochea has collaborated with different international institutions like the World Bank, UNDP and the ILO. He has a BA in Economics from the Universidad Complutense, a MA in Public Administration from the Instituto Ortega y Gasset and a PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research.

Sponsored by Oxford Development Studies. 

The conventional paradigm in political economy routinely treats living, complex, adaptive social systems as machine-like objects. This treatment has driven political economists to oversimplify big, complex social processes using mechanical models, or to ignore them altogether. In development, this has led to theoretical dead ends, trivial agendas, or failed public policies. This article proposes an alternative paradigm: adaptive political economy. It recognizes that social systems are complex, not complicated; complexity can be ordered, not messy; and social scientists should be developing the concepts, methods, and theories to illuminate the order of complexity, rather than oversimplifying it. The author illustrates one application of adaptive political economy by mapping the coevolution of economic and institutional change. This approach yields fresh, important conclusions that mechanical, linear models of development have missed, including that market-building institutions look and function differently from market-sustaining ones.

Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of two acclaimed books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), both featured in The Economist and described as “game-changing.” Her scholarship has received multiple awards across disciplines: political science, economics, and sociology. She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize from the American Political Science Association (APSA) for “impactful contributions to the study of comparative politics,” in addition to the Peter Katzenstein Prize (political economy), Viviana Zelizer Prize (economic sociology), Douglass North Award (institutional economics), and Alice Amsden Award (socio-economics). The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) produced a 7-part video series featuring her work, “The Economics of China,” which is available on YouTube. Apolitical in the UK named her among the world’s “100 Most Influential Academics in Government,” based on nominations from policymakers and civil servants. She has been featured in prominent outlets including Freakonomics Radio, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times. She received her PhD from Stanford University.