“As a hydrofeminist (someone who believes water justice = gender justice = env justice) doctoral researcher working on water, gender, and governance, attending the Development Studies Association (DSA) Conference 2025 in Bath was a personal and professional milestone,” wrote Doctoral Researcher (Leeds) Spurthi Kolipaka on her blog. We were grateful for Spurthi’s insights on her perceptions of who attended the DSA conference and why and are pleased that she has already given us some suggestions on places to reach out to address this.

“I’m more convinced than ever that the development studies and social scientists/ feminist economists need to engage more deeply with Civil and Public Health Engineering. As someone based in Civil Engineering, I’ve heard and seen the reverse happening for a very long time already! It’s always great to see the development sector deep dive into social justice, gender equality, and universal access, with newer theories/ explanations/ associations.

However, in my brief interactions, I noticed that many still had no idea how WASH/public health engineering works, for example, water contamination can be geogenic, not just anthropogenic/ systemic. We’re quick to critique engineers for their lack of social engagement, yet we rarely hold social scientists to similar standards when they ignore technical realities. Meanwhile, the WASH sector remains insulated from critical social inquiry, especially on gender justice, with the latest thinking going back to rudimentary ‘should water even engage with gender?’.”

Gabriele Caldas, Outreach Co-ordinator at Causal Maps wrote on the Causal Map website: “Most of our work at Causal Map involves looking backwards; we usually map people’s narratives about events that have already happened, like in a project evaluation. But we had a question: could we apply the same methods to map out arguments about the future?”

As an experiment, Gabriele along with Steve Powell and James Copestake, analysed Michael Albert’s recent book, Navigating the Polycrisis: a complex text all about future global challenges to see if their Causal Map Workflows software could map its core arguments in a useful way.

PhD candidate Sandy Nofyanza wrote a post conference blog focused on one of the final sessions of DSA2025, an action roundtable on what we can do for Gaza. Sandy wrote his blog Building bridges with Palestine: DSA 2025 reflections on what higher education can and must do“ with a surging amount of hope, aiming to share some key points from the workshop. This ‘hope’ is inspired by an interdisciplinary concept, drawing on research from fields including anthropology, philosophy, and psychology.”

Sarah Huxley, Research Engagement from the British Council, joined the conference online and wrote her post conference reflections on the concepts of dignity, false generosity, and radical humility and whether she could take the knowledge from the conference from to connect ‘ways of knowing’ with ‘ways of doing’- a concept that she says is central to the Research and Insight team’s work at the British Council. “In terms of dignity, generosity and humility, how can these values be translated into sharing and embedding insights? A good provocation.” she reflected.

GAGE (Gender and Adolescence, Global Evidence) said a takeaway from the conference was “the need for critical thinking about transformative social change in the face of sustained crises and in the context of the 2030 Leave No One Behind agenda for sustainable and equitable development.” As DSA 2025 keynote speakers Jean Dreze and Akosua Adomako Ampofo observed, hope for change must be connected to collective action.

GAGE’s Kate Pincock pulled out four key themes which emerged from the panels they presented on Youth and Protest in Africa and Inequality, poly-crisis and young people in the global South.

Victoria Jenkins’ (MSc Gender, Development and Globalisation Candidate at LSE) reflections from DSA centered on examining the discipline itself in the polycrisis:  “The experience deepened my belief that development studies is in a transitory period, with the definition of ‘development’ itself heavily contested,” she wrote. She observed John Kirkland’s work on diversity in development and noted that “Improving socioeconomic diversity in the sector is not only an issue of equity, but also is essential for empathy, legitimacy and political resilience.”

If you’d like to contribute a blog on the DSA website, your own website or via LinkedIn please get in touch with Rowena, the DSA communications officer.