The Gender and Development Study Group is one of the regular panel conveners at the DSA annual conference. Sharmila Parmanand, one of the Group’s co-convenors alongside Mirna Guha and Reetika Revathy Subramanian, explains why gender is central to development and the DSA.

“The project of development is not gender-neutral. Gender is both an important analytic and often an object of intervention in development practice,” Sharmila explains. “And when we talk about gender here, we’re not simply talking about women. We’re talking about gender as a set of social relations and relations of power, which are themselves shaped by class, race, ethnicity and other structures of inequality. So we take a strongly intersectional approach to understanding gender.”

Sharmila explains that the study group is not exclusively for those researching gender issues and that all researchers and practitioners should consider the gender issues in their field. “Development, both as a field of practice and as a discipline, is underpinned by gendered assumptions,” she explains. “We can see this even in foundational approaches such as modernisation theory, which historically associated progress with particular masculinised ideals: large-scale industrialisation, technological mastery, economic growth and profit-seeking activity, whose assumptions also shape how we measure economic productivity and what we recognise as ‘productive’ work, often rendering reproductive and care work less visible. At the same time, many development interventions explicitly seek to promote gender equality or empowerment, so it is important that we remain intellectually critical about what these interventions understand gender equality or empowerment to mean, and how they seek to achieve them.”

The Study Group is therefore deliberately interdisciplinary. It is open to people whose research engages with gender centrally or only in part, and to practitioners as well as academics. “Gender studies is famously interdisciplinary!” says Sharmila. “We can approach gender from many different disciplinary and methodological orientations, so the Study Group is very open to anyone who is curious about gender broadly or whose work engages with it.”

The conference is an important part of the Study Group’s work. At the last two DSA conferences, the Group organised four panels, using broad themes that could accommodate different research questions and approaches.

The Study Group’s advice for a good panel is to think of it as more than a collection of interesting papers. The Group looks for geographical and methodological diversity, intellectual connections between papers, and ways to include participants who are unable to attend in person. The Group also pays careful attention to who chairs its panels. A good chair can help draw out connections between papers, constructively reframe questions where necessary, and create a productive conversation among panellists and the audience.

But the intention is for the conversation to continue after the conference. For the last two conferences, the Group has developed special issues for the journal Development in Practice from its panel papers. This involves considerable collective work: selecting papers, running workshops with authors, finding reviewers, working with journal editors and reviewing papers.

For the Gender and Development Study Group, that work is part of how intellectual fields are collectively produced. “This is one way a field is produced,” Sharmila explains. “It allows us to help shape conversations and agendas in the field and to exercise intellectual leadership in an inclusive way. It also gives us an opportunity to create platforms for authors, many of whom are early-career researchers and some of whom are not UK-based, and to help widen access to academic networks and publishing opportunities that can otherwise be difficult to enter.”

Not every conference paper will end up in a special issue, but that does not mean the conversation ends. The Group tries to ensure that chairs or conveners provide feedback, and papers may go on to other publications or become the basis for further research or a PhD.

The work undertaken by those active in the Study Group, from reviewing journal articles to organising panels and presenting papers, is considerable. “It is a lot of work, but there is also an intellectual payoff for us. It keeps us immersed in emerging research and debates in the field, and allows us to contribute to those conversations through how we curate panels and frame special issues. But we also shouldn’t romanticise it: it is a lot of work.”

To help address this, the Study Group looks for organisations and institutions that can amplify its capacity. Last year, the Gender and Development Study Group worked with the University of East Anglia, which has a strong gender and development programme and was hosting a conference. With some grant funding from the DSA, the Group used the opportunity to access a bigger platform and helped to curate aspects of the conference. Working together had a multiplier effect in terms of the Group’s effectiveness and capacity.

For other Study Groups, this is a practical example of not needing to build everything yourself or even beginning with the question of where to find funding. As Sharmila explains: “Given our current capacity, our approach has been… rather than starting by asking where we can find more money, we ask where we can find partners who can amplify our capacity. There are often organisations already doing work that overlaps with ours, and collaboration allows us to do more without having to build everything from scratch.”