The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.

Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
A new article by Nandini Gooptu and Rangan Chakravarty explores skill formation and gendered identity in the context of home-based women entrepreneurs in India.
The article analyses the meaning and significance of skills from the perspective of those who acquire and use them, going beyond dominant approaches to skill development as a strategy to enhance employability, productivity and economic benefit.
With a study of home-based women entrepreneurs, who prepare food for delivery to customers’ homes, the article examines how entrepreneurial skills relate to gendered identity.
While men operate with a market-savvy, commercial logic, women are animated by an ethic of personalized care and a family ethos of involvement in their customers’ everyday domestic life. They cast themselves as expert practitioners of an inherited culinary tradition as well as being skilled in exercising a superior and inherent gendered capacity to forge emotional, nurturing and fictive kinship bonds with customers. Although this reproduces gender distinctions and may constrain the growth of women’s business, they nevertheless cultivate these skills as a powerful mode of self-realization and developing a sense of self-worth.
Bearing in mind the conception of human development as advancement of human flourishing, the article concludes that, in approaching skill development, it is critical to consider the identity and perception of those who use skills, and the subjective, affective meanings attached to skills in a given social context.
Nandini Gooptu and Rangan Chakravarty (2018) 'Skill, Work and Gendered Identity in Contemporary India: The Business of Delivering Home-Cooked Food for Domestic Consumption', Journal of South Asian Development, DOI: 10.1177%2F0973174118804448