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.”
While feminists have long argued for the importance of gender in the analysis of political economy – for example that the (heterosexual) family should not be assumed to be a unit, that men and women have different power relations within the family, and that they have different relationships to the labor market -- studies of political economy and the political economy of gender have simply not come together often enough. When they have done so, the focus has been on women’s experience of the economy. The failure to understand capitalism globally, as always already marked by the analytical category of gender (and race/caste/religion where relevant) has led, in the wake of global changes in men’s work, to an inadequate understanding of the complexity of the resentments wrought by these changes. This paper joins a burgeoning conversation about masculinity when men are faced with structural irrelevance in the workplace. In this paper, I consider men who do not have class advantage, and who are increasingly seen as those the new economy has left behind – the losers in the new global order who pose a threat to society at large. What becomes of men in the absence of work? What possibilities beyond attraction to popular authoritarianism and fundamentalisms are there for men to inhabit during unsettled times?
Raka Ray is an American sociologist and academic. She is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies, and recently appointed the Dean of Social Sciences at UC-Berkeley. She researches and has published on gender, postcolonial sociology, emerging middle classes, South Asia, inequality, qualitative research methods and social movements.