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.”
Leonie Hoffmann is a doctoral candidate whose project examines a public employment programme in South Africa. Situated at the cross-section of social history, economic anthropology, and political thought, her research seeks to understand the relation between changing labour regimes, distribution, and political authority. Studying the discursive and practical evolution of the programme will help to understand how the state and proximate actors grapple with long-term work absence from an ideological and policy perspective. Studying how participants experience and contest the programme will shed light on aspirations and frustrations surrounding work, its social life, and evolving state-citizen relations. Mobilising these perspectives in wider debates about the future of work and progressive policy avenues will permit a critical interrogation of the assumptions and values at the core of potential pathways towards a more equitable future.
Leonie completed the MPhil in Development Studies at ODID with a prize-winning thesis on basic income policy debates in South Africa. She also gained her BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford, focusing on social and political theory. Prior to joining ODID, Leonie worked for Austria’s national labour organisation in a policy development and communications role. Further professional roles include social network analysis for regional development projects in North Africa, as well as fieldwork coordination at a large-scale programme evaluation in South Africa’s Eastern Cape run by the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford.
At ODID, Leonie’s research is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), a Scatcherd European Scholarship (Oxford), and the Wilfrid Knapp Scholarship (St. Catherine’s College).
labour regimes, political order, South Africa, moral economies of distribution, cultures of work, politics of delivery, social protection, the state, ideological change and contestation, in/formality, non-ideal theory