Master of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies

The advanced Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) is a one-year international advanced Master programme that brings together students and professionals from all over the world, involved or interested in consultancy, policy, education and research in the international development sector. It offers students a large international and interdisciplinary platform to deal with development issues from a profound anthropological perspective, and therein lies its uniqueness. At a time when so much of development and social sciences research is replaced by short-term consultancy assignments it is pertinent to foster and stimulate theoretical and methodological reflections on the goals and guises of sustainable development. CADES aims at capacity strengthening of both (1) future development workers (or social/intercultural workers more broadly), or professionally active development and social workers who interrupt their professional careers and (2) development researchers in academia by (a) strengthening their capacity and competences in order to become better equipped and skilled development/social workers; (b) re-sourcing themselves through an academic study to have refreshed ideas on (newer) development methodologies and paradigms, on critical development theory and models; and (c) (for those who do not work in the field of development work yet) more radically reorienting themselves into a more development-related, or international job through the CADES degree. CADES students are able to combine a critical-scientific attitude with a critical-social one, and can use the acquired knowledge in various cultural contexts in a culture-sensitive way. Herein lies the contribution of CADES graduates to the development field.

Every year a very heterogeneous group of some 35 students is selected (based on their CV, motivation, research plan) to start CADES. With the 12 scholarships through ICP funding we hope to reach more participants from the VLIRUOS country list for whom the study and living cost in Leuven is now discouraging. The ICP incremental funding will be used to elaborate an intense collaboration with partners in the South. We will develop and fine-tune our collaboration with 2 of our actual partners: the Departments of Anthropology of the University of Arba Minch (Ethiopia) and the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique).Based on discussions with our partners we defined some of their needs and priorities: student and staff exchange; collaborative student research; a yearly (turning) Field Work Winter School; an alumni programme and an intensive recruitment and selection of students. We envisage to start-up a collaboration with other prospective partners: two universities in Morocco (Ifrane and Mohammed V), the University of Science and Technology of Zimbabwe) and possibly a regional collaboration with 3 South-African universities (UWC, Stellenbosch, UCT). First steps were made with all of them, but the format, intensity and terms of collaboration will be explored in the coming ICP-years. We plan to insert our collaboration with our regular partners in Ghana, DRCongo and Namibia (see full proposal) into the ICP programme as well, as these are important partners for us, however, these alliances do not resort under ICP incremental funding (as these countries are not on the VLIROUS list).