UT-600 Emergent Futures. Development, Planning and Communication

The course is connected to the following study programs

• PhD Programme in Social Sciences

Teaching language

English

Prerequisites

Students need to fulfil the admission requirements for the PhD specialisation in Global Development and Planning.

Course contents

UT-600 is a core course, aimed at doctoral students with an interest in how to work with development and planning as innovative processes always framed by political institutions, cultural schemes, and communicative forces. The course includes discussions on current methodological issues, offering a forum for theory-based analysis and discussions on how to understand the complex of socio-cultural and institutional forces that affect agency, planning, and communication.

The course will address various empirical, methodological and theoretical challenges, such as:

• How empirical studies and theories can be employed in the study of the role and function of (public) participation in development, planning and communication.

• How network processes and participatory engagement can produce agency, new forms of communication, and changes in actor roles.

• How social relations and social processes affect and are being affected by power, communication networks, cultural experiences, gender, ethnicity, discourses and knowledge capacities.

The objective of the course is to enable students to produce high-level research on the generative forces of agency to be used in planning processes, public participatory communication, and the management of development processes.

Learning outcomes

At the completion of the course, the candidate will:

• Have an advanced understanding of how to do research on forces behind and constraints within management, participatory planning, and communicative practices.

• Have frontline knowledge of research and theories addressing the role of agency for social innovation, including the effects from social capital, gender, language and communicative processes.

• Have critical capacity to describe, discuss and apply theoretically informed analysis and practical knowledge regarding development management, communication and strategic planning.

Teaching methods

The course will be taught as a combination of lectures, seminars, group work, and one-to-one supervision. The dialogues will be organised as:

• Face-to-face group discussion at seminars

• Online communication between students and teachers

• One-to-one supervision (on-line/or face-to-face)

Lectures and supervision are primarily given by faculty staff members at the Department of Global Development and Planning.

Evaluation

The PhD programme manager, in consultation with the student representative, decides the method of evaluation and whether the courses will have a midterm- or end of term evaluation, see also the Quality System, section 4.1. Information about evaluation method for the course will be posted on Canvas.

Assessment methods and criteria

Individually written paper of about 8000-10000 characters. The paper will be graded with pass or fail, where pass is equivalent to a grade B or better.