Rural Development and the Capability to Stay
About the Workshop
This summer workshop at Duke University was part of Rural Development and the Capability to Stay, a two-year project led by Kerilyn Schewel (Duke Center for International Development), Vesall Nourani (University of Chicago), and Sina Rahmanian (Bahá’í International Development Organization), and funded by the Social Science Research Council. The project starts from the observation that rural places are often treated as an afterthought in current models of development. It asks what alternative approaches might enhance people’s capability to stay and flourish in rural places, with particular attention to initiatives in which rural communities take part in generating and applying knowledge about their own futures.
Over five days, academics and practitioners from around the world examined the logics of rural development, the role of local knowledge, the capability to stay, and the relationship between religion and development, alongside regional analyses of promising rural development initiatives. A second workshop in the project, The Logics of Rural Transformation, was held at Makerere University in Uganda in 2023.
Program
- Logics of Rural Development
- Regional Analysis: Latin America
- Local Knowledge
- Regional Analysis: China
- Regional Analysis: Africa
- Regional Analysis: India
- Reflection Session
- Capability to Stay
- Regional Analysis: Myanmar/Thailand
- Regional Analysis: North Carolina
- Religion & Development
- COMIT Reflection
Regional Analyses
The workshop’s regional analyses were prepared by a team of research interns whose internships were funded by COMIT. Each studied promising case studies in rural development, in Africa, China, India, Latin America, Myanmar and Thailand, and North Carolina, and presented their findings to workshop participants.
