Introduction

Development is one of the dominant organising ideas of our time, and there are of, course, many ways to approach it. Most people – whether development professionals or ordinary members of the public – learn about development through predominantly economics-focused research studies and policy documents, or from sometimes informative but often unhelpfully simplified news reports. The humanistic side tends to receive less attention, as does the proliferation of different representations of development beyond academic texts and forums. Yet, as John Durham Peters (1997: 79) has observed:

Part of what it means to live in a modern society is to depend on representations of that society. Modern men and women see proximate fragments with their own eyes and global totalities through the diverse media of social description.