ABSTRACT
The central theme of this book has been that distinctive and useful insights into the phenomenon of development can be gleaned by going beyond the source material most familiar to academics and practitioners – namely, research monographs, journal articles and policy reports – to include contributions from popular culture. We hope to have shown that novels, films, television and (most recently) social media, if viewed with a correspondingly critical eye, can convey a rich understanding of how development processes are encountered, experienced and explained by different actors and in turn embraced, endured or rejected by them. It bears repeating that we are not, of course, arguing that traditional empirical analyses – to which all three of us have actively contributed throughout our careers – should be discarded, or that policy responses to (say) poverty rates can be discerned with equal validity through national household surveys and postmodernist paintings. To borrow from the language of economics, popular culture is not a substitute for but a complement to orthodox social science, in the sense that it provides a different but potentially fruitful epistemological entry point for engaging with complex phenomena (such as ‘development’) that encompass all aspects of human life.
