ABSTRACT
The idea of globalisation has profoundly challenged pre-existing discourses, theories, and practices of ‘development’. However, the separation between the two academic fields of critical development studies (CDS) and critical global(isation) studies (CGS) is ideologically constructed. In this chapter, Hosseini and Gills argue that a transformative approach is necessary to problematise the foundational and yet deeply misleading dualism between development and globalisation. To do so, CDS and CGS need to be actively developing and systematically engaging in communities of communal inquiry, where facts and values are constantly re/assessed in their contexts, and the emancipatory legacies of the past are put into dialogue with the utopian imaginaries of the future. A transformative approach must thus start from exploring the alternative ways of living that are extant or that are now arising, and move forward to examine the methods of empowering them. While the number of studies of context-specific alternatives has been growing in recent years, concrete projects to explore the potential for integrating these into macro-scale models of national, regional, and global transformations are still relatively absent. The commensurability of CDS and CGS lies in a joint reinvention of their critical approaches, which provides a solid base for traversing across their division.
