international organizations and domestic aid agencies engaged in development practice, 5 to scholars seeking to develop characteristics to understand, assess, and systematize the field, 6 private entities and practitioners who are in the business of "doing" law and development, 7 social movements which organize around and often resist "development", 8 or people who are affected by development projects or programs. 9 These locations, levels and laws -and the actors they implicate -provide different starting points and cases for how to teach and develop a course or program on Law and Development.We argue that this plurality impacts not only the teaching of Law and Development but its epistemology more broadly. 10 Together with the contributors to this special issue, we are interested in how the heterodoxy and plurality of the field translate into different approaches toward teaching. In particular, we want to learn more about what we call the functionalities of teaching, i.e., what instructors do and what kind of choices they make when teaching Law and Development and what struggles against dominant knowledges and knowledge practices are entailed in this process. 11
An exploratory qualitative analysis of Law and Development (L&D) course descriptions reveals plurality and heterodoxy across time zones through the way in which they approach ‘law’ and ‘development’. We see this contestedness as a manifestation of the inherent power asymmetries of the field and offer the notion of time zones to better describe plural and contested forms of L&D knowledge. We seek to explore teaching as an important arena where knowledge is created and argue that the characteristics of substantive complexity and methodological heterodoxy of L&D provide promising conditions for making teaching more inclusive and reflexive. In this way, teaching can help in further provincialising the field. Additionally, inclusiveness and reflexivity can also have an impact on the epistemological trajectory of L&D more broadly by giving voice to a diversity of narratives, concepts and values.
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