Human Development at the Intersection of Culture and Globalization: Towards a More Inclusive Future

Abstract

There is a long history of studies of human development in different cultural groups, but studies of development that explicitly take globalization into account are more recent. Cultural practices change, but cultures have often been considered static. Studying developmental change in changing societies in dynamic global settings presents challenges for researchers. It also presents opportunities to clarify content and processes in research. For such a clarification, it is compulsory to understand how local and global phenomena have been framed in the discourse of human development, and the potential outcomes of this positioning on people’s lives. In this article we lay out five key practices to guide researchers who wish to study culture and development in a globalizing world: engaging diverse groups of people within and across societies, acknowledging multiple pathways of development, attention to the cultural context, using mixed methods, and designing sustainable and relevant interventions.

Manywheres: In Pursuit of Social Justice in Developmental Science

“…PVEST shows us how individual meaning-making links to development outcomes, while manywheres calls on us to embrace the tension in multiple worldviews and universals without uniformity in striving for social justice. Historically, critiques have been leveled at both developmental science and social justice for being rooted in Western centrality (Killen & Smetana, 2010;Maynard & Chaudhary, 2020;Weisner, 2020). With a strengths-based foundation, manywheres opens a broader scope for considering how social justice and development can be brought together in recognition of diverse cultural frameworks; rather than forcing a top-down definition of what success, thriving, and equity should look like, the principles of manywheres address the tension in centering diverse young people's perspectives and experiences.…”

“…This work was built over time through multiple methods to engage with the complexity and influence that macrosystemic events (e.g., renewed fighting; peace processes) held on localized meaningmaking (see manywheres principle 4). More broadly, numerous scholars have argued for using integrated methods over time and attending to meaning-making in psychology and development (Maynard & Chaudhary, 2020;Power et al, 2018;Power & Velez, 2020;Velez et al, 2022;Weisner, 2020). Here, we build on these frameworks by operationalizing manywheres in research and providing examples.…”

“…We specifically outline its application to climate change and racial/ethnic and resource inequalities. These issues are on the forefront of developmentalists' minds across disciplines as they consider what it means to build more harmonious, just worlds Maynard & Chaudhary, 2020;Moghaddam, 2021). These issues demand responses that are nuanced, attentive to diverse and intersectional positionalities and strengths-based.…”

“…Others have articulated why cultural context must inform developmental science (e.g., Jensen, 2012), the role meaning-making plays in young people's emerging identities (Hammack, 2010;Power & Velez, 2020), and the value in attending to children and youth's perspectives on inequality, inequity, and injustice (Killen et al, 2022). Recent work has also emphasized that human development scholars must study diverse experiences and developmental pathways through multiple methods (Maynard & Chaudhary, 2020). Manywheres builds on this foundation as a set of guiding propositions to address the tension between attending to the diversity of human development and striving to build more harmonious, just, and democratic societies amid the complexity of conflicting visions of social change and social justice.…”

“…A commitment to social justice, with rights as part of this focus, is vital and central to human development (Goodman et al, 2004). At the same time, who articulates these experiences matters: what it means to feel exploited, terrorized, devalued, battered, chronically exhausted, or virtually enslaved can be defined from above or emerge from people's own dynamic meaning-making (Maynard & Chaudhary, 2020). A more expansive view of social justice requires us to be attentive to how young people may hold varied, and at times divergent, ideas of what makes a better world.…”