Teaching the Plurality of Law and Development: Teaching of and with Contested Knowledge

Abstract

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