Commodifying development experience: deconstructing development as gift in the development blockbuster

This paper discusses the recent rise of popular ‘blockbuster’ books written by international development industry insiders and produced by commercial publishers. The paper explores a set of common stylistic devices found within this emerging genre. Though each book is different, a key trope is the story of an author's earlier professional life—the hard lessons and gritty insights that have supposedly emerged from it—that normally underpins each narrative. By living the challenges involved in development work at first hand, and by making mistakes and experiencing epiphanies along the way, these author-professionals want readers to know that they have found out the hard way that long-cherished beliefs about development now need to be questioned. Readers are invited to relive these lessons and epiphanies, and to think and act differently about development by upholding a highly pragmatic form of development professionalism. Combining elements of research monograph, self-help book and personal memoir, these development blockbuster books can be understood not only as commodities, but also as part of the development gift. The authors promise a gift of experience but, in reality, these books are mundane commodities enmeshed in capitalist exchange relations

Diversity and pedagogic practice: reflections on the role of an adult educator in higher education

This is a postprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Teaching in Higher Education (c) 2007 Copyright Taylor & Francis; Teaching in Higher Education is available online at http://www.informaworld.comBased on a model developed by Brookfield (1995), a deliberately reflective approach is taken in this paper to the relationship between the author's earlier work in a department of adult education and her current teaching on a course for new university lecturers. As increasing numbers of mature students are being encouraged into universities, she wonders whether the principles and practices of adult education have a place in the pedagogic practices of higher education. She summarises the development of adult education departments in British universities, and draws attention to different pedagogic approaches in adult and higher education. Looking through various 'lenses', the author concludes that there is a need for a new professional agenda in higher education - where commonality and difference provide the starting points for mutual exploration and self-understanding - and that the traditions of adult education have a significant contribution to make to this agenda