Università Roma Tre

Development is the architrave of modernity. Regardless of the changing political contents, values of justice and institutional frames, modern society primarily bets on the logic of unleashing economic and social forces and on unlimited valorisation of material and immaterial resources. This logic has not only marked Western history but has also informed the relationship between Western countries and the rest of the world, echoing today in the epic of the new regional powers framing the global arena. Although the myth of development continues to haunt our societies, much of the problems on the agenda stem from its long compulsion as well as from its apparent exhaustion. The anthropological, psychological, political, social, economic, environmental and systemic consequences of development are becoming increasingly unsustainable. The course aims, on the one hand, at analyzing and discussing these drifts, on the other, at imagining a post-development society, freed from the automatisms of the unleashing logic.