The year’s edition of Ideas from IDS, our publication featuring student essays from the 2018/19 academic year, has for the first time a thematic focus: food.
Ideas form a fundamental component of development studies, and there are a great number of them in this collection of top-class student papers from across our suite of master’s degrees.
Why focus on food?
Food is a prominent development issue that concerns hunger, malnutrition, inequality, environmental sustainability, power and politics, social justice, and cultural identity. It is about the trade-offs that this era of globalisation has brought about, such as ensuring food security for all, while protecting the environment. It is about striking paradoxes such as the concurrence of under and overnutrition, sometimes in the same country or region, which reflects pervasive social inequalities and power imbalances in the food system.
This compilation of ten selected essays examines issues such as nutrition and care; government interventions including school feeding programmes and taxation; popular mobilisation for food justice; climate change and resilient livelihoods; and South-South agricultural cooperation.
Together the authors highlight the sociocultural and political dimensions of food, the interrelationships between interventions and social process, and the complexity and multidimensionality of food and sustainability issues. Collectively, they affirm the importance of considering food as a fundamental dimension of development studies.
Lidia Cabral, IDS Research Fellow and co-editor of the collection said:
“The diversity of themes, analytical frames, geographical foci, and levels of analysis represented in this issue reflect the multidimensional nature of food as a development topic. We hope the collection promotes further engagement with students and the wider academic community across IDS, Sussex and beyond on debates, studies, and research on food and development.”
A topic of growing significance at Sussex and beyond
Postgraduate teaching at IDS and the University of Sussex reflects the growing significance of food in global development and its relevance across disciplines and fields of study. This is particularly encapsulated in our specialist master’s course on Food and Development. The course, which earlier this year celebrated the graduation of its first cohort of students, was listed by Devex among the top 20 unique courses and programmes in global development.