MA Development Studies student Deep Mehta shares his honest reflections about his year with us – including the challenges and frictions caused when your values, beliefs and opinions and not always aligned with those who you are studying with.
Much of what I say here overlaps with what others have expressed previously on this theme, but I am confident that I have something new to offer. I don’t write this as sheer praise for IDS, or my masters’ programme, or to beam about my positive journey. I attempt to elaborate on a very important tenet of the IDS experience: the diversity.
It is obvious that the staff and cohort of students are diverse in ethnicity, nationality and occupation. This is the case in much of higher education in the developed world, especially for courses in development. I am not familiar with the demographic composition and culture in other programmes in the UK or elsewhere, but at IDS I have learnt that diversity is a lot more than it appears to be. It is not just putting together people with different accents, appearances and introductory notes in a room. These people have different personalities, perspectives, ideas and values, and you get to observe in part how they play out and interact with each other over a year.
The rich diversity at IDS
Importantly, it is not always harmonious and pleasant. One might assume that a diverse community is formed under the garb of an overarching progressive ideology, like I had when I arrived here. But even though IDS itself is grounded strongly in progressive values, the community has a range of values, beliefs and opinions, including the conservative, traditional, opportunistic and idealistic, and I have even seen some of them at odds with each other in and outside seminar rooms. I have observed undercurrents of tension too, when people at different points on ideological spectra interact, although without open hostility. To me, this has been, at its least, highly interesting, and at its best, spiritually enriching.
The ethnic and geographical diversity itself is amazing to experience. I had never seen or met anyone from Latin America, from the Maghreb, and even parts of Asia, where I am from, before coming here, and students from these places are now good friends of mine. They make me feel emotionally connected to these parts of the world that rarely entered my mind before. This truly does make you feel more in touch with the planet, and humankind as a whole.
Meeting the many different people at IDS, you get to learn at least a little about many of their stories and therefore, how their views on the world are shaped. There’s the humanitarian relief worker who has been in the midst of gunfire in conflict zones in the Middle East, the ex-soldier who fought against terrorists on their country’s border, the INGO employee who struggled to operate under an authoritarian regime, the social entrepreneur seeking to expand an enterprise in South Asia, another using music to tackle social divides in East Africa, the evaluation specialist who’s seen the apathy of development organisations to on-ground realities, the multinational corporation executive seeking a fresh perspective and the recent graduate looking to learn and test academic learnings, among many others.
In my experience, being in the midst of such diversity offers important learnings.
Values and perspectives are complex
First, one learns to appreciate complexity. The conservative and the very progressive can come together to condemn the same military incursion, the supporters of free enterprise (including yours truly) and the communists can have a shared concern for environmental sustainability, the deeply religious and the atheistic can similarly resent economic inequalities and what is a mildly problematic opinion for one is an obvious thought for another. The motivations people claim they have for expressing these range from pragmatic interests to academic inquisitiveness to moral value. Such complexity, in a sense, is a feature of the world as it is. The student community at IDS is a remarkable melting pot where one gets to witness such a reflection of the world at close hand. It amends the simplistic ideas one has of people who belong to communities and orders (corporates, activists, those of different religions, etc.) and makes you appreciate how individuals have complex circumstances and hold complex belief systems.
Engendering empathy
Also, when interacting with people in person, noting their behaviours and expressions, it humanises the distant concept they represent. This leads to an even greater learning: that of empathy. We can hold strong opinions about people who hold values different from our own. We can have judgements about their conscience, their perspectives and motivations. But if you take the time to interact with them, it becomes harder to hold on to an assumption of what they are. Because you will begin to appreciate the experiences that make them who they are. People’s experiences of violence, struggles, living in environments very different from our own, facing challenges in life we were not conscious of, even in part, bring us closer to their realities, dispelling myths in the process. And in being closer to others’ realities, one can expand their own reality.
What is international development?
This empathising begins with acknowledgement of a commonality: we are all people. Students dress differently, eat and consume differently, speak differently, but there are shared emotions and understandings that people have. At least in my experience, IDS lets you see this vividly.
The first thing IDS teaches you about development is to be confused about what it is. And rightly so, because there are many perceptions of what it means and takes to make the world a better place. But students are encouraged to share stories, comments and questions which reveal insights and perspectives beyond the reading material, that are not just intellectually enriching. You get to see and understand more about the personal and professional stories and the communities and countries our colleagues hail from.
There are debates, but I have found that a strong culture of politeness and indulgence prevails, and people are mostly patient and listening. Hearing someone out in a seminar may not change your mind about whether they are wrong, as I have experienced, but it can help you to understand better how they are thinking. Even arguing with peers gives you a peek into their emotional and intellectual selves, and I find that the more you are willing to learn and observe, the more able you are to put yourself in their shoes.
Bringing people together
But perhaps more importantly, the pleasant air in IDS, beginning with the warmth of the staff and the helpfulness of everyone, and the communal sentiment of house sessions and gatherings, from the informal ones on the reception sofas, in the study space, on the benches outside, and the organised festivities in the IDS kitchen, , in working on group assignments, sitting in module seminars and guest events, or in the study space on a quiet afternoon, facilitates human connections. As is natural in any engaging environment, peers can be at odds with each other, and there can be unpleasantness. All students may not find time, motive and opportunity to have the positive experiences others do. But IDS, never claiming to be perfect, provides a balance of communality and diversity that in my experience is rarer than it should be in the world. It is heartening to witness the bonding of people who are otherwise very different, to relate over British weather, share in the joy of a friend’s birthday, dancing or in some of our cases, nodding heads awkwardly, to music from around the world or simply exchanging a radiant smile when passing each other in the corridor.
To me, the environment in IDS is spiritually enriching, and the freeness and flexibility of people and the curriculum add to it, because despite the different ideas of development and the motivation for being here, all seem to me to be tied in an aura of profundity, brought by undertaking study and work that is intended to make the world a better place. This is magnified by the human connections one gets to develop here. There are different perspectives on the value of a masters’ degree, many critical, but I can say with confidence that the one year at IDS can leave you significantly wiser about the world, and in this way, better equipped to take on the development problems in your corner of it.
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