The document discusses how popular media representations, including novels, films, and social media, contribute to understandings of development. It emphasizes the importance of these narratives as influential sources of knowledge and alternative methods for conveying complex ideas in development education and practice. Ultimately, the talk aims to connect the humanities with social sciences in the analysis of development issues.

1. Popular
Representations of
Development:
Insights from Novels,
Films, Television and
Social Media
Michael Woolcock
World Bank & Harvard Kennedy School
Institute of Development Studies
January 21, 2014

2. Overview
• What this talk is, and is not, about
• PROD’s “comparative advantage”
• Why it’s interesting, why it matters
– For scholarship
– For a well-rounded development education
– For thinking and doing in development practice

3. What PROD is not
• An overview of ‘world’ (or even ‘Western’)
literature, cinema, or television on development
• A treatise on the epistemological equivalence of
statistics and poetry for determining policy
• An analysis of the incidence or meaning of key
development words (e.g., ‘poverty’) in literature
over time
– cf. Ravallion (2011)

4. ‘Poverty’ in literature, 1700-2000
Source: Martin Ravallion (2011) “The Two Poverty Enlightenments: Historical Insights
from Digitized Books Spanning Three Centuries” Poverty & Public Policy 3(2): 1-146

5. What PROD seeks to be: a book that…
• Takes seriously popular expressions of how
‘development’ is explained, experienced, and
encountered
– A source of authoritative knowledge
• cf. JPE and WDR…
– Legitimize, facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue
• Opens up alternative modalities for conveying
complex, controversial ideas
– Great teaching tool!
• Is a complement to, not a substitute for,
orthodox scholarly and policy research

6. Table of Contents
• Part 1: Introduction
– Key themes
• Part 2: Literature and Fiction
– Novels, 1 World Manga
• Part 3: Media and Television
– Reality TV, ‘The Wire’
• Part 4: Films
– Hollywood, Bollywood
• Part 5: Public Campaigns
– Empire Marketing Board, ‘Band Aid’
• Part 6: New Media
– Twitter, Blogs
• Part 7: Conclusion
– Implications, agenda

7. Perspective, empathy via stories,
allegories (as ‘true myths’)
• A long, venerable, diverse insight
– BCE: The Bible
• Isaiah (6:19) “their eyes cannot see, and
their ears cannot hear”
– 9th C: Jain, Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu lore
• The Blind Men and the Elephant
– Mid-19th C: George Eliot
• ‘Appeals founded on generalizations and
statistics require a sympathy readymade, a moral sentiment already in
activity; but a picture of human life such
as a great artist can give, surprises even
the trivial and the selfish into that
attention to what is apart from
themselves, which may be called the
raw material of moral sentiment.’

8. Perspective, Empathy
• Early 20th C: Joseph Conrad
– “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by
the power of the written word to make you
hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to
make you see.”
• Mid-20th C: Kenneth Burke
– ‘A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing’
• Mid-20th C: John Berger
– Ways of Seeing
• Today: Scott E. Page
– The Difference: How the Power of Diversity
Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and
Societies
• Today: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
– Purple Hibiscus; Half of a Yellow Sun
– ‘The Danger of the Single Story’ (TED Talk)
• Downloaded ~5M times

9. ‘Tambien la Lluvia’
(‘Even the Rain’)

10. Reconnecting the humanities and
social sciences in development
• Some examples:
– Lewis Coser (1972 [1963]): Sociology Through Literature
– Kenji Yoshino (2011) A Thousand Times More Fair: What
Shakespeare’s Plays Teach us About Justice
– Stephen Kern (2004) A Cultural History of Causality
• Artists as researchers
– Philip Zelikow (2012) on ‘Lincoln’ as innovative history
• “Because filmmakers can often devote far more resources to
research than scholars can, because the sheer process of a
painstaking reconstruction of a past world can itself yield insights
about it, it has always been possible that filmmakers might add to
our collective historical understanding, rather than either
popularizing or debasing it. In Mr. Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ that
possibility is happily realized.”

11. Reconnecting the humanities and
social sciences in development
• Artists as trenchant social critics, advocates
– Lynn Hunt (2006) Inventing Human Rights: A History
• Novels help transform routinized torture into LFE
– Phil Montgomery (2011) Two Roads East
• Artists as teachers of social science concepts
– Structure-agency; counterfactuals; ‘poverty traps’;
identities; ‘lifeworld’; ‘asymmetric’ variables
• Arts/Social Science hybrids
– Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
• “It seemed to *Abdul+ that in Annawadi, fortunes
derived not just from what people did, or how well they
did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they
avoided. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you,
the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you
hadn’t caught.”
• The political economy of artistic mediums
– Is small beautiful? (i.e., is anyone ‘independent’?

12. 1. Giving, receiving
• John Steinbeck on his friend Ed Ricketts
(the character ‘Doc’ in Cannery Row),
who had a unique ability to “receive
anything from anyone, to receive
gratefully and thankfully, and to make
the gift seem very fine.”
– “It is so easy to give, so exquisitely
rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand,
if done well, requires a fine balance of
self-knowledge and kindness. It requires
humility and tact and great
understanding of relationships. In
receiving you cannot appear, even to
yourself, better or stronger or wiser than
the giver, although you must be wiser to
do it well.”

13. 2. Small vs Big Development
“*T+here’s only so much good you can do unless you are willing to confront
corruption, venality and disorder head-on. So if I could, presumptuously, recommend
a reading list to help these activists fill in the gaps in the prevailing service ethos, I’d
start with the novels of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, or at least the
movies based on them.
The noir heroes like Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” served as models for a
generation of Americans, and they put the focus squarely on venality, corruption and
disorder and how you should behave in the face of it.
A noir hero is a moral realist. He assumes that everybody is dappled with virtue and
vice, especially himself. He makes no social-class distinction and only provisional
moral distinctions between the private eyes like himself and the criminals he
pursues. The assumption in a Hammett book is that the good guy has a spotty
past, does spotty things and that the private eye and the criminal are two sides to
the same personality.
He (or she — the women in these stories follow the same code) adopts a layered
personality. He hardens himself on the outside in order to protect whatever is left of
the finer self within.
David Brooks: ‘Sam Spade at Starbucks’ (New York Times, 12 April 2012)

14. 3. Leaving, entering
…slowly but surely we have become alienated from our own people and our
own environment. This alienation would have been bearable had it not been
that in our case the abandonment of our own culture did not at the same
time bring access to another civilization. Thus we have sacrificed what was
ours but have not gained in its place anything that might be considered its
equivalent; we have lost our world, but we have not entered another…
We have added much new cultural material, the value of which cannot be
discounted; however, it often fits so ill with our own style or is so far removed
from it that we can use it at best as a decoration and not as material to build
with. It is quite understandable why we have been so mistaken in our choice.
In the first place, much has to be chosen, and there has been so little to
choose from.
Ki Hajar Dewantara, 1935 (Indonesian educator)