Call for Abstracts, Posters & Workshop Proposals

For the full conference concept note, including the conference context, aims and key questions, please visit the DSAI Annual Conference 2027 page.

We welcome contributions from researchers across development studies and related disciplines, including international and global studies, political science, geography, sociology, anthropology, and other cognate social sciences. We also encourage submissions from practitioners and activist-led research in development debates, as well as transdisciplinary and collaborative research initiatives, and from early career researchers, postgraduate students, and colleagues from the Global South.

The DSAI conference in 2027 will explore the many complex challenges facing development studies into the future. Drawing on contemporary research, the experience of development practitioners, researchers, policy makers and activists, it invites participants to critically reflect on what’s working well, what needs to be unlearned in development studies and how development studies can situate itself more meaningfully and effectively in the future. Inviting participants to critically reflect on understandings, framings and practices of development and solidarity, it will open space for debating development studies’ future roles in theorizing global challenges and responses, in research and policy and in critical and transformative pedagogies. Are our higher education institutions spaces which can support the kinds of meaningful and engaged development research, theory, and pedagogical practices which are needed to shape alternative futures? What forms of intersectionality, relationality and interdisciplinarity should drive development studies in the future?

We invite abstracts, posters and workshop proposals that interrogate  the conference theme from diverse disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Contributions may engage with, but are not limited to, DSAI’s thematic study groups, or the following themes: