What it means to be an educated person or have an educated population as a country is a big part of what informs the decisions around industrial, economic and education policy. But built into these questions are some fundamental assumptions about what it means to make progress or be developed as a society. And beneath that particular values about what it means to know and be in the world.

My guests this week have been exploring these precise questions in the context of international development but as you will hear there are so many resonances with the conversations that we are sharing about change in education. Dr. Uma Pradhan and Dr. Peter Sutoris are the authors of the new book 'Reimagining Development: Bold Directions Towards a Thriving World'.

Uma is an Associate Professor at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, and Deputy Programme Leader for BA Education, Culture, and Society. She also serves as Inclusion Co-Lead for the Department of Education, Practice and Society (EPS). At UCL, she is part of the Centre for Education and International Development (CEID) and the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. Before joining UCL, she was a Lecturer and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford.

She is author and co-author of many books including, Language Education, Politics and Technology in South Asia; Anthropological Perspectives on Education in Nepal: Educational Transformations and New Avenues of Learning; Rethinking Education in the Context of Post-Pandemic South Asia; Simultaneous Identities: Language, Education and the Nepali Nation.

Peter is Associate Professor in Climate and Development in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds University in the UK. His work bridges anthropology with education, development studies and environmental studies.Prior to this new book with Uma, Peter authored two books, Visions of Development (Oxford University Press, 2016), Educating for the Anthropocene (The MIT Press, 2022), all tackling the central questions about how humanity might be able to imagine its path to survival through the unfolding environmental multi-crisis.

Links:The book: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/development-reimagined/

https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/87070-uma-pradhan/about⁠

https://www.petersutoris.com/

https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/see

Exclusive: Kunal Basu (author of "In An Ideal World") in conversation with Lakshya Datta