The Master's programme in Anthropology and Development Studies is a one-year programme (60 EC) taught at the Faculty of Social Sciences. It is structured across four periods, guiding you step by step from theory to independent research.
- Period 1 – Foundations: You build the theoretical and methodological foundations needed to develop your research ideas.
- Period 2 – Research Design: You write your research proposal, developing your topic, theoretical framework and methodology.
- Period 3 – Fieldwork: You carry out three months of independent fieldwork, in a national or international context.
- Period 4 – Analysis and Output: You analyse your data, write your thesis, and learn how to translate your findings into accessible and socially relevant outputs.
Thematic tracks
Within this Master's programme, you choose one of three thematic tracks, each offering a rigorous and distinctive entry point into the questions that drive the programme. Your track shapes not only your research focus, but the way you come to understand the world around you. Through your coursework, you engage with key academic debates and develop your own research topic. Your final paper in the thematic course forms the basis for your research proposal, including your literature review and theoretical framework.
Decolonising diversity in a polarised world
In an increasingly diverse and polarised world, belonging and inequality have become the object of intense debate and concern. Discussions revolve around multiple and intersecting dimensions of perceived difference: of race and ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, mobility, legal status and indigeneity, rural and urban, and religion and the secular. In this thematic track, you seek to understand how citizens, social organisations and governments enact, experience and possibly deconstruct boundaries. You focus on new imaginations of relations across boundaries in everyday encounters. Where and when do new forms of conviviality and equity emerge? How do people break boundaries? And how do they create a new sense of belonging in diverse and polarised societies? Researchers and students of this track take on a postcolonial perspective and find inspiration in critical refugee studies, critical race and whiteness studies, feminist anthropology, queer studies, and post-secular studies. We explore both how people live with and across differences, and how diversity is taken up as an object of governance.
Ecological livelihoods and environmental justice
How can the diversity of views on global warming, biodiversity loss, or sustainability be explained? In this track, you study the social nature of human relatedness to the environment from an interdisciplinary perspective. You learn about the complex and changing capacity of solidarity within the more-than-human world, focusing on classical social domains such as gender, religion and kinship, and how these are shaped through diverse understandings and lived practices in a multi-species environment. Understanding the diversity of ecological livelihoods also implicates a critical focus on volatile structures of socio-political and economic inequalities concerning land, the increasing depletion of natural resources and the transition to renewable energies. This track invites you to delve deeper into the multifaceted questions of the Anthropocene.
Grassroots initiatives, development and the state
People have always, individually or collectively, tried to ‘make the world a better place’. Many organise themselves in grassroots initiatives aimed at some form of development. Occasionally, such initiatives are ‘enforced’ from above. Grassroots initiatives and their challenges raise many questions about how they take shape and how they relate to governments and the private sector. Who, for example, takes the lead and who is left out? How do authorities, such as governments, corporations, and (development) NGOs, encourage and/or react to these initiatives? This thematic track inspires you to study the large diversity of grassroots initiatives that support transitions in the global North and South.
Theory courses
Contemporary Theory of Societies and Change
Contemporary societies are changing fast and so do the aspects to understand, capture and analyse these processes of change. This course offers you cutting-edge theories, such as on practices, social navigation, assemblages, well-being, natural resources and decolonisation. These help to understand the processes of change and development. You develop a strong level of empirical reasoning in the discipline of anthropology and development studies and learn to connect the theoretical debates and concepts to concrete cases in your own field of interest.
Method courses
Advanced Research Methods
You gain practical experience with methodologies that are essential to both anthropology and development studies. This course presents a review of advanced and the latest methodologies, in particular ethnography, social network analysis, and experimental and survey methodology. You will practice a number of methods and research techniques that prepare you for designing and conducting your research.
Research Design
In this course, you review key themes and methodological and ethical dilemmas regarding the development and design of a research project, whilst simultaneously learning how to deal with them in the design of your own research. In addition, we discuss important themes that are essential for a solid research design, such as the conceptualisation of the field, access to the field and rapport with research participants, but also triangulation and reflexivity. In the second part, you develop your own research project and write an in-depth research proposal.
Master's project
Field Research
Field research is a key component of this Master’s programme. You carry out three months of field research on a relevant issue in your thematic domain. You can choose to stay in the Netherlands or to go abroad to do fieldwork and collect data. You are encouraged to formulate a research question in consultation with social partners or organisations, such as city councils, NGOs, embassies, or education and healthcare institutions, which makes your research not only academically, but also of socially relevant.
Reflecting and Reporting
In this course, you learn to critically reflect on your research findings and make these findings available and understandable for relevant interested parties. You will learn to present your findings in both a Master’s thesis and a public article, such as a blog, column or policy brief.
Master's thesis
Your Master’s thesis contains the findings of your research, analysed from a theoretical perspective and presented in a written report of a high academic standard. You will be supervised by our expert staff. By combining theoretical views and ideas with your own research findings, you contribute with your thesis to scientific debates on anthropology and development studies.