Dr Glyn Williams
School of Geography and Planning
Reader
+44 114 222 6179
Full contact details
School of Geography and Planning
Room D11e
Geography and Planning Building
Winter Street
Sheffield
S3 7ND
- Profile
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I studied Geography as an undergraduate at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, and continued my studies there, completing my PhD in Geography in 1996.
From 1994-2002, I was a Lecturer at Keele University, before taking up a lectureship at the Department of Geography, Kings College London (2002-2006).
I joined the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield in 2006 as a Senior Lecturer, and was promoted to the position of Reader in 2013.
I am an active member and former Chair of the Royal Geographical Society's Developing Areas Research Group: I am also co-editor of International Development and Planning Review, and editorial board member of Contemporary South Asia.
Dr Glyn Williams talks about his teaching in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
- Research interests
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My research interests lie in the field of international development, and more specifically in the interaction between development programmes, governance practices, and citizenship in the Global South.
My work is driven by a motivation to promote development practice which is more socially just in two key respects.
First, by critically engaging with the core agendas of development interventions, looking at their limitations, their unintended consequences, and the spaces for resistance within them.
Second, by seeking to represent more fully within academic and policy debates the agency and understanding of socially, economically and politically marginalised groups in whose name ‘development’ is often invoked.
These interests are inherently inter-disciplinary, engaging with debates at the interfaces between Development Studies, Geography, Urban Studies and Planning.
My research looks at three interlocking themes at these interfaces: state power and political practices; social marginalisation and political participation; and urban governance and city-level development.
Linking all three is a concern with the impacts that intentional plans to 'develop' the global South have for communities living there. My work critically engages with mainstream discourses of development and investigates the ways these selectively include individuals and groups within political processes.
The questions that continue to inform my research, and on which I am interested in supervising PhD students, include the following:
- How are formal institutional and democratic processes understood, reworked and practised as ‘actually existing governance’ in post-colonial contexts?
- What informs ideas of desirable urban change in cities of the Global South, and in whose interests do these ideas work?
- To what degree do participatory development initiatives empower marginalised people?
- How do development institutions define and address forms of social marginalisation, including poverty?
To date, I have investigated these questions through in fieldwork in India, where I have conducted research since 1992.
Research projects
- Mobility in the peripheries: a scoping project (HEFCE)
- Megaprojects and the reshaping of urban futures (British Academy)
- Self-help or Social Transformation: The role of women in local governance (Research Council of Norway)
- Developing Research Capacity for Inclusive Urban Governance (RCUK and the National Research Foundation, South Africa)
- Managing Covid-19 in India’s Cities: Reshaping people’s everyday lives in poorer urban neighbourhoods
- Publications
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Books
Edited books
- South Asia in a Globalising World: A Reconstructed Regional Geography. London: Routledge.
Journal articles
- (Im)mobility at the margins : low-income households’ experiences of peripheral resettlement in India and South Africa. Housing Studies.
- Outsiders in the periphery: studies of the peripheralisation of low income housing in Ahmedabad and Chennai, India. International Journal of Housing Policy. View this article in WRRO
- Childcare and academia : an intervention. International Development Planning Review. View this article in WRRO
- Planning a ‘slum free' Trivandrum: Housing upgrade and the rescaling of urban governance in India. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 37(2), 256-276. View this article in WRRO
- Enacting participatory, gender-sensitive slum redevelopment? Urban governance, power and participation in Trivandrum, Kerala. Geoforum, 96, 150-159. View this article in WRRO
- Managing political space: authority, marginalised people’s agency and governance in West Bengal. International Development Planning Review, 40(1). View this article in WRRO
- Making space for women in urban governance? Leadership and claims-making in a Kerala slum. Environment and Planning A, 47(5), 1113-1131. View this article in WRRO
- Decentralisation and the changing geographies of political marginalisation in Kerala. Environment and Planning A, 45(6), 1337-1357. View this article in WRRO
- Researching with impact in the Global South? Impact-evaluation practices and the reproduction of 'development knowledge'. Contemporary Social Science, 8(3), 223-236.
- The disciplining effects of impact evaluation practices: Negotiating the pressures of impact within an ESRC-DFID project. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(4), 489-495.
- The politics of defining and alleviating poverty: State strategies and their impacts in rural Kerala. Geoforum, 43(5), 991-1001.
- Performing Participatory Citizenship - Politics and Power in Kerala's Kudumbashree Programme. Journal of Development Studies, 47(8), 1261-1280.
- Seeing the state again. Geoforum, 38(4), 611-613.
- Postcolonial environmental justice: Government and governance in India. Geoforum, 37(5), 660-670.
- Decentralized Corruption or Corrupt Decentralization? Community Monitoring of Poverty-Alleviation Schemes in Eastern India. World Development, 34(11), 1922-1941.
- Evaluating participatory development: tyranny, power and (re)politicisation. Third World Quarterly, 25(3), 557-578.
- The Everyday State and Political Society in Eastern India: Structuring Access to the Employment Assurance Scheme. Journal of Development Studies, 39(5), 1-28.
- Brainstorming, Modified Logframes and the Conversion of Research Hypotheses into Field Questions: Reflections from Team‐based Fieldwork in Eastern India. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24(2), 242-257.
- Participation and Power: Poor People's Engagement with India's Employment Assurance Scheme. Development and Change, 34(1), 163-192.
- Entanglements of participation: the theory and practice of attacking poverty. Progress in Development Studies, 3(2), 93-97.
- Enhancing pro-poor governance in Eastern India: participation, politics and action research. Progress in Development Studies, 3(2), 159-178.
- Making Social Science Matter 1: How the local state works in rural Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Economic and Political Weekly, 38(24), 2377-2389.
- Making Social Science Matter 2: How the rural poor see the State in Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Economic and Political Weekly, 38(25), 2561-2569.
- Making sense of the local state: Rent-seeking, vernacular society and the employment assurance scheme in eastern India. Contemporary South Asia, 11(3), 267-289.
- Understanding 'political stability': Party action and political discourse in West Bengal. Third World Quarterly, 22(4), 603-622.
- Assessing Poverty and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from West Bengal. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24(2), 193-212.
- State, Discourse, and Development in India: The Case of West Bengal's Panchayati Raj. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 29(12), 2099-2112.
- Navigating the challenges of fieldwork and childcare: revisiting Muddy Glee. Area.
- Producing planning knowledge: how professional PhD candidates bridge research-practice divides. Urban Forum.
- Megaprojects, mirages and miracles: territorialising the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor and state restructuring in contemporary India. Territory, Politics, Governance.
Chapters
- The State, The Routledge Handbook of Social Change (pp. 181-190). Routledge
- Governance, Good, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (pp. 235-243). Elsevier
- Researching with impact in the Global South? Impact-evaluation practices and the reproduction of 'development knowledge', Knowledge Mobilisation and the Social Sciences: Research Impact and Engagement (pp. 57-70).
- Postscript: Viewing South Africa's urban governance from an 'Indian' perspective In Benit-Gbaffou C (Ed.), Popular Politics in South African Cities: Unpacking Community Participation (pp. 282-293). Cape Town: HSRC Press.
- Conclusion: Development in South Asia: Ground-truthing constructions of regional change, South Asia in a Globalising World: A Reconstructed Regional Geography (pp. 270-273).
- South Asia in a globalising world: A reconstructed regional geography, South Asia in a Globalising World: A Reconstructed Regional Geography (pp. 1-16).
- Politics of middlemen and political society In Gudavarthy A (Ed.), Re-Framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society (pp. 171-200). London: Anthem Press.
- Development: Part I In Agnew J & Duncan J (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography (pp. 559-574). Wiley-Blackwell
- Governance, Good, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography: Volume 1-12 (pp. V4-606-V4-614).
- India's evolving political geographies In Raju S, Kumar S & Corbridge S (Ed.), Colonial and Post-colonial Geographies of India (pp. 261-278). London: Sage.
- Literature Reviews and Bibliographic Searches, Doing Development Research (pp. 209-221).
- Towards a repoliticisation of participatory development: political capabilties and spaces of empowerment In Hickey S & Mohan G (Ed.), Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation (pp. 92-109). London: Zed Books.
- Rethinking West Bengal's 'political stability': from party organisation to local practices of politics In Zavos J, Wyatt A & Hewitt V (Ed.), The Politics of Cultural Mobilisation in India (pp. 71-102). Delhi: OUP.
- Development in South Asia: ground-truthing constructions of regional change In Williams GO & Bradnock R (Ed.), South Asia in a Globalising World: A Reconstructed Regional Geography (pp. 270-273). London: Prentice Hall.
- Panchayati Raj and the changing micro-politics of West Bengal In Rogaly B, Harriss-White B & Bose S (Ed.), Sonar Bangla? Agricultural Growth and Agrarian Change in West Bengal and Bangladesh (pp. 229-252). Sage
Book reviews
- Book review: India Today: Economics, Politics and Society. Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), 385-386.
- Grassroots Democracy in India and China: The Right to Participate. JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, 23(1), 155-155.
- The politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of the world. CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES, 15(1), 151-151.
- An Everyday Geography of the Global South. GEOGRAPHY, 93, 191-191.
- AN EVERYDAY GEOGRAPHY OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH. GEOGRAPHY, 93, 191-191.
- Theories of development.. ANNALS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS, 92(2), 374-377.
- Conflict and cooperation in participatory natural resource management. ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS, 11(2), 204-205.
- World hunger.. ANTIPODE, 31(1), 120-121.
- Power of development. Political Geography, 17(1), 119-120.
- Readings in Political Geography. Political Geography, 16(4), 356-357.
- Non-governmental organizations: performance and accountability. International Affairs, 72(4), 818-818.
Dictionary/encyclopaedia entries
- Good Governance. In International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography. London: Elsevier.
- South Asia in a Globalising World: A Reconstructed Regional Geography. London: Routledge.
- Research group
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I am Primary Supervisor for the following PhD students:
- Debjani Dasgupta, State-responsiveness, Decentralisation and Poverty-reduction
- Manuel Heckel, Urban governance and finance in sub-Saharan Africa
- Zhen Lu, Social justice and school district housing in China
- Pu Niu, Deliberative democracy in urban villages in China
- Vidya Pancholi, Towards substantive public participation in urban governance: a case study of Kalyan-Dombivli, Mumbai, India
- Teaching activities
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I have a range of teaching experience, and teach across both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
I currently teach on the following modules: