Meet the Team: A Conversation with Ragini, Sanjana and Doris

Can You Hear Us?

“International development encourages us to view the world as a ‘bigger picture’.” -Doris Huang

“When we are talking about international development, we do need to be mindful of the fact that the reason inequalities exist is because they were created. If the west is prosperous, they did so at the cost of someone else not being prosperous.” - Ragini Puri

“ID focuses more on the actor ‘doing development’ as opposed to the site of development. Hence, there is less focus on creating an environment where development can foster itself.” - Sanjana Sundar

The Can You Hear Us podcast is back! There are several themes we are eager to explore with our brand-new team. In this Meet The Team episode Monica and Madiera are joined by Ragini, our assistant producer, Sanjana, our social media manager, and Doris, our lead researcher all responsible for the conversations that will take place in this third series of the podcast. Today, the new team discuss: everything International Development (ID)!

Doris, is a first-year sociology student at the LSE, who had not heard about ID before joining the podcast. However, after discussions with Monica and Madiera, she realised that she had in fact done work which could fall under development. To this end, she asks Ragini and Sanjana to elaborate on their understanding of international development and its definition. This leads to an insightful conversation about what the main goal of ID is, what constitutes the ID space, and why we need ID!

Turning to Inclusivity, Sanjana provides insights about how ID tends to be gendered. She also touches upon the idea of those who provide aid versus those who receive aid. The team draws from their own experiences to understand what an inclusive ID space would look like and while there are no concrete answers, the team builds on each other’s knowledge to come up with practical solutions.

In the final segment, the team becomes introspective as they discuss where they stand in the ID space. As students and alumni of LSE, the team discusses the inherent elitism in the ID space. Sanjana had already touched upon the idea of an active actor and a passive receiver. The team expands on this topic to include personal anecdotes of instances where they first realised their own position in ID.

After an excellent conversation about everything ID, Monica and Madiera bring out the wheel of questions! For this episode, the guests had to answer the prompt, “Horoscopes, yay or nay?” As an issue that has swept up the youth, there were many opinions to be shared. In an interesting discovery, the CYHU team realised there are three cusps on the team! To find out who votes yay and who votes nay, as well as who those cusps are, make sure you tune in to our brand new episode of Can You Hear Us!