Music is one of the most immediate forms of art in the cultural repertoire. It thus possesses a distinctive power. Yet little research has been done to date to on the relationship between global development and popular music.

This gap is the jumping off point for Prof. Dennis Rodgers and his co-authors David Lewis and Michael Woolcock in their recently published article “The Sounds of Development: Musical Representation as A(nother) Source of Development Knowledge” in The Journal of Development Studies.

The piece examines how music can offer distinctive insights into the way development issues take on public significance in social, cultural, and political terms, as well as the ways they are sustained in everyday life. 

It discusses the relationship between music and development in five specific domains: the tradition of Western ‘protest’ music; musical resistance in the Global South; music-based development interventions; commodification and appropriation; and music as a globalized development vernacular. 

“The Sounds of Development” is the next installment of the authors’ research on arts and development, which also includes a piece on fiction, “The Fiction of Development”, and on film, “The Projection of Development”. This innovative research agenda builds on Popular Representations of Development a volume co-edited by Prof. Rodgers.

One of the authors’ goals is to enhance the relevance and coherence of development debates for a greater range of key stakeholders of development by making them more open, authentic, and compelling.

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Dennis Rodgers is Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. He is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded GANGS project and was recently appointed as Advisory Faculty member of the Global Governance Centre.