Yesterday on our Facebook page we shared this candid shot of our students in a physical exercise where 10 students had to “cooperate” and lower a paper tube to the ground using only their extended index fingers. Guest professor Mbongeni Ngulube’s analogy aimed to illustrate the delicate and complex task of integration when it comes to international cooperation.

Mbongeni graduated in 2010 from the previous incarnation of what is now our masters program, back then titled International Cooperation in Architecture: Housing, Urbanisation and Sustainability in Developing Contexts. This year we are thrilled to have him back as guest professor, giving lectures on the history of development and highlighting the key alternative and critical views of development theory and practice.

After graduating, Mbongeni collaborated as an editor and author of Reflections, our program’s first publication, and the pursued a PhD at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), where he works at the university’s Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa developing his research on the impact of diaspora and social movements on development. He is a Mundus Urbano Scholar for UIC and TUD Darmstadt and has also taught at the Institute for Development Studies located at the National University of Science and Technology, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Last year, he participated in a debate on Rebuilding Zimbabwe at the House of Commons in London, the audio of which you can listen to here.

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