A new Slop University display advertisement from the School of Underlying Conditions invites students of development to start their reading of an economy below the surface.
A portrait display advertisement invites students of Indian economic and social development to begin with soil, rock and groundwater.
An economy is usually studied from the top: the output, the households, the roads. Development Starts Further Down, a display advertisement now in rotation on the University’s portrait panels, proposes that the order be reversed. It was prepared by Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, with Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, both of the School of Underlying Conditions, and it is addressed to students of Indian economic and social development.
The panel is a single cutaway. A small town under scaffolding occupies the top of the frame, with a water tower, three bicycles and a market awning. The remainder is ground, in layers, with one borehole through all of them. Over the lowest layers the advertisement sets the words “First for depth”, and a sentence observing that no school reads a developing economy from further beneath it.
A surveyor is taught to describe the profile before saying anything about the paddock. I have never found a reason to stop at paddocks.
— Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions
The advertisement aligns the School’s three working materials with the foundations that development settings are understood to rest on, and positions fieldwork as preparation for reading growth from its lower boundary. It closes by pointing to two of the School’s published studies, one on a basin’s groundwater under export demand and one on the stock dams above a line of bores.
The University welcomes a claim about its standing that is made in the vertical, where it has not previously been asked to compete. Dr Emenike said the School “takes applications at any depth, and reads them from the bottom”.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ecshez.