Brian Dill

I study development as a relational and historically uneven process. Building on critical traditions in development sociology that have exposed dependency, dispossession, and unequal exchange, my work advances the concept of reparative development. Rather than stopping at critique, I ask what it would mean to institutionalize repair across knowledge systems, material redistribution, and the relational architectures through which development operates.

Reparative development reframes the field’s central questions. It shifts analytic attention from whether development “works” to how authority, resources, and decision-making power are organized in the wake of harm. Across projects, I examine how repair can be institutionalized through pluralizing knowledge, redressing extraction, and reconstructing social and ecological relations in more durable and reciprocal forms.

My earlier and ongoing work on networked ruralism provides an empirical and conceptual foundation for this approach. By examining how rural and post-extractive communities are embedded in multi-scalar economic and political networks, I show how uneven development is relationally produced and how communities can reconfigure their position within those networks in more equitable ways.

Across my research, I am interested in how development might move beyond critique toward practices of redress, redistribution, and relational reconstruction, and in how worlds marked by uneven development can be rebuilt differently.