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Inspired by the "Humans of.." concept of sharing stories originated by photoblogger Brandon Stanton in New York, Humans of ID is a podcast where students in the LSE Department of International Development sit down with classmates, instructors, and alumni to learn about their stories and how they are interacting with issues in, and approaches to, development.
In these informal discussions, the Career and Professional Development team engages with guests, learning about their journey in the development field and discussing some pressing contemporary issues in international development. New episodes drop every Tuesday and are a great way to delve into the world of development whilst you are on the go!
07.12.23 Humans of ID: Episode 2 Professor Catherine Boone
Razan Awaad: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome back to the Humans of ID podcast, but this time with a twist. The Careers and Professional Development edition hosted by the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is organized and hosted by the Careers and Professional Development ID Student Organizers.
Razan Awaad: I'm your host Razan Awwad and I'm here with Professor Catherine Boone. You may recognize her as the author of Property and Political Order: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics in Africa, which won an award for being the best comparative politics book. You may also recognize her from her work as a member of the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association, or you may recognize her from her Invaluable Political Economy of Africa course.
Razan Awaad: So, hello, Catherine. How are you today?
Professor Catherine Boone: Hi, good. Thank you for inviting me.
Razan Awaad: We're thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with you [00:01:00] today, given your outstanding professional and academic experience. So, without further ado, could you first tell us what drove you to pursue this career and this path? What were your main inspirations?
Professor Catherine Boone: Well, thanks again for asking me, uh, to do this, and I think, um, my main inspiration has always been the thrilling experience of being in academia, really. So, I had a fabulous undergraduate education at the University of California, San Diego. And um, part of my education in the political science department was really encouraging this love of discovery using social science to generate new knowledge. The teachers were really young and inspiring and innovative and I took a series of fabulous classes in comparative politics and I also took advantage of the University of California [00:02:00] study abroad program which took me to the University of Nairobi in Kenya for a year and at the University of Nairobi I, I did a, a double program in Agricultural Economics and African Politics and both were super interesting.
Professor Catherine Boone: The African Politics class in particular really inspired me to want to understand this fascinating diversity that we see across African countries and the epic drama of the trajectories of different countries sort of coming into being in the 20th century as, as we know them today, and then sort of embarking on this, these projects of national formation and state building.
So, part of my education really introduced me to the power of social science to unlock these [00:03:00] different stories or to tell different stories about, about this big, important processes and to use empirical evidence as a way of trying to make them more precise, make them more accurate, also to find what is generalizable about them and what is not. So that is really what inspired me. Um. My story goes on from there. Do you want me to continue, continue on? So, I had a fabulous undergraduate experience. I wrote my, so I did a thesis while I was at the University of Nairobi. It was on the Kibera informal settlements in Nairobi, also known as the largest slum in Sub Saharan Africa.
Professor Catherine Boone: It's actually very densely organized, a very political city, and there was already a lot of research on Kibera that I built on. Um, so I came back to the United States, and I did my undergraduate thesis on the [00:04:00] independence struggle of Zimbabwe, Rhodesia Zimbabwe, and you know, I just felt I was in the middle of the project, so I went to graduate school at MIT and continued on the path. And I got very interested in the relationship between the structure of the economy and the structure of the society and how that shaped politics. And so, I wrote my PhD at MIT and, uh, you know, became, you know, ever more immersed in the comparative politics literature and putting the African stories into the context of the, kind of the bigger world histories of state building and building national economies.
Professor Catherine Boone: And so then I became a, an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and, you know, wrote, wrote a book on [00:05:00] Senegal, um, and then started another book and got promoted and wrote another book and, um, each one, each big project has led to the next actually kind of seamlessly because as I always say to the students, the more the more you study, the more you know what you don't know. So, learning actually reveals to you things that you don't understand. And it is kind of addictive, I guess, in that way, to want to just keep going. So that's, that's basically my story.
Razan Awaad: Thank you so much. This is really, really insightful. But if we just think back to the beginning of your career, and, you know, your journey in academia, what are the most important skills that you think you would want to pass on or encourage students to develop?
Professor Catherine Boone: Well, [00:06:00] this there are so many different paths and types and avenues within academia. I think to talk about skills in the narrow sense could lead to a discussion about different skills that are appropriate maybe in different disciplines and different paths. But I think maybe generally it is a, I don't know if it's exactly a skill, but a kind of willingness to explore and to read and to have some kind of confidence that your efforts will yield something interesting and new and good. And the willingness to, you know, be very, very open to learning, I think. Um, and to love the process, I mean that, I don't think this is a skill, but you know in [00:07:00] academia we, like all my books have taken ten years, for example, and um, you know often for classes, I mean it may look like we teach the same class every year, but they're extensively reinvented every year and so you give a class and it just kind of goes out there into thin air and then you reinvent it again the next year.
Professor Catherine Boone: So, it's something like patience or the love of the process and the journey I, I think that is part of the part of the skill. And then for some of us in some disciplines, it's a love of of reading and talking to people. Um, where a lot of what we do is trying out our ideas in, with colleagues and in these forums, working with students’ kind of one on one and in class. And then for the kind of research I do, a lot of it, although probably most of what I [00:08:00] know comes from reading, but a lot of what I know also comes from talking to people in the field and, you know, observing and talking and having the patience to observe and to let other people kind of tell you what. How they see things and what they, how they understand things and what they think is important and somehow, you know, having the willingness to kind of get into their shoes and go with the flow to try to understand what they're telling you as a way of reinterpreting maybe the ideas you had from before or weaving together the things that you've read.
Professor Catherine Boone: So, I'm not sure those are skills, but it's a kind of. Could be a kind of personality, maybe.
Razan Awaad: No, I mean, I definitely agree. But I want to understand what led you particularly to ID at LSE? And from here, what are your biggest achievements when you look back at all the work that you've done?
Professor Catherine Boone: So, ID at LSE, so it's an international [00:09:00] development department within this larger university. And I myself am actually half time in ID, and the other half of my appointment is in Government. And so really my career trajectory has been as a professor of Government, or professor of Political Science. And so, I worked for many years at University of Texas at Austin, and I think it's common in academia, um, for people to change universities over time so they, you know, move around often kind of trying to optimize or find the best fit. And so, when I had the opportunity to come to LSE, in other words I applied for a job and was offered the job, I realized that London would be a great perch for continuing to do the kind of research that I was doing and the kind of teaching.
Professor Catherine Boone: So, in terms of research, there have been a lot of resources, um, So, funding for [00:10:00] research projects and we're much closer to the African continent here than I was, uh, in Texas. So, there's more accessibility and there's this research funding and, you know, one of the big draws also about coming to London was I have, I have students from Africa in my courses and PhD students, which is something that was rare. I mean, there were a few over time in Texas, but you know, given our location, a global city, proximity, just the, the catchment pool of the students we recruit from, I have many more students from African countries, or their parents are from African countries or, you know, they're coming back and forth. They're much more directly connected. So, this has been, you know, one of the great rewards of being here. And also, being in the two departments has allowed me to kind of optimize or take advantage of both sides of my profile or my interests that compare to Political [00:11:00] Economy side, which is sort of my Government hat and then the sort of development African Political Economy, African politics side, which is, is my ID hat.
Professor Catherine Boone: And there are quite a few scholars who work on Africa in both of my departments, both here in ID and in Government. So, you know, this is what brought me to, to the LSE.
Razan Awaad: And from the LSE or from your previous work, what would you classify as your biggest achievement?
Professor Catherine Boone: Although my biggest achievement is my two kids. Who are, now they're, they're around 30, they're both around 30. Yes, there's, and there, you know, they, seeing, that they've successfully grown up is my biggest achievement. But other than that, I would say my biggest achievement, you know, academically is my four books. And, um, I [00:12:00] have written a lot of other things, articles and book chapters and papers and reports and everything else.
Professor Catherine Boone: But I think for me, it really comes together in these four books, which you know, for me, are kind of major steps in a progression of a research trajectory over time that, um, sort of accumulate into a certain kind of analysis of African countries that I think is a contribution to the field and I think, you know, creates new research paths for other people. And I think that's been the case of. Yes, of each one has kind of opened up new, new kinds of research problems for younger scholars and, and scholars in other disciplines, but also, you know, situated sort of questions and problems and aspects of the African political [00:13:00] economy that are really important in the African context.
Professor Catherine Boone: In the context of, of broader questions, questions that, you know, also relate to, to Europe, to Latin America, to Asia, you know, so allow scholars of African politics to see these connections and at the same time allow scholars who work on other parts of the world to kind of, uh, uh, understand how, how, what they can learn from the African continent and how Africa fits into their theories and their empirical research and, and, you know, thinking about, you know, how to frame and tackle problems within development studies and political science that are really wide relevance. So, I'm really, I really am proud of, of, uh, that corpus of work.
Razan Awaad: Yeah, I mean that's really inspirational to hear, but as well as you know that a lot of our listeners are going to be students in the field, and sometimes they [00:14:00] will face a lot of challenges, and I think they'd love to hear what the challenges you were that faced, how you overcame them, and how you would impart that knowledge on them.
Professor Catherine Boone: Well, academia is challenging because it's very competitive. And, you know, there are a lot of off-ramps on the academic career trajectory where, you know, somebody, maybe they think they would like to have an academic career and so they get a master’s and then they decide not to do a PhD or they just don't get into the PhD program they want or they don't get funding and so that's kind of an off-ramp or they do the PhD and for, they decide not to take a job in academia, or they would perhaps like a job in academia, but they don't get one that is permanent or that will really sustain them for a long time. So that's another off-ramp.
Or they get a job in academia, but they, they're not promoted [00:15:00] through the ranks. And so, in our profession, you know, every, let's say every approximately five years or so there's an off-ramp. And if you're not, if you're not promoted, you're out. And so, these are also off-ramps. So, it's a kind of survival, um, and, and meeting these challenges as sort of in the, in the narrow sense, having the publications, having the, the right publications, having the teaching record, getting the grants, doing, getting the recognition.
Professor Catherine Boone: I mean, these are in the short run, the things that keep us sort of on that treadmill of academic accomplishment. But of course, in the larger sense, what the source of the new projects and the inspiration is, is just the ongoing fascination with the, the empirical material or the changing world before us.
Professor Catherine Boone: [00:16:00] And on one hand, and on the other hand, just the love of the love of the hunt. You know, I love going to the library. I love reading. I love downloading articles and reading them. I love going to the archives. I love going to African countries and travelling around and designing research projects. So, it is really just the sheer, um, love of the process.
I like going to seminars. I like talking to my colleagues. I like having PhD students. So, you know, these are also the things that keep us going.
Razan Awaad: Thank you so much. But um, I just have one last question before we quickly summarize, which is what would you say to someone who is looking to pursue a career in international development? And what should students in international development go on to do? Is it academia? Is it IGOs? Is it something completely different?
Professor Catherine Boone: So, you mean, um, master's [00:17:00] students in international development. Well, I think as you suggest in your question, it's true that, you know, there are so many different ways to go in the public sector, the private sector, international, domestic. Um, I think maybe what I would say by way of advice to people is that you know, precisely because the options are so open-ended and there are so many directions to go in, it's very good to continuously challenge yourself to ask yourself where you want to be next year and where you want to be in five years.
Professor Catherine Boone: And to look around and, and consider different trajectories and do the thought experiment. Would I, you know, would I like to work for the UN in New York? Would I, is this really what I would like to do? Or [00:18:00] would I like to work in the humanitarian sector? And if so, would I, would I like to be in a field? Do I want to be in a field hospital? Do I want to be processing refugees? Do I want to work in Brussels? I mean, really try to imagine what direction you want to head in and to think about everything you do as, or to consider when you're making your decisions, what should, what classes should I take? What should I, what should I write my master's dissertation about?
Professor Catherine Boone: To think about how these, these choices build and shape your own profile and how that sets you up to go on to the next thing. And I don't think a person wants to be monomaniacally driven toward one objective. But it's good to keep, keep thinking about doing the thought experiments about, so if I wanted to, you know, work at a UN agency [00:19:00] in New York, what, what would I need to do in order to get there and do I want to do that? And if I want to work at, you know, UNDP in Nairobi in housing, what is that path and what is required to follow that path? And to, to, to consider the instrumental side of your choices, but at the same time, of course, what I myself have done is I've sort of followed what I love to do the most, and I think this is indeed where we can excel. So somehow, like, finding your life path is somehow nega…finding the sweet spot, or bringing these things together. So, like in my own case for academia, of course, we struggle for promotion, we check the boxes, we, we do what we're supposed to do, but it's not only about that. It's also about, you know, doing it in a way that allows, keeps, allows you to [00:20:00] follow your own motivation and do something that you, yes, that you think you'll really be proud of.
Professor Catherine Boone: When you think about your life's work after, you know, 40 years, after you've been at it for 40 years, what would you like to have accomplished? That's what I would say.
Razan Awaad: No, thank you so much. And as we're concluding, uh, we've mentioned a lot today. We've talked about loving to learn, loving the journey, and, you know, talking to one another, but if you were to leave this podcast, uh, and give students one final piece of advice, what would that be?
Professor Catherine Boone: I would say really try to push yourself. Um, and to try to go out of your comfort zone and try to take as much advantage as you can of being at the LSE or being in the university. You know, for a lot of people, this will be the last time they’re, they're [00:21:00] really in a university setting or at least the last time they're in a social science setting. So they might go on to law school or something, something like that, but it's really the last time to really, um, wander across the disciplines, Anthro, Sociology, History, Econ, Political Science, wander across the disciplines to read and, and to really try to find your voice as a, as a researcher and a thinker in academia and there’re skills in the narrow sense, it can be acquired here too, the quantitative skills, research skills, research, design, interviewing, making podcasts like you all are doing, but really to try to embrace the full experience.
Professor Catherine Boone: And I know in the pressure of the weeks and the terms, there's a constant, you may feel constantly besieged and harassed to just get the next thing done and turn it in and find, find the shortcut, like, [00:22:00] what is the minimum I can read to be prepared for this next seminar? And of course, that's a normal and that's part of life, but you know, don't forget that like this kind of work is for most people is not a kind of work that they will return to. And it's really a time to, to build these skills of, of thinking and researching, designing projects, designing your own argument, finding your own voice, learning how to read and leverage research materials to build something new, really to take advantage of being here while also doing your thought experiments about what your, your next, the next step in your career progression and indeed your life progression will be.
Razan Awaad: Catherine thank you so much again for taking time out of your day to speak to me. I honestly found all your insights super inspirational, relatable, and I'm really gonna enjoy listening back to this, I'm sure our listeners will too. So once again, thank you so much, Catherine, for being our guest on the Humans of ID [00:23:00] podcast organized by the Department of International Development and hosted by LSE ID Student Organizers, the Careers and Professional team.
Thanks to you, today, we had the opportunity to explore some of the prospects, insights, and challenges when entering the International Development professional arena. Thank you, Catherine Boone, for joining us. I would also like to especially thank all our listeners, the Department of International Development, Maya Bullen, and Andrea Merino Mayayo.
Razan Awaad: All the ID Student Organizers behind this project, including Makayla Levitt, our podcast editor and producer, Valentina Papu, our script co-writer, and Shiwani, our supervisor. Please make sure to subscribe to our podcast on Spotify or your preferred platform and follow us at the LSE Department of International Development on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Send us any comments, suggestions, questions, and thoughts on the Google form attached in our LinkedIn bio, Instagram bios, and in the weekly emails on what you'd like to hear. Stay tuned for more of the best guests [00:24:00] as we continue exploring further insights on how to start out in the development sector.
Razan Awaad: Until next time, this has been your host Razan Awwad.