In 2010, as a faculty member at the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Auckland, I was teaching a course on microfinance to a group of postgraduate students from New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific. One afternoon, one of the most engaged students in the class came to my office hours and asked me, in a tone somewhere between anger and resignation, whether there was any hope left for development. Was microfinance, a popular and widely celebrated development intervention that she had until now regarded very positively, really just another in a long line of programmes that was not working? And, if so, was there anything that was actually helping marginalized people? And what did these doubts mean for her own plans to work in development upon graduation? The student was right. Based on my own research into microfinance I was highly critical of the practice and conveyed that to my students, obviously to great effect. The student's questions did not bring me satisfaction or pride in my successful teaching but, rather, a sense of discomfort and unease. Especially because this was not the first time that I had heard such comments. Like many of the University of Sussex students whom I interviewed for this book eight years later, this particular student had “hit the wall” and was feeling “defeated” by what she was learning. She felt “heart-broken to learn about difficult issues and see that there is no direct answer or solution”. And she was questioning her career path and identity as somebody who wanted to help make a difference in the world.

To be clear, students, who sometimes come to their studies with a selfadmitted idealistic plan of “working for the United Nations (UN) and saving the world”, mostly appreciate critical teaching. They understand why it is necessary to learn that development is much more complex and complicated than they had initially assumed, that it is rooted in historical colonial injustices that give rise to persistent inequalities, structured by a global system of power where Northern institutions dictate the fate of millions of marginalized people. Students recognize the need to interrogate their own positionalities and privileges and to query their everyday and historical complicities.