Development practitioners need to engage with a variety of research and its methods and evidence in order to stay reflective and up to date. This course focuses on the ethical, logical, and analytical foundations of research, as well as your ability as a development practitioner to engage with research as a user and designer. 

In this course, we present to you the foundational aspects of research by using examples from developmental research and debates in India. You will develop the capacity for logical thinking and argumentation, reasoning by identifying hypotheses, arguments, evidence and claims, and learn how to frame and conduct research for academic purposes and development action. We will cover different types of development information and representation of data and methodological approaches. 

We encourage you to learn how to build sound arguments and detect fallacies in thinking and argumentation, analyse value commitments of development discourse and understand and interpret the nature and types of evidence used to support or refute arguments in the field of development. This course includes lectures, case studies, discussion and debates.