Teaching and Practice of Development in the Global South
Inviting educators, students, practitioners, scholars and professionals — teaching, researching and practicing development across higher educational institutions.
Development has been pursued as ‘positive change’ and a transformative project aimed at securing and creating individual and collective wellbeing in an equitable and sustainable manner. The Global South has shaped this project through the efforts of a large body of students, scholars, teachers, and professionals. Yet very little of the contribution of the Global South is known or documented in the broader literature on the subject. This includes the institutional history, functioning, teaching, and practice of development within the Global South.
This conference seeks to acknowledge, review, and build upon the institutional and collective contributions made by the Global South within this domain. It seeks to examine questions such as,
- how do higher educational programmes in Development in the Global South respond to contemporary challenges in development theory and practice?
- what role do educational programmes play in preparing future development researchers/practitioners to contribute to the transformative agenda of development?
We invite educators, students, practitioners, scholars and other professionals teaching, researching and practicing development across higher educational institutions to participate in this conference.
Our discussions will be framed around the following themes:
Development Education: Going beyond disciplinary boundaries
How can higher education programmes on development — traditionally structured around disciplinary perspectives — be designed to think within and beyond disciplinary fields? How have multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity across natural sciences, humanities and social sciences led to more productive and multi-dimensional engagement with issues of development?Embedding practice in development curriculum
How is ‘practice’ of development imagined and configured into development education programmes, beyond the rhetoric of the binaries of theory/practice or thinkers/doers? How do higher educational programmes in development shape, and, in turn shaped by development practice? How is the ‘field’ imagined beyond a site of exposure or study? How have such efforts in preparing students and prospective practitioners contributed to development going beyond techno-managerial or quick fix solutions to the problems of the here and now?Vocabularies of development
The word “development” may have different meanings across different contexts and languages. Given this, how could a broader programme and curriculum engage with multiple vocabularies that express diverse realities and contexts of development in the Global South? How does the relationship between language and development realities matter for development? How do we understand the significance of multiple vocabularies at the pedagogical, practice and epistemological levels? How can we bring together diverse experiences of teaching and learning about development across languages?- Reimagining pedagogy
What are the pedagogic practices within institutions in the Global South that have contributed to developmental teaching or are influenced by deep engagement in the Global South? To what extent do these reflect questions of colonial histories, contemporary Global North-South relations, and complexity within the Global South? How do our pedagogies reflect the increasing diversity of our classrooms?
Our one-day pre-conference workshops featuring four themes will take place on 19 Feb 2026. These workshops will equip participants with an in-depth understanding of the following:
a) How to disseminate research to public platforms?
b) How to use simulation games as pedagogic tools?
c) How to design a course?
d) How to understand development issues using granular datasets?
These are parallel sessions (11 AM‑4 PM / 6 PM with an hour’s lunch break). Participants can attend any one of these.
Click here for the Conference schedule →
Click here for the Paper Presentation schedule →
Contact us
To know more about the conference and to address any other queries write to devconference@apu.edu.in