EDS272 Development Challenges in Rural India

This is a four-week field course developed by Noragric in partnership with local partners in Udaipur, India. The course will take place in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India.

The objectives of the course are twofold:

• To help students understand the complexity of practice in the development processes at the landscape level;
• And to help students acquire skills to identify the multiplicity and contradictions in development practice.

Through the course, the students will learn about challenges and opportunities in local realities and across cultures. The students will have the opportunity to experience the relationship between theory, method, and practice through a combination of classroom discussions, field visits, and development and application of field research. We will explore and experience different ideas, adaptations, and solutions to environment and development challenges and opportunities.

The academic content of the course builds on central and overarching topics and perspectives presented in various courses on global environment, development, and landscape.

Course activities will include:

• Introduction to India and Rajasthan with lectures by subject experts on specific themes;
• Field visits related to subject themes and continuous discussions.
• This knowledge will then be used by students to develop a research agenda with continuous guidance, support and training in the application of field data collection methods.
• Finally, the students will apply their field research methods to experience challenges and opportunities in local realities in an intercultural context.

Knowledge and Competence:

• Identify the relationship between global environment, development and landscape processes, contextual histories, culture, and local realities.
• Understand local environment and development opportunities and challenges, link those to global environment and development discourses, and identify strategies applied in local contexts to address those.

Skills:

• Formulate a research topic linking global and local environment, development and landscape issues, design and apply field methods for data collection.
• Conduct an analysis, formulate, and present results combining theory, local realities, and field data to explain the relationship between global environment, development, landscape challenges, and the on-the-ground strategies to address those.