The course seeks to transform participants into more literate, capable, and humble researchers. It will provide seminar participants with skills and competences that will allow them to better understand and critically engage work in Politics and other social sciences. These skills and competences should also enable them to undertake high quality social scientific research. An effort will be made throughout the course to alert participants to the strengths and promise as well as the weaknesses and limits of various methods and the trade-offs involved in the methodological choices scholars make in diverse contexts.