Inna Melnykovska
Department of Political Science
Teaching with cases and simulations
Field Research and Qualitative Data Analysis course is a core course on qualitative methodology in the Master Programs in Political Science. Offered at the first time in the 2019 winter term, it is included in the departmental curriculum for the 2nd half of the fall term on a regular base. The course is developed as a reaction to the increasing number of MA students who incorporate field research in their MA projects. This is the course about how to systematically collect data in the field, manage and analyze them. The course covers most frequently used methods and sites of data collection in qualitative research (participant observation, interviews, focus groups, archival work, experiments, etc.). It provides the knowledge about methodological foundations and practical application of these methods in the field. Students review best practices and elaborate don’ts in using one or another method of data collection. Also, students get familiar with principles and practices of doing fieldwork in general and are introduced to particularities of doing fieldwork in the difficult contexts of illiberal regimes and/or conflict. Finally, students learn how to manage collected data and about specifics of data collection and analysis in qualitative research in contrast to quantitative research as well as how qualitative and quantitative approaches could be combined in one research design. Students collect the knowledge not only from the readings but also from the practical experiences of fieldwork which invited guest speakers share with them.
Furthermore, throughout the course students collect their own practical experiences. They do the ethical issues training (recommended by the CEU Ethical Research Board), draft a consent form, design a field research strategy and a data management plan for their own research designs. Also, they participate in the interview lab – a practical team project that involves all components and stages of qualitative interviewing, management, analysis of the collected data and visual presentation of the results. The interview lab of the current class (fall term 2019) includes two groups of students who address the question of what makes learning effective (the classroom become the field; students themselves are literally the subjects they are collecting and analysing the data about). While the students who attended this course in the 2019 winter term articulated their satisfaction with the course topics and its usefulness for their research projects, they wished to have more practical exercises on certain techniques of data collection and analysis, however. Taking this feedback into account, I modified the course for the run in the 2019 fall term. As far as it was possible with limited resources, I drafted practical exercises (see selected examples in the Annexes) and designed an interview lab. The feedback of the current students participating in the course is largely positive.
Still, I am going to enhance the practical learning in the course through following activities:
(1) embed already created practical exercises into contemporary topics and trends of Political Science: most exercises I use in the current run of the course are borrowed from neighbouring disciplines (ethnography, anthropology and sociology) and their revision with a better fit to the research topics and needs of Political Science is required.
(2) design simulation exercises (such as mini-games, a board/cards game) that would help students gain personal exposure to challenges of fieldwork as well as benefits and drawbacks of methods of data collection in engaging ways. These simulation exercises are expected to empower students to better understand tricky situations of fieldwork and advance their skills of doing political research.
In particular, I plan to design exercises that would simulate (challenging) situations in conducting interviews, focus groups, participant observation and exercises that would train students capacities to organize and manage the collected data in qualitative field research. I would appreciate the assistance of the staff of CEU’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) in drafting these practical exercises and with visualization (video-recording) components of the simulations.
Nadia Jones Galiani
Department of Gender Studies
Decolonizing Gender Studies
This course is designed to meet the growing needs and demands raised by students, as well as many others across academia, to decolonize knowledge production. The course is designed around the practical application of theory to practice within the context of syllabus-building; training students to think of themselves as an integral part of the work of decolonizing by having them organized into workgroups that will build together a syllabus for ‘decolonizing Gender Studies’. Students in the course will previously have taken the “Postcolonialism and feminism(s)” course, which identifies and traces the centrality of gender to the processes and problematics of colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism and transnationalism, and the ways in which feminism(s) have been shaped by and within these different contexts.
With a foundation in the history of postcolonial feminist thought, students will actively engage theoretical developments in the field of decolonial and decentering feminist pedagogy, as well as critical feminist critiques to colonialism, imperialism, nationalism and capitalism. The aim of the course is to bring students into the task of decolonizing as an active means of rethinking how only what we teach, but how we teach, and in what ways discourse is produced around these engagements. Students will be active participants in developing a syllabus which can be shared across social media and academic platforms as part of ongoing and vibrant collectives in North America, Europe and Australia who are actively working to decenter white, liberal feminist voices that have for so long dominated our discipline.
Course outline
The class will be organized thematically into areas of focus in which students will in each of their workgroups discuss different readings and present these weekly in the class in order to discuss how these can/should be incorporated into the final syllabus. The first class will begin from the context of collaboratively agreeing upon a structure for the final syllabus, and in drawing upon mind-maps in order to trace the trajectories and genealogies that are currently obscured by an expected – and nonetheless important – cannon of work that we now teach as “Foundations to Gender Studies”. Special attention will be given to the theoretical viewpoints of situated/subjugated knowledge, Marxist and materialist feminisms, and the role of women’s and feminist texts produced outside of the ‘west’ across the span of the long twentieth-century.
Learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:
- Identify and engage with the major themes outlined in the course syllabus and offer a critical interpretation of all class readings assigned to these themes.
- Understand the key theoretical developments in the field of decolonial feminisms, as well as critical feminist critiques to colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism.
- Engage actively with the key fields of colonial, postcolonial and imperial developments that subaltern and postcolonial feminist theory have critiqued and be able to distinguish from these how we can remap our understanding of who has contributed to ideas now considered integral to the study of gender and of Gender Studies as a discipline.
- Practically apply the outcome of conversations had in the previous Postcolonialism class to a rethinking of the process of building and teaching a syllabus. The aim is to have a finalized syllabus built with the cooperation of the class by the end of the term.