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PhD Coursework Research Workshop Streams 2012

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Phd Coursework Research Workshop timetable Semester 1, 2012

Researching Texts

Stephanie Trigg and Grace Moore

This year-long, fortnightly workshop will be structured around a dialectic between the close, slow, or deep reading of selected texts, performances and a range of contextual, historical and other theoretical approaches to literature, theatre and other forms of textuality. It will encourage students to reflect upon themselves as researchers and writers, allowing them to consider their social, cultural and intellectual positioning in relation to the projects they are beginning to define. Students will examine a range of historical debates in different literary and cultural traditions regarding canonical and popular literature. Individual seminars will be devoted to key topics such as periodization, liteary history, the archive, memory, style, reviewing and refereeing, translation and textuality. We will also engage with current debates about the role of the humanities, and literature, more specifically, in contemporary culture and society. Students will read a range of texts and genres from the medieval period through to the twenty-first century, mostly written in English, but some in translation from other languages.

Researching Politics and Policy

Helen Sullivan and Les Holmes

Those students electing to take the 'researching politics and policy' workshop will become familiar with the latest developments – the 'cutting edge' – in major branches of political science (including public and social policy, and international relations) and the theories, debates and methods associated with each. The underlying objective is for each student to be better prepared to select the most appropriate theoretical framework and methodology for their particular project. The subject has been structured in two equal halves – one more theoretical, the other more methodological (and both avoiding overlap with the two Political Science electives); students will be able to take the two parts in any order, so rendering the subject suitable for both calendar-year and mid-year entrants.

Seminar outline

Part One: Theoretical Issues

1. The study of politics as 'science'; power, influence, authority and legitimacy; and the politics of political science; ethnocentrism, gender blindness and anthropocentrism
2. Normative political theory
3. Empirical political theory (inc. political culture; feminist theories)
4. Post-modern and post-structural approaches
5. International Relations and International Political Economy – the major IR and IPE theories (inc. realism, liberalism, constructivism and Marxism)
6. Group discussion of theoretical problems encountered in individual theses


Part Two: Policy and Political Analysis

7. Policy analysis – what it is (inc. risk assessment, impact assessment, comparison, ethics, implementation evaluation, etc.)
8. Comparative political analysis – what it is
9. Some common methods and approaches 1 – interpretive approaches
10. Some common methods and approaches 2 – rational and institutional approaches (inc. rational choice theory  and new institutionalism)
11. Some common methods and approaches 3 – inc. case-studies; process-tracing;  small-, medium- and large-N research
12. Group discussion of methodological problems encountered in individual theses

Researching Society and Culture

Andrew Dawson

The aims of the 'Researching Society and Culture' workshop are twofold. Part I is designed to enable students to reflect comparatively on how different theoretical traditions have contributed to debate about core tensions in the conceptualization of society and culture. Part II is designed to enable students to deepen and broaden their understanding of core and, whether perennial, resurgent or cutting-edge, contemporary concepts in the social sciences. In both cases the emphasis is on relating this to students' development of their own and their peers' doctoral theses.

Seminar Outline

Part I: Core Tensions in Conceptualizing Society and Culture

1. Society/Culture
2. Materiality/Ideology
3. Consciousness/Unconsciousness
4. Structure/Agency
5. Reproduction/Change
6. Locality/Extra-locality

   
   Part II: Core and Contemporary Concepts in the Study of Society and Culture

7. Modernity
8. Development
9. Neo-liberalism
10. Body
11. Risk and Uncertainty
12. Multi-speciesism

Researching Images

Charles Green and Mark Nicholls

This subject will introduce students to methodologies of researching images and to current issues in the research of images. The subject will be taught through active discussion and joint class readings of extracts from recent significant publications within or cognate to disciplines that work with images. These texts may be drawn from art history, cinema, critical theory or cultural studies. The subject will introduce students to the range of new developments in the scholarship of visual art and culture, cinema and new media. The subject will include workshops led by visiting scholars and invited specialists who will lead discussions about their own recent scholarship. Regular student-prepared reading reports and allotted class presentations will result in the acquisition of literature review skills, advanced seminar presentation and participation skills, and in cross-disciplinary knowledge about disciplinary shifts in the research of images. Students will be assessed on the basis of effective précis, bibliographic, textual and evaluative skills. Students will choose topics based either on the proximity to their own research or based on their exploration of cross-disciplinary content beyond their home discipline.

Researching language

Tim McNamara

This subject has twin aims: to help students to prepare for confirmation of candidature on the topic they have chosen; and to introduce a range of fundamental theories of the nature of language and approaches to the analysis of its structure and use. Cognitive and social/cultural perspectives on language will be explored and contrasted. The subject will introduce historical and contemporary debates about the nature of language, including the emergence of structuralism in the work of Saussure, Jakobson, Boas and Sapir, the ongoing debate between formal and functionalist schools, and current discussions of the disciplinary character of linguistics. Theories of the use of language in context, in theories of pragmatics and in debates over appropriate methods for the analysis of discourse, will also be considered. These and other issues and approaches will be in turn be related by class members to issues arising in the conceptualization of their PhD projects.

Researching Ideas

Francois Schroeter

This seminar introduces students to central contemporary methodological approaches to philosophy and to cutting edge research in the following four core areas of philosophy: practical philosophy; metaphysics and epistemology; logic, philosophy of language and mind; and the history of philosophy. It also gives students practical instruction in how to present and defend their philosophical research, with a view to preparing them for their confirmation seminars.

Format: The seminar meets for 1.5 hours for a total of 16 sessions, 8 per semester. Over the course of the year, four seminars cover the following methodological approaches to philosophy:

1. Apriori reasoning and analyticity
2. Experimental approaches to philosophy
3. Logical models for philosophy
4. The phenomenological method(s)

One seminar each semester is devoted to how to present and defend philosophical research.

Researching the Past

Andy May

This year-long subject, conducted as twelve fortnightly seminars, introduces commencing graduate students to various tools and traditions of reading, writing, researching and thinking about the past. The subject will touch on a range of key methodological approaches in the historiography over the past half century. Its intention is to refocus students' attention towards researching and communicating the past, and on discussion of the broader role and claims of historical scholarship and the history profession more generally. To enable either calendar or mid-year commencement, the seminar will be divided into four modules, two per semester: Purpose, Empathy, Poetics, Archives. Importantly, it provides a forum that will inform the current research and project development of graduate students, assisting in the framing of research questions and the development and articulation of argument and evidence. To this end, student thesis proposals and work in progress will be regularly workshopped. It is also expected that the seminar program will include presentations by guests or visiting academics who will showcase books or ideas that have shaped their own historical journeys.