Research Design in Collective Action
Programma
The seminar has a crash course format and is organised into three full-day meetings. Each PhD student will be assigned two discussants, but all will be welcome to comment orally and in written form. 45 minutes will be assigned to each PhD student, with 10 minutes of presentation, 7 minutes to each of the discussants and 21 minutes for further comments from the rest of the audience. Students are asked to circulate the following type of documents: the research proposal (for 1st year PhD students); one PhD chapter or PhD-related article and a five-page summary of the PhD (for 2nd and 3rd year PhD students). A shared folder will be created. All PhD students are asked to participate (also 4th year PhD students). In order to allow all to read all, PhD students are asked to upload their materials in Google drive at least a week before each session.
Obiettivi formativi
The aim is to provide a common space to the PhD students of the first three years, working on collective action, to present and discuss the development of their thesis projects to an audience made of faculty members, post-doctoral fellows as well as of their peers. Besides improving reciprocal knowledge and potential networking, the research design course aims at discussing, with reference to the specific projects, the main steps in the development of a research design: from the selection of the central research questions, to their theoretical framing, the case selection, the choice of the empirical methods of investigation, the challenges of fieldwork, and the analysis and presentation of the results. Involving participants at different stages of their academic experiences, the seminar also offers the opportunity to develop the PhD students’ skills in not only discussing, but also constructively contributing to each other research, both during the sessions and in successive informal occasions.