Research Design in political communication and media studies
Prerequisiti
Optional for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students of the PhD Programme in "Political Science and Sociology"
Optional for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students of the PhD Programme in "Transnational Governance"
Programma
The seminar has a crash course format and is organized into two full-day meeting according to the schedule provided below. Each student will be assigned two discussants and all participants are welcome to comment orally and in written form. Each student is assigned 60 minutes which are approximately divided as follows: 20 minutes for the presentation of the research project; 10 minutes each for the discussant (including the reply of the paper presenter); and 20 minutes for further comments from the rest of the audience (Q&A).
Students are asked to circulate the following type of documents: first-year PhD students upload the research proposal; second- and third-year PhD students upload a chapter in progress of the dissertation or a dissertation-related article plus a five-page summary of the research project. A folder in Google drive will be created. All PhD supervisees are asked to participate (along with fourth-year PhD students). In order to allow all participants to read each project, PhD students are asked to upload their materials in Google drive 10 days in advance of each session.
Obiettivi formativi
The aim is to provide a common space to the PhD students of the first three years, working on comparative politics, political communication and cultural studies, to present and discuss the development of their thesis projects to an audience made of professors, 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 PhD’s skills in not only discussing, but also constructively contributing to each other research, both during the sessions and in successive informal, face-to-face or small groups, occasions, that are in part already ongoing and that we hope to stimulate further.