Exploring Contemporary Challenges

Full course description

In the first year skills courses, you have also become familiar with the multidisciplinary nature of the curriculum, being introduced to a wide variety of scholarly approaches to seemingly similar questions. You saw how different disciplines come with their own traditions, theories, methods, terminology and writing requirements, and learnt to distinguish their different “ways of knowing”. You may also have observed that not only do researchers differ in the answers they present, but also in the questions they ask and in the way they go about in answering them. It is now time to take a step further and learn how to start your own research with regards to the literature you are analysing. And one of the first steps in the process, usually involves for you to identify the most important scholarly works written by other academics in a particular field. In other words, in this course you are expected to write a literature review on the challenge that you have previously selected. This means that first you will have to carry out a thematic synthesis of sources to provide readers with an up-to-date summary of theoretical and empirical findings of the prior research on a particular topic. In a nutshell, the literature review needs to identify and discuss/explain all of the main points or findings of a specific topic. These include both classic and the most recent studies, which need to be included to demonstrate an in-depth understanding of the topic at hand. This course is connected to EUS2516 where you will continue working on the challenge you have previously selected.