Researching the Field: Democracy, Identity, and Communication
Full course description
This course will introduce and give you a chance to examine and experiment with different approaches to researching topics in Modern Political Culture. The course contains three intertwined cycles each dealing with a topic area that is central to the study of political culture: democracy, identity, and communication. Through this course you will gain an understanding and competence with some of the different ways questions about democracy, identity and communication are currently studied in academic research, but we will also examine how academic research can feedback to policy in relation to these areas. This will then help to prepare you for the research that you will yourself undertake in periods 3 and 4, as well as in the thesis trajectory. Some of the approaches that we will look at include political theory, conceptual engineering, hermeneutics, political anthropology, history of ideas, political and intellectual history, political sociology, social psychology. The specific course content will change from year to year in order to stay aligned with the state-of-the-art and the research expertise and interests of the teaching team.
Course objectives
This course will help you to build competencies in a number of key areas. These include:
Applying knowledge of a range of contemporary theories and approaches relating to democratic governance, social and political identity, and scientific and political communication
Critically evaluating ideas, arguments and evidence presented in the scholarly literature addressing the topics of the course
Intervening constructively in oral academic debates with your peers in the graduate level, international PBL classroom in relation to the main themes of the course and the state-of-the-art in the scholarly literature
Expressing your comprehension and being able to critically evaluate the state-of-the-art literature using an appropriately high standard of academic writing and written argumentation in a research paper.
Recommended reading
Appiah, K. A. (2019). The lies that bind: Rethinking identity : creed, country, colour, class, culture.
Bak-Coleman, J. B., Alfano, M., Barfuss, W., Bergstrom, C. T., Centeno, M. A., Couzin, I. D., Donges, J. F., Galesic, M., Gersick, A. S., Jacquet, J., Kao, A. B., Moran, R. E., Romanczuk, P., Rubenstein, D. I., Tombak, K. J., Van Bavel, J. J., & Weber, E. U. (2021). Stewardship of global collective behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(27), e2025764118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025764118
Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything. A new history of humanity. Allen Lane.
Lefort, C., & Thompson, J. B. (1986). Political forms of modern society. Polity Press.
Scharfbillig, M., Smillie, L., Mair, D., Sienkiewicz, M., Keimer, J., Pinho Dos Santos, R., Vinagreiro Alves, H., Vecchione, E. and Scheunemann, L., Values and Identities - a policymaker’s guide, EUR 30800 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2021, ISBN 978-92-76-40966-3, doi:10.2760/022780, JRC126150.