OBME 2175 - Methods for ideas. Studying theories in global contexts.

Ideas are back! Long considered an after effect of more tangible social factors and not the priority of social scientists, they are now in full display. A recent stream of scholars (Slobodian 2018, Mirowski and Plehwe 2009) have documented how the most recent political waves have been crafted by scholars and intellectuals. So studying ideas is timely, particularly at a time when their viral potentialities have multiplied. The course teaches methods to understand the production of knowledge and to learn how to craft our own categories and interpretations of actors' knowledge. It teaches how to study ideas and theories but it also teaches how to use social sciences concepts AND tools to understand ideas and theories. It takes place at a time when an avalanche of data sources both help social scientists and make their life more difficult. Old statistical notions such as “population”, “samples”, “representativeness” become problematic if one ventures and collects digital traces on the web. Similarly, the age-old distinction between fieldwork experience, archival work and data is tested by the increasing availability of different modes of existence of evidence. Methods for Ideas is addressing these new opportunities and challenges by introducing students to methods and their epistemologies through class projects. It is This year, the course will use one case study to present and test methods and tools. We will study how Russia has been an object of theories by French and American scholars and intellectuals. How do we talk about Russia and who sets the agenda of the conversation about them? This question is both timely and lasting, as scholars have long noted that both Russia or the USSR have been causes talked about and mobilized by scholars and intellectuals far away from their geographical sites. By exploring a series of data sets of knowledge produced about Russia, we will consider the different options available to study ideas and their transformative effects on our societies. We will look at a variety of materials and documents (theses, scientific articles, think tank reports, books, popular articles) to understand how to organise a research project fraught with ideological pitfalls and easy sloppy interpretations. Rooted in the tradition of social sciences, science and technology studies and digital humanities, the course provides students with theories, methods and open access tools needed to analyze knowledge of social actors and conduct their own social sciences research. The philosophy of this course is the need to be as critical and questioning of our categories (as researchers) as we are of the categories and theories the actors we study deploy. This has consequences as trivial as the choice of the methods we use, the tools we use to build a corpus and the visualisations we adopt to illustrate our findings. By opening a dialogue with sources taken as a research object, the goal is not to produce a plain bibliography, but to build a quality research corpus, analyzed through both up-to-date qualitative and quantitative methods. This course trains reflexive social scientists, that is scholars who learn methods AND their limitations. This is definitely a course mixing theoretical readings of scholars who have innovated in the field of social sciences and very practical and hands-on projects realized by students.

Vincent-Antonin LEPINAY

Séminaire

English

It is a course designed to teach methods and skills. Exercises and hands-on tasks are not an option. They will be taught in class but they should be practiced as homework. Expect 4 hours of work outside of the classroom weekly.

None

Autumn 2026-2027

The course is designed to teach students skills and to breed to good practices. That can only happen with attention and work, ahead of the classroom meetings and during our collective discussions. Students will have to do weekly exercises and they will also read a half dozen articles/chapters that will structure the course. The mini exercises will be either individual or collective's. They will be presented on a weekly or every other week basis. Overall, these presentations will count towards 30% of the final grade. Students will also write a final paper - and it will exploit all the works done during the weekly exercises. They will also count towards 70% of the final grade. Both the weekly exercises and the final papers can be individual or collective. It is usually better to keep groups to a size of 2 -3 students. Students who will not work in a group will be evaluated solely on the basis of their weekly participations/contributions (50%) and final paper (50%).

A mix of lectures (short and limited to the beginning of the term, mostly during the first few meetings), readings and in class collective discussions, presentations of work-in-progress. The orientation of the course is that of a lab: we know the general direction that animates us but we invent collectively how we can collect, analyse and interpret data pertaining to the discourses about Russia. Come with an interest for experiments and discussions, and some suspicion for ready-made solutions. The course is device-free. Neither phones, nor computers/tablets are needed in the classroom. I may authorize the use of laptops for exercises when relevant, but we can't afford the distraction of screens during our discussions. So come prepared with notes taken on a sheet of paper or course notebook.