OBME 2215 - Qualitative Methodology

This 24 h. course aims to help students advance their research, develop their creativity, and reflect upon their work through exposure to practical, theoretical and political challenges raised by qualitative methods. Key questions addressed in the course will include ethnographic observation, interview techniques, writing challenges, as well as various kinds of risks faced by researchers on the field and beyond. Students will familiarize themselves with a diversity of sources and research methods, including the use of audio-visual material. They will increase their observation skills, devise original ways of problematizing and documenting specific issues, and learn how to reflect upon their daily environment. An additional purpose of the course is to allow students to historicize current discussions around research skills, ethics of fieldwork, and the social uses of the social sciences.

The conception of social sciences defended here is resolutely broad-minded in terms of disciplinary affiliation, and comparative in scope. This approach to comparison rests on a strong belief in the unitary character of the social sciences and the texts discussed collectively will be drawn from sociology, history and anthropology, as well as political science. The course develops this approach to comparison through crosscutting questions revolving around key research operations.

Seminary, 2 hours per week

Students will be assessed on the basis of their oral presentation (40 %), their final paper (40 %), as well as their individual participation in class discussions (20 %). Oral presentations will consist in a max. 20' discussion of the required reading, which will be contextualized, problematized and critically assessed. The final paper can either consist in (1) a 25,000 characters (min.) essay discussing a specific methodological/epistemological challenge raised by qualitative research methods, drawing on at least two academic texts (books or articles), or elaborating a personal dilemma encountered in the course of one's own research; or (2) a transcription and discussion of two interviews conducted in the course of one's own research, focusing on the interview process itself as much as on the interpretation of the content ; or (3) a 25,000 characters (min.) exercise inspired by one of the exercises in Howard Becker & Franck Leibovici, Exercises, p. 3, p. 7 or p. 17 of the English edition.