BMET 27A61 - Research Methods in International Studies

This course offers students an individual and collective occasion to master their research, planning, and writing abilities for making sense of recent developments in connection and comparison with each other by using several political-historical methods. International Studies refers to the broad field of area studies within which one finds the wide geography from North to South Americas, from Europe to Middle East, and from Sub-Saharan Africa to East/Southeast Asia. Students are going to be trained to ask well-defined research questions, conduct research by using traditional sources such as archives as well as digital techniques; collect, cite and quote sources, and bring their findings together by using analytical, historiographical, and conceptual tools. By this way, students are expected to interpret and deconstruct contemporary and past events with an original gaze. Critical review of their findings will enable students to learn how not to take sources at face value and grasp the time, context, and language within which the arguments are proposed. Students are expected to make connections between cases in the international and global arena, supported by the findings through archival research, interviews, interdisciplinary approach, and the review of press and secondary literature. Lastly, students will be able to follow and comprehend sophisticated academic debates, take cultural, contextual, and ideological differences into consideration, work with techniques offered by multiple disciplines, report on their studies and research in good written English, and to learn how to use time and deal with deadlines.

Students who earn a mark lower than 10 owing to insufficient participation will fail the course.

Students who do not deliver a term paper on time will automatically fail the course.