Advanced Qualitative Methods

Admission requirements

This course is only available for students in the BA Urban Studies programme.

Description

Advanced Qualitative Methods will equip students with knowledge and skills needed to critically engage with urban space. This class will enhance students’ data collection and analysis skills, but it also goes beyond the first-year methods training in that it emphasizes taking an interpretive approach, being attuned to the normative and political implications of research in urban sites, and presenting findings to a wider public.

Over the course of the semester, students will work in small research groups, applying a variety of methods covered in lectures to conduct neighborhood-based inquiry in The Hague in an ethnographic framework. Groups will present the results of their research during a closing conference-style event that will be open to the public. Throughout, we will grapple with a series of problems during work groups, such as “What is space?”, “What is a subject?”, “What is meaning?”, and “What is an image?” Students will thereby gain broad familiarity with methodological approaches, tools, and theories, and deepen their understanding of research traditions in urban studies and their foundations in humanities fields from philosophy to comparative literature to gender studies. Through close readings of theoretical texts and hands-on research in urban field sites, students will develop as urban scholars who are socially engaged and well prepared to meet the challenges of twenty-first century cities. We will interrogate the implications of the commodification of urban space, how the boundaries between private (commercial) space and public space are becoming increasingly fluid, and how such processes reshape the urban landscape. We will address such threats to the functioning of public space by operationalizing critical concepts for neighborhood-based research.

Advanced Qualitative Methods will prepare students to move confidently between the different disciplines that make up Urban Studies, but above all to take an interdisciplinary approach to complex issues and often disruptive challenges of urbanization that require taking multiple perspectives into account. Students will develop their critical sensibility through engagement with the humanities’ underlying ethical notions of who and what we are as human beings as well as more politically charged approaches to issues of urban change.

Course objectives

General learning outcomes

See tab Additional information for the overview of the programme's general learning outcomes. In the assessment methods below is outlined which general learning outcome will be tested through which method.

Course objectives, pertaining to this course

1) Students understand the interface between ideas, empirical inquiry, and citizen engagement as well as the importance of urban research for critical and creative efforts to meet the challenges of the contemporary city.
2) Students have learned how to apply advanced qualitative methods to understand contemporary developments in urban space.
3) Students are able to take abstract and critical ideas an operationalize them for practical research and critical intervention.
4) Students are confident and independent researchers who are able to devise, design and carry out a research project using a variety of qualitative methods.
5) Students are able to present research findings in writing and orally to an audience.

Timetable

The timetables are available through My Timetable.

Mode of instruction

• Lecture.

Assessment method

Assessment

• Midterm exam
  Take home examination
  -measured programme's general learning outcomes: 4-5
  -measured course specific objectives: 2

• Group research report
  -measured programme's general learning outcomes: 4, 7, 11, 16
  -measured course specific objectives: 1-4

• Oral presentation
  -measured programme's general learning outcomes: 4, 11
  -measured course specific objectives: 5

Weighing

End grade

To successfully complete the course, please take note that the end grade of the course is established by determining the weighted average of all assessment components, with the additional requirement that the midterm exam grade must be higher than 5.50.

Resit

If the end grade is insufficient (lower than a 6.0), or the midterm exam grade is lower than 5,50, there is a possibility of retaking the take home exam and/or the group research report, replacing the previous grade(s).

Faculty regulations concerning participation in resits are listed in article 4.1 of the Faculty Course and Examination Regulations.

Inspection and feedback

How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organised.

Reading list

• Forrest Stuart, Ballad of the Bullet (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Additional readings to be announced.

Registration

• Enrolment through My Studymap is mandatory.

Contact

• For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.

• For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Student Affairs Office for BA Urban Studies

Remarks

None.