Admission requirements
- Only students of the MSc Crisis and Security Management can take this course. This 5 ECTS equivalent of the course is only open to students with permission from the study advisors to follow this course as part of their personal study plan.
Description
The course has two interrelated goals. First, the course also gives students practical experience in coding and managing data, including (1) elaborating and implementing different data collection strategies; (2) by using theoretical and conceptual insights to analyse empirical cases; (3) by inferring recommendations from their results and communicating relevant findings in a form accessible to a professional audience. Students will also gain practical experience conducting OSINT research, working in groups to construct and manage a large-scale dataset, and will also gain a deep understanding of data science methods. These are transferrable skills that they will be able to use in professional contexts.
Second, the course will introduce students to contentious politics and violent social movement, focusing on far right mobilisation in Western Europe and North America. The focus will be on the comparative analysis of the causes and manifestations of the extreme and populist right across different countries and political contexts both offline and online. The course will introduce students to theories explaining individual and contextual conditions which facilitate far right mobilisation and political success.
The course will provide students with the theoretical and analytical tools necessary to tackle the panorama of North American and Western European far right politics. In addition, the course aims at mapping parties and social movements across countries, investigating their historical origins, ideological features, and the patterns of opportunity structures that led to their emergence. The course will make extensive reference to ongoing and past academic debates, as well as to journalistic reports, relevant online material, documentaries and political debates in the observed countries. By the end of the course, students are expected to master the main conceptual and theoretical issues concerning far right politics in Western democracies, they shall be able to recognise the key concepts to study political radicalism, extremism and populism and they shall be confident with at least one country case, in Western Europe or North America.
Course Objectives
After finalizing this course, students are able to:
Research Skills
1. Identify different types of data collection techniques and discuss the factors affecting the choice of data collection method and the data collection methods used in qualitative studies.
2. Design a (small) research project; ask a relevant research question, and choose accordingly the appropriate design and method; reflect on the limits and ethics of their research project.
3. Seek evidence, and to identify relevant empirical material; perform data collection in a rigorous way, using selected research methods and reflect on the validity and reliability of their data.
4. Analyse data by identifying empirical patterns from collected data, and perform elementary analysis and link back their results to academic concepts and theories.
5. Discuss ethical considerations of data collection, the obligations of researchers, and plications of calls for data accessibility and research transparency for qualitative research.
Academic Skills
6. Understand, based on advanced knowledge on concepts, theories and analytical approaches, social movements and their dynamics and assess the approaches’ explanatory power by applying them to particular instances of violence in social movement.
7. Understand and apply the conceptual and theoretical foundations of far-right politics, and draw on comparative empirical expertise on far-right mobilisations, electoral performances, and violent manifestations.
8. Understand the rationale and practices of a number of methods employed to study far-right politics, at the micro, meso, and macro levels.
Professional skills
9. Work in team, collaborate to produce knowledge, and confront their viewpoints to develop collaborative solutions.
10. Transfer academic knowledge to professional settings, communicate their research results in an appropriate format to a professional audience and draw conclusions, make judgments and/or provide solutions to real-life problems or societal issues based on empirical data.
11. Self-evaluate and reflect after interactive in-class work and individual assignments.
Timetable
On the right side of programme front page of the E-guide you will find links to the website and timetables, uSis and Blackboard.
Mode of Instruction
Two lectures per week that emphasize interactive and group-based working methods;
Working in teams to produce a large dataset.
Individual work to produce self-reflection exercise.
Course Load
Assessment method
For this 5 ECTS course, the assessments are different compared to the 10 ECTS equivalent. Please consult the lecturer.
Brightspace
Brightspace is the main tool for communicating with you. All information about the organization of the course, the reading materials, announcements, assessment, etc. will be provided through Brightspace Students have the responsibility to stay informed by visiting Brightspace regularly.
Reading list
A selection of books and articles, to be announced on Brightspace.
Registration
by OSC staff.
Contact
All communication should be directed to course coordinator dr. Yannick Veilleux-Lepage. Please send your email to y.d.veilleux-lepage@fgga.leidenuniv.nl.
Please see the in-class office hours as your first point of call for questions and comments and use email only for particularly pressing issues.