REQUIRED: Conceptual and Methodological Foundations of Qualitative Research,  Faculty rotate teaching

Next offered in Spring 2026

The new critical ethnography: hybrid, virtual and multi-modal

Setha Low

The seminar begins with an overview of the goals, methods and forms of analysis that make up contemporary “real life” practices and then turns to the ways that film, video, digital and other forms of virtual techniques expand and complement current methods. The seminar explores a wide range of digital and analog tools, techniques, and methods for use across the disciplines. Readings focus on past projects and the impact of remote methods on ethnographic research.  Interviews with some of the major scholars in the field are included as well as viewing pre-recorded video interviews that are already available (John Jackson, Bianca Williams, Darya Radchenko, Sarah Pink will be invited). Each student who is planning ethnographic research projects in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is offered an opportunity to search social media for “data” and then use the course as a way to question the validity and reliability of these personal archives and resources to think through the implications of working with these data. The course will require reading, web-based searches, and presentation of a final project that incorporates some of the virtual/digital methods covered in the course.

Note: Last taught Spring 2022

Critical Discourse Theory and Analysis (PSYC72203)

Colette Daiute

Critical Discourse Theory and Analysis focuses on expression as activity and subjectivity in processes of social change and learning. Expressive media, like personal narratives, policies, laws, images, interviews, and curricula occur in tension, synergy, and transformation. We review research focused on how individuals, cultural groups, and institutions use those and other discourse genres to share/impose/resist/innovate ways of knowing and living, especially at moments of major change such as in social movements and displacements. Drawing on social sciences and humanities, we consider research designs within naturally occurring practices and craft detailed analytic strategies to learn about interactions among and within diverse participants, privileging especially the voices of people who have been marginalized, discriminated against, and excluded in other ways, while also shining a light on those with resources and power. Topics organizing our work include literary readings of everyday interactions, the language of microaggressions, silences in policy reports, and multiple voices in interviews. The course features discourse analysis workshops, with previous data sets and as applied to students’ projects. We also work with computer software such as Atlas ti, Nvivo, and others). Students are invited to bring their own projects and data to the course.  No prerequisite.

Childhood and Youth Studies: Approaches and Methods

MALS 78900, PSYC 80103

Spring 2022

Professor: Colette Daiute

This course in Childhood and Youth Studies: Approaches and Methods involves in-depth focus on the interaction of problem, theory and method, with sustained attention to the ways in which researchers frame their investigations, develop guiding questions, designs, implementations, and reports. Students engage with the contemporary study of children, childhood and adolescence as defined and supported in collectives of human cultural development (education, family, social welfare, community organizations, transnational child rights projects).  The course emphasizes sociocultural approaches to childhood/youth in field-based settings with young people growing up amidst contemporary challenges such as displacement, lack of access to economic and sociopolitical resources, and social exclusion. Methods addressed in this course, include ethnography/participant observation, activity-meaning system design, narrative analysis, conversation analysis, archival studies, surveys, and participatory-action research. The course uses an inductive approach to research methods, that is we examine research designs in the context of exemplary studies in interventions to address inequities in education, health, and social welfare. Course activities involve reading research articles, discussing articles orally and in writing with a focus on method, and applying the course readings and knowledge building to your own research interests.

Each week, readings introduce a challenge to childhood/youth development, in specific settings, diverse research approaches to the issue, mediations between challenge and development via cultural tools (especially language and other symbol systems), purposeful activities, interventions, and methods of inquiry. The conceptual organization of the course, highlighted in “the 3 dimensions” stated for each week, includes theory defining childhood/youth and societal development, diverse life contexts, and methods of inquiry to address urgent research questions.  Guiding questions integrate the weekly readings toward scholarly and activist research. Students present their research interests, as relevant to the dimensions and/or readings of the week. Several guest speakers who are experts in specific areas of child/youth research will present, suggest readings, and discuss ideas and issues with the class.

Using Archives in Social Justice Research, Formerly by Susan Opotow

Archives offer rich textual and material data for understanding social issues and collective efforts for societal change in contemporary society and historical periods. The possible uses of archival material for social justice research are boundless.  Using Archives in Social Justice Research is a course designed to foster students’ knowledge, skills, and strategies for using physical, digital, and hybrid archives to study research questions of interest to them. Grounding our work in archival scholarship, students read deeply in the social sciences and humanities to deepen their knowledge of archives as a construct, a societal resource, and a repository vulnerable to politicization. Topics we study include archival theory, methods, and ethics; community archives; and archives documenting oppression and human rights. We study empirical papers in multiple disciplines to learn how scholars have used archival data to address a range of social justice topics.  By the course’s end, students will have begun and progressed on their own archival projects.