Narrative Inquiry: Systems, Structures, and Persons (PSYC# 82005, 3 CR)

Colette Daiute

last offered 2024 – 2025, next up 2026 – 2027

“Narrative” appears in public as well as scholarly discourse. With so much reference to
narrative, we must ask, “What is narrative?” Relevant to research, we focus on dynamic narrative processes within and across cultural, institutional, and quotidian relations. Because narrating is an expressive process, we focus on how this and other genres are activities with implications for critical inquiry in the human sciences. The course reviews and applies primarily an integration of sociocultural and literary theories and methods for narrative inquiry. We draw in particular on exploring discourses as mediating interactions among individuals, communities, societies, institutions, and physical environments. Course readings draw on studies addressing issues of social justice, learning/development, community engagement, social change, and geo-political crises. Topics include principles of narrative inquiry, activity-meaning system research designs in practice, explicit and implicit narratives of systems and structures, and narrative analysis strategies with legal/policy discourses, cultural practices (such as in social media interactions, praticas, testimonios, call-and-response, indigenous rituals, everyday sense-making, mission statements). We consider and distinguish broad and specific definitions of narrating to address power relations in life, in institutions, and in research, as manifested, for example, in autobiographical narrating, interviewing, conversation, focus groups, ethnographic settings, historical archives, and multi-media discourses in education, community organizations, play spaces, clinical practices, workplaces, and forensic contexts. We highlight narrative analysis strategies including values analysis, plot analysis, significance analysis, character mapping, conversation analysis, with attention to diverse cultural manifestations of such strategies. In-class workshops guide the use of such strategies and digital tools like Atlas.ti and Nvivo. The combination of readings, class discussion, in-class workshops, and writing assignments provide students with practice and reflection in narrative inquiry as a critical and creative process for research, especially in challenging and changing environments. Students are welcomed to use your own research ideas and project materials/data for workshops, as well or instead of those I provide. No prerequisite.

Theorizing and Studying Injustice: Critical Methods for Tracing Circuits of Dispossession, Privilege and Movements of Resistance (PSYC 70312)

Michelle Fine

Online, Synchronous

Last offered 2024 – 2025

Designed for students planning/in the midst of their dissertation projects, critical methods will combine deep reading of classic and contemporary inquiry rooted in racialized political economy, social movements and lives, with a context for workshopping students’ projects. We will focus on the theory-methods-ethics of inquiry framed with critical theor(ies) (decolonial, queer, critical race, feminist, disability, Marxist, indigenous), and projects embedded in/with movements for social justice in the U.S. and transnationally. 

In a blend of creative nonfiction writing/workshopping projects/exploring critical inquiry as legal briefs/reading the classics you forgot to read (Du Bois/Jahoda/Bond), the grey literatures you never encountered (knowledge produced in prison/held in archives/performed in community theatre) and work forged at the social science-arts nexus, we will be asking to whom our work is accountable and how we might create projects for “provocative” generalizability/aesthetic awakenings so audiences can imagine social arrangements otherwise.

Community Based Inquiry (PAR)

Maria Torre

In person, last offered 2024 – 2025

Critical Community-based Research is designed as a theoretically rich research clinic, we will collectively wrestle with questions about the what/how/why of engaging as academics and people rooted in communities, in a praxis of justice-oriented research in communities, with unconventionally trained researchers. Together, we will think through the intertwined issues of history, theory, methods, and ethics of participatory community-based research in the context of our own research projects. You are encouraged to present your projects for in-depth discussions and feedback. Topics we will consider: Framing participation – Stakeholders and colleagues, MOUs and solidarity; Building research collectives; Conditions of collaboration – How is it that we can participate as equally as possible?; How do we ‘work’ power?; Ethics and the practice of participation, action, and research; Navigating Contradictions, Complexity & Ambiguity; Designing participatory methods, analyses and products.

Listening Guide (PSYC70321)

Deb Tolman

In person, last offered 2024 – 2025

This seminar is designed for students asking research questions that can be answered through narrative inquiry.  In particular, the Listening Guide a methodology and a method that enables researchers to develop an understanding people’s inner lives as they are lived—embodied, in relationships, in social worlds. The Listening Guide method of inquiry and analysis facilitates psychological discovery by attending to different voices, including voices held in silence and of those who speak from the margins. It has been used extensively to investigate questions anchored in social in/justice, taboo topics and social and relational conflicts and challenges.  The method will be taught in a workshop format that spans the research process, from asking a real question (something you want to know and don’t know), to the methodology of the LG, to conducting a LG interview, to learning and applying the specific steps of the method that comprise a Listening Guide analysis, and finally, to composing an analysis.  In learning how to do a Listening Guide analysis, you can work with materials from their own research or use the interview(s) you conduct for this class.

Study of Lives

Molly Andrews

Hybrid, Synchronous, last offered 2024 – 2025

A course in the study of lives invites students to grapple with the uniqueness, challenges, and wisdoms of the individual person.  In addition to reading some critical (and interesting) life stories, including those of people who contend with various forms of injustice and struggle, we will reflect on the theories, interviewing and interpretive strategies, and ethical issues connected with the study of lives.  Throughout the course, we will consider how the study of lives fits with, enhances, and is distinctive from a variety of other conceptual and methodological frameworks that students are engaging within their own research.  Please note that we will focus much of our energies this semester on the “doing” of the work as students sketch the life of another person. 

Doing Visual and Arts Based Research (UED  73200)

Wednesdays 4:15 – 6:15

Wendy Luttrell

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of participatory visual research projects.  This course aims to situate these projects within overlapping disciplinary traditions (education, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and psychology) and to consider what makes this research “critical” (i.e. feminist, de-colonial, reflexive, transformative).   The course affords students the opportunity to read and review exemplary projects; and to work directly with visual data utilizing different analytic/interpretive strategies, including one I have designed called “collaborative seeing.”  Students will have access to an audio-visual archive of data I have collected based on a longitudinal visual research project with children 10-18 or can utilize an archive of their own interest.  We will consider issues of power and ethics in participatory visual research; how working with visual data can (but not necessarily) challenge traditional notions of knowledge production; the role of new technologies in disseminating and reaching new audiences; and how we align our work with the expectations and politics within the communities within which we work.    

This seminar is designed to introduce and develop a working knowledge of qualitative research design and methods for geography, environmental psychology, and other social science graduate students.  It is a full semester course that require 1) examining the research methodologies from diverse point of view through multi-disciplinary readings, 2) short written reports on research design and methods, and 3) completion of field visits to a selected site(s) in New York City to practice each method.  The emphasis is on both learning through reading and lectures as well as through application, practice, and class interaction and critique.  The course combines a graduate seminar with intellectual content and theory discussion and a methods workshop along the lines of the “methods modules” offered for more advanced students. Topics covered include:

1.             Paradigms, Epistemologies and New Ontologies

2.             Research Questions: Their relationship to the paradigms and how to know if you can answer them. The use of the literature review

3.             Research Designs: Their relationship to the different paradigms and epistemologies

4.             Ethical Considerations and the Politics of Research Strategies: At the intersection of race, class and gender

5.             Historical Documents and Archives

6.             Participant Observation and Field notes

7.             Structured and Unstructured Interviewing

8.             Behavioral, Movement and Physical Traces Mapping

9.             Qualitative data analysis

10.         Selection of the best fieldwork method for the research question

Course requirements include participating in an individual or group research project to understand different research perspectives and methods, presenting selected readings in class, completing written methods based assignments, and presenting your research experience focusing on what you learned and thinking about where you go with you project next.

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

Setha Low

last offered 2024 – 2025

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. 

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