FALL 2025

Anti-racist Methodologies & Research Ethics for Black Participatory Community Engaged Research

Monique A. Guishard, PhD, Tameka Battle, EdD,  & Justin T. Brown, PhD, MPH

The fundamental objective of this course is to support graduate students with designing, conducting, ethically evaluating, and producing intersectional critical race scholarship (and policy) that can be utilized to address inequities rooted in systemic racism. This 3-credit, 3-hour course was designed with funding support from the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies (BRES) Curriculum Development Faculty Fellowship program and as a function of that was envisioned as a core course under the Research Approaches with a Qualitative Emphasis area.  In graduate research methods courses, there are often sparse or superficial attemptsto infuse moments of criticality, by including whiffs of intersectionality praxis, critical race theories/methodologies, decoloniality, white queer theory, and BIPOC feminist perspectives. Research ethics training is designed similarly, with readings, practices, and theoretical frameworks that center cis-white normative ethics as they pertain to mostly individual research participants. These traditions are troubling, particularly when rich tomes of place-based and community-centered scholarship exist. This course pushes the academy to rethink graduate training curricular frames in keeping with aims of the CUNY Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative Council and Collaboration Hub. 

By the conclusion of this course, doctoral candidates of the Ph.D. Program in Black, Race and Ethnic Studies will be able to: 

1. Identify foundational concepts, epistemes, and practices central to Diasporic Black qualitative, participatory, and community engaged approaches.
2. Distinguish interdisciplinary critical race approaches to research, from legacies of epistemes, ontologies, ethical frameworks and methodologies that sustain the characteristics of white supremacy culture.  
3. Synthesize intersectional ethical stances and methodological frames rooted in Black queer, transnational feminist/womanist praxis in order to create a developmental IRB protocol centering core concepts of this praxis framework .
4.  Investigate the role of historical, social, and political attempts at devaluing culturally-centered humanizing, anti-racist, decolonial praxes through policy analysis of publicly available documents. 
5. Create humanizing, anti-racist, and decolonial community engaged research projects.

Qualitative Research Methods (EES & Open to Ph.D. students in other programs)

Celina Su

Fall 2025, Wednesdays, 11:45 am to 1:45 pm

This course introduces students to key principles in research design and methods in qualitative social science research, especially archival research, interviews, participant observation, and ethnography. We will discuss the assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses associated with each method, and students will practice each of these methods firsthand over the course of the semester. We also consider common research traditions, such as case studies and grounded theory. Students will become acquainted with issues related to ethics, validity, reflexivity, and interpretation in qualitative research. We will pay special care to helping each student develop their own research project and the skills necessary to implement it over the course of the semester– choosing the method(s) most appropriate to their project, managing design, data collection, analysis, and writing up research.

SPRING 2026

Conceptual and Methodological Foundations of Qualitative Research

Deb Tolman, Ed.D., Day/Time TBA

This course introduces students to the shared principles and varied approaches to qualitative research theory and methods in the social sciences. The course presents the foundations of diverse qualitative research methodologies in terms of their epistemologies, practices, and contributions. Presentations by faculty members illustrate the range of traditions of qualitative methods presented by faculty actively using the approach and thus able to share it and reflect on it critically as well as practically. Faculty coordinating and guiding the course invite colleagues teaching qualitative courses and providing a diverse range of approaches, such as ethnography, grounded theory, narrative inquiry, the listening guide, study of lives, and so on. Students will be introduced to methods of data collection and analytic strategies typically employed in qualitative inquiry and will discuss special issues the confront qualitative researchers.

Methods of Qualitative Research, SSW77000 

Vicki Lens

Wednesdays, 2:45 – 4:45

Hyflex

This course is an introductory doctoral seminar on qualitative research. We will explore five major approaches to qualitative research: ethnography, grounded theory, narrative, phenomenology, and case studies. Students will learn by doing, with students designing their own research project, culminating in a research proposal, and where the classroom will be designed as a group learning space where students will get and give feedback on their research proposals.

Students successfully completing the course will be able to:

Identify the history, purposes and philosophies underpinning qualitative methods;

• Decide when qualitative methods are appropriate;
• Identify major methodological approaches including ethnography, grounded theory, narrative, phenomenology, and case studies;
• Formulate a research question and design a qualitative study;
• Demonstrate basic skills in gathering qualitative evidence (interviews, observations and archival);
• Critically evaluate and ensure high quality data;
• Engage in the beginning stages of data analysis.

FALL 2026

Feminist Ethnography, Day/Time TBA

Soniya Munshi

Feminist Ethnography is a methodology that approaches the study of people in their everyday structural and cultural contexts through feminist analyses of power to examine gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, disability and other modes of social difference. Feminist ethnography is rooted in praxis, a process that transforms theory into action, and takes up questions of how and where it can contribute to social change. Through this course, we will engage topics such as the histories of feminist ethnography including debates and critical interventions, methods, ethics and accountabilities, and applications. We will also attend to practical considerations, such as strategies to build meaningful relationships with people and place over time that take into account the realities of everyday graduate student life in NYC.  In this course, you will be invited to work with a research question that will inform an independent feminist ethnographic research project over the course of the semester. This course will also attend to the craft of feminist ethnographic writing through close readings of texts as well as our own practice with the genre.