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., Thursdays, 9:30 – 11:30

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 

Daniel Gardner

Wednesdays, 2:00 – 4:00

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.

Technology, Learning and Development Research Methods ESPY 85100-01

Spring 2026, Tuesdays 4:15 – 6:15

Professor Colette Daiute, [email protected]

 This semester we focus on research methods in/on/with Interactive digital narrative (IDN) as a case study providing conceptual foundations of digital technologies for use in education, mental health, public policy, and social change. IDN is a game-like narrative genre involving designer-player collaborations. In addition to gaining knowledge, appreciation, and methodologies relevant to IDN, we develop research rationales, questions, and designs for uses of interactive media by educators, social welfare practitioners, community activists, and others who work to support human development. We craft a critical and creative perspective on digital media in several ways, including to emphasize human purpose, systems knowledge, and creator/user ownership. Course readings, workshops, and assignments highlight complexities of IDN system-process-product dynamics including interactivity, play, multi-modal semiotics, game mechanics, choice poetics, character development, inter-subjectivity, and role play. Given the digital setting of IDN, methodologies may also employ AI-assistant tools to support rigorous process analyses for pilot case studies as well as for large scale studies. Class sessions begin with the professor’s brief lecture, a student presentation analyzing an IDN example with potential research design, and full-class discussion about the readings and presentations. The course includes a basic hands-on experience with authoring in Twine to familiarize students with how it works and to encourage their further pursuit of IDN design. The course is adapted to students’ research interests. No prerequisite.

Critical Archival Research (PSYC 80101), 1 CR

Marilyn Reside,

Alternating Thursdays, 4:15 – 6:15

This course will offer students the opportunity to both critically interrogate archives and also imagine the possibilities of archival research. Students will consider: the expansion and reconceptualization of archives over time; archival silences/absences/obscurities; types of archives and archival materials; ethical implications; honoring archival encounters; archival challenges and strategies; and more. The class will draw on multiple theoretical/conceptual approaches as well as the lived experiences of researchers’ archival encounters.

Doing Visual and Arts Based Research, UED 73200

Gene Fellner, Mondays 4:15 –: 615pm, in person

In the past decade there has been an explosion of visual and arts-based research projects across several disciplines (e.g. anthropology, educational, public health, psychology, sociology). Arts-based research is an approach to inquiry, a methodology, which relies on artistic means to interrogate, reflect upon, and understand ideas, situations, relationships, experiences and structures. Like traditional research, arts-based inquiry seeks to raise awareness, broaden insight and understanding, and produce knowledge. Unlike traditional research, the value of arts-based research lies in its ability to evoke experience, celebrate nuance, validate feeling, promote reflexivity and generate empathy rather than in adherence to established research concepts of generalizability, replicability and “truth.” Ambiguity, complexity, polyphony and polysemy – the welcoming of multiple voices, meanings and perspectives – are friends of an arts-based methodology. Visual methods are also used to document phenomena and make visible patterns that might otherwise remain invisible. 

In this course we will explore different visual arts-based methods of inquiry, including photography, drawing and painting, video and collage, paying particular attention to projects that are dedicated to building a better future for all and making our world more just. Visiting arts-based researchers will discuss their visual explorations, and a number of assigned readings will help us to theorize our own work and that of others. Central to this course will be your own visual inquiry into a subject that is of importance to you. Students may opt to analyze arts-based data that you have already gathered or to represent existing research findings in an alternative visual or multimedia form. Through discussion and analysis of your own work and that of visiting artist-researchers, students will develop conceptual and methodological skills to be applied in your own visual arts-based explorations. The course is organized around a commitment to joy, pleasure and playful experimentation as vital ingredients to arts-based research, analysis, and scholarship. 

In recent semesters, a few participants have also explored phenomena through dance and music. While I am not very knowledgeable about these artistic forms, and especially not in their investigative capacities, you are welcome to join the class and see how these might be used in the service of research.