SPRING 2025

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

Michelle Fine

Mondays, 6:30 – 8:30

Online, Synchronous

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

Thursdays 4:15 – 6:15

In person

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.

Methods of Qualitative Research 

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.

Listening Guide (PSYC70321)

Deb Tolman

Thursdays 9:30 – 11:30

In person

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

Wednesdays, 9:30-11:30

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. 

Fall 2024

Feminist Ethnography, Tuesdays 2:00 – 4:00

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.   

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

Tuesdays, 4:15 – 6:15

Colette Daiute

“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.

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.

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