Webinar: Teaching Research Design in Politics and International Relations

Are your students anxious about learning methods? How to teach research methods without resorting to a quant-qual divide? Do your students struggle to decide on a research project? Would you like your students to be sensitive to knowledge hierarchies?

Join Anouk S. Rigterink and Mareike Schomerus, authors of the newly published textbook Research Design in Politics and International Relations, as they introduce ways in which teaching research methods can empower students to think like researchers, help overcome common student anxieties and reignite students’ curiosity for political questions.

Rigterink is an associate professor in quantitative comparative politics at the University of Durham. Schomerus is vice president of the Kenya-based research institute Bursara and a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Inspired by research methods teaching experience in the UK and US, Anouk and Mareike’s teaching philosophy puts student reality center stage. This includes challenging students to break down their research into manageable choices of epistemology, research question, research design, and approach to data collection and analysis.

The approach also champions honesty about the doubts, distractions, difficulties and demotivation that come with research. To build student enthusiasm, it encourages students to learn technical skills through tackling real problems in politics, reframes barriers as decisions, and is frank about getting stuck. It invites students to think about how their approach to creating knowledge can break down existing hierarchies.

Join the webinar to learn how to:
– Teach students to make coherent choices when doing a research project
– Reflect the methodological diversity in Politics and IR, beyond the quant-qual divide
– Introduce students to knowledge hierarchies without assigning blame

The webinar, part of Sage’s Politics Webinar series, is free.