Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

Scholars and policymakers advocate for sustainable urban development to accommodate the growing number of people across the world that now live in cities. This definition typically refers to a form of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising future generations. Dominant scholarly approaches emphasize technical fixes like infrastructure improvements, resilient architecture, renewable energy, and technological advancements. Largely missing in this analysis is the politics of sustainable urban development, or the political conditions under which sustainable development outcomes are met in cities across the globe. How do political institutions shape the prospects of a sustainable future? What role does political participation play in the construction of sustainable cities? How do urban populations enable or constrain development interventions? What information and data are necessary to construct sustainable cities?

This short course draws from the unique set of theoretical and methodological approaches of political science to contribute to debates on building sustainable cities. Theoretically, we emphasize the importance of political behavior, social connectivity, governance processes, and citizenship for prospects of sustainable development. Methodologically, we draw from a range of social science research strategies, including surveys, field experiments, interviews, and participant observation. Importantly, we understand the building of sustainable cities to be a process, one that includes demands for citizenship, the provision of goods and services, politics of implementation, and the long-term challenges of management. Thematically, we advance important political perspectives on emerging policy debates around sustainable urban transport, climate change adaptation, sustainable resource governance, inclusive public service provision, and affordable housing. These insights will inform policies with the goal of constructing sustainable cities in the era of climate change.

The full-day short course seeks papers that fit under the following research streams related to the politics of sustainable urban development:

• Understanding how residents demand rights to the city
• Examining the politics of service provision
• Probing the process of implementation
• Assessing the long-term management of cities

The short course will include a combination of lightning talks, research presentations, and paper workshops. This is a full-day short course; half the day might be hosted at a nearby university. We envision the course to bring together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners.

There will be a call for papers in February, with the full list of participants decided by April. This is a follow-up to the 2020 short course on the politics of sustainable urban development.

The short course is sponsored by the Comparative Urban Politics Related Group and the Urban Politics section.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

Comparative historical analysis (CHA) encompasses a methodological tradition that has been widely used for studying problem-driven, macro-historical questions. Like historians, CHA uses the past to formulate research questions, describe complex social processes, and generate new theoretical insights. And like social scientists, CHA compares those patterns to formulate generalizable and testable hypotheses. CHA builds a bridge between these two research traditions and developed a heterodox methodological toolbox.

The course introduces four elements from CHA’s toolbox:

1.  Exploration and Description. Figuring out what happened is essential for identifying new research questions of\r updating existing ones. CHA explores by emphasizing description, typologizing, and other tools that help to identify patterns and translate them into research questions.
2.  Data Visualization: CHA draws on visualization strategies to make historical transformation visible. These strategies involve developmental typologies, periodizations, time series trends, trees, chronologies, or visualization tools.
3.  Temporal Thinking: Problem-driven research often is historical because it is driven by sudden changes (i.e. economic crisis, pandemics, wars) or slower moving trends (i.e. demographic, cultural). CHA employs a refined temporal vocabulary to adequately describe historical processes and cope with the causal complexity that is necessary to explain these processes.
4.  Theorizing: Theory plays a central role in CHA’s effort to cope with causal complexity. Theories facilitate a close dialogue between existing theories and new inductive insights. And this dialogue updates existing theories. CHA uses theories particularly to identify confounders that existing theories have overlooked. It also employs causal diagrams to translate theories into transparent data gathering strategies.

The instructor for this session is Marcus Kreuzer. He is a Professor of Political Science at Villanova University and has been working on the origins of European and post-communist party systems as well as qualitative methodology. He is the author of The Grammar of Time. A Toolkit for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge, 2023) and published widely on qualitative methods. He has taught CHA courses at the IQMR, ECPR, and MethodsNet summer schools.

Half Day Short Course
1:30pm – 5:30pm

How can we ethically navigate the challenges of conducting research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)? Scholars have examined the challenges faced by researchers in various autocratic contexts, shedding light on the ethical considerations, methodological complexities, and power dynamics inherent in such environments. They have emphasized the importance of navigating restrictions on academic freedom, managing potential risks to researchers’ and participants’ safety, and adapting research methods to account for state control and censorship. In the context of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), studies on conducting research in the region show how the prevalence of authoritarianism influences the researchers’ choice of research topics, countries for study, and data collection.

This module will delve into the complexities of conducting research in the MENA region and provide important guidelines for ethical research practices in this politically sensitive context. Panelists will address the subjective dimensions influencing research outcomes including the positionality of the researcher and how to maintain a reflexive research process. They will share best practices to ethically engage with hard-to-reach and vulnerable populations and discuss the impact of fieldwork on the researchers and participants’ mental health. The discussions will extend to the application of interview data in analysis, incorporating culturally sensitive coding techniques and ethical considerations. Throughout the module, the focus will remain on fundamental ethical obligations, including principles of informed consent, privacy, and safety considerations. By the end of the module, participants will develop a deeper understanding of ethical research in the MENA region and gain important insights and practical strategies for impactful and ethical research practices.

The session will have three presentations, each spanning 20 minutes, covering vital themes in ethical research within the MENA region. The presentations are followed by a 30-minute Q&A session. Scholars researching politically sensitive contexts will benefit from participating in this module. The module will provide them with an interactive platform to delve deeper into field research topics, share experiences, and seek clarification on the nuanced dimensions of ethical research in politically sensitive contexts.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

The Graduate Students in International Political Economy (GSIPE) Workshop is an interdisciplinary virtual workshop space organized by doctoral students from universities across North America and Europe. For the last two years, we have held an in-person pre-conference event at APSA, and for the third consecutive year, invite submissions for the GSIPE Pre-Conference Workshop at APSA 2024 in Philadelphia. We welcome research proposals from junior scholars from institutions worldwide and aim to offer graduate students and postdoctoral researchers a unique opportunity to connect in person, present their work, and receive feedback from their peers from different institutions and fields. Our goal is to support research by junior scholars in the fields of International Political Economy, and foster professional networks and research exchanges worldwide, especially for students from underprivileged backgrounds or with limited resources from their home institutions.

The pre-conference workshop will consist of 12 presentations, with four thematically organized blocs around key political economy topics, each with three 15-minute presentations followed by discussant comments and audience Q&A. The conference itself will broadly focus on International Political Economy research, with sub-themes including trade and global value chains, distributional politics foreign investment, and the rise of economic statecraft and industrial policy. We especially welcome submissions regarding the policy implications of democratic retrenchment and governance innovations in support of the APSA 2024 conference theme “Democracy: Retrenchment, Renovation, & Reimagination.”

Those who are interested in presenting research should submit a proposal no later than May 30, 2023, to GSIPE at gsipe.workshop@gmail.com. Proposals should include an abstract (300 words), and 3-5 keywords to help select discussants and create thematically-cohesive panels. We particularly welcome submissions from scholars who are underrepresented in IPE.

All participants (junior scholars and discussants) will need to register for the main APSA meeting. Please contact GSIPE organizers Ishana Ratan (ishanaratan@berkeley.edu), Hao Zhang (hzhang3@mit.edu), or Ilaria Natali (ilaria.natali@ulb.be) with any questions.

Half Day Short Course
9:00am – 1:00pm

This short course will be divided into two sections. In the first section, I will give an introduction to the general Bayesian approach for regression analysis. In the second section, I will focus on the Bayesian model-averaging approach for regression analysis. We will be combining theoretical aspects with empirical applications using Stata.

Section 1:
In recent years, researchers across disciplines have become increasingly interested in Bayesian analysis. This is not surprising, because researchers often have some prior knowledge about parameters of interest, and this can be incorporated when using Bayesian estimation. This approach also provides a more natural interpretation of the results in terms of probabilities for hypotheses of interest and predictions. Another attractive characteristic of Bayesian regression is that it offers a common theoretical framework for a wide variety of models. In the first part of this short course, I will provide an overview of the main concepts associated with regression analysis using the Bayesian approach, and I will use empirical applications to illustrate the way different elements associated with Bayesian estimation can be implemented in
Stata.

We will be covering the following aspects in this first section:

1. A brief introduction to Stata
2. A brief overview of Bayesian analysis
   a. Why and when to use Bayesian analysis
   b. Intuitive description of Markov chain Monte Carlo
3. Empirical applications using the -bayes:- prefix with Stata estimation commands
   a. Linear regression
   b. Probit model
   c. Random effects Poisson model

Section 2:
Most empirical applications consider a fixed unknown underlying data-generating model (DGM) that researchers try to find, based on a particular theoretical framework that is combined with the data associated with the variables involved in the selected model specification. Bayesian model averaging provides an approach, where instead of focusing the estimation on the search for that unique unknown model, researchers can incorporate the uncertainty about the DGM to obtain probabilities associated with relevant predictors, measurements about complementary or substitutable predictors across different model candidates, and also predictions that incorporate uncertainty about the model and the parameters. This approach is particularly appealing because the results can be intuitively interpreted and are useful to help the researcher in determining the more important predictors for the outcome variable. In this section, I will work with an empirical application to illustrate the way we can implement the Bayesian model-averaging approach using the Stata bma commands.

We will be covering the following aspects:

1. Brief introduction to model averaging
2. Brief description of Bayesian model averaging
3. Empirical application (Linear regression)
   a. Posterior model probabilities
   b. Posterior inclusion probabilities
   c. Jointness (complement and substitute regressors)
   d. Sensitivity
   e. Predictions

Half Day Short Course
1:30pm – 5:30pm

Humanity’s biggest and most difficult problems are political: domestic violence, conflict, discrimination, inequality, global heating, environment, trade policy, you name it. Yet there are still too few opportunities for people to develop practical political understanding, strategies, and skills – unlike business, the biggest subject in higher education and online.

This short course covers a range of tried and tested methods for teaching non-partisan, practical politics across the curriculum, including how to:

• make the most of ‘teachable moments’
• create learning communities in a class or lecture programme, using peer induction, electing class representatives and devils’ advocates; setting up study buddies, huddles, buzz groups and action learning sets;
• tackle controversial issues constructively
• make the most of invited activists, politicians and practitioners
• base assignments on real-life tasks, projects or community service
• explore issues of power and exclusion
• use Solutions Focus and Systems Thinking in political problem solving
• present theories as stories, pictures and diagrams
• teach Theories of Change and how to plan and develop a campaign
• evaluate the impact of your course

This course is participative and informative, enabling participants to share their experience and prioritise topics they wish to explore, including strategies for promoting learning for democracy across the curriculum or in education more widely.

Instructor:
Titus Alexander has four decades of experience in civic education, engagement, and advocacy at a local, national, and international level. He currently teaches an advanced apprenticeship in Campaigning, Leadership and Management for Britain’s biggest trade union.

Titus is a regular contributor to the World Forum for Democracy at the Council of Europe and has published widely on deepening democracy and other topics, including Family Learning: The Foundation of Effective Education (Demos 1997), Citizenship Schools: A practical guide (2001), and Unravelling Global Apartheid: An overview of world politics (Polity/Blackwell’s, 1996). He founded Democracy Matters, an alliance for learning practical politics, Charter 99, and co-founded the Parenting Education and Support Forum.

Participants will receive practical templates for learning and teaching, course notes and slides, and can download – “Practical Politics: Lessons in Power and Democracy” here: https://bit.ly/PP-Final

For a briefing paper on the case for teaching practical politics, examples and further reading download “How Universities Can Make a Difference” here: http://bit.ly/3jcjNu8

Half Day Short Course
9:00am – 1:00pm

Traditional political science guidance approaches field research from the perspective of a supposedly neutral, unmarked researcher [i.e., a hegemonic white male]. Doing so does researchers a disservice by overlooking and underestimating the variability of bodies and positions that researchers actually carry everywhere they go. These varied bodies and positionalities are not ancillary to the planning and doing of fieldwork but influence every aspect of it. Researchers must make decisions about which fields are safe, under what contexts, and for whom, whether, what, and what type of access they can likely secure, and more, and they should take their embodiment and likely positionalities into account in doing so. Researchers also need to take their caregiving needs and responsibilities; personal comfort, health, and safety; and financial status into account in planning and conducting field research. Meanwhile, the researcher is not the only decision-maker of note. Potential research gatekeepers’ and participants’ willingness to engage with researchers is influenced by multiple variables, including their own assessments of the researcher. These assessments stem from the researcher’s strategic self-presentation as well as the respondents’ levels of comfort and respect for the type/category of people they understand the researcher to be. We take up these concerns in this interactive workshop session, not only sharing our experiences insights and expertise, but also creating space for participants to integrate their whole selves into planning and adapting field work.

Half Day Short Course
1:30pm – 5:30pm

This half-day short course, co-organized by the editorial team of Politics & Gender and the APSA Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section, will provide guidance and advice on writing academic research on women, gender, and politics. The day will open with a roundtable on submitting work to the journal. Subsequent sessions will focus on topics like framing your contribution, organizing your paper, planning your writing, and disseminating your research. The day will end with a networking opportunity for short course participants. While designed primarily for graduate students and other early career researchers, the short course is open to anyone interested in developing their writing on women, gender, and politics.

Half Day Short Course
1:30pm – 5:30pm

This course introduces the Bayesian logic of qualitative case studies, building on “Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference: Rethinking Qualitative Research” (Fairfield & Charman, CUP 2022). The material complements the morning short course on process tracing led by Bennett, Checkel, and Fairfield, but each course can be taken independently.

The first part of this course introduces the basic principles of Bayesian reasoning with the goal of leveraging common-sense understandings of inference and improving intuition when analyzing qualitative evidence. We begin with the general logic of Bayesian inference, which involves updating prior views about which explanation is more plausible when we learn new evidence. We explain the importance of working with rival hypotheses and discuss how to formulate well-constructed explanations to compare. We then elaborate practical procedures for evaluating the inferential import of evidence by “mentally inhabiting” the world of each hypothesis and asking which one makes the evidence more expected. We include examples and group exercises using real-world qualitative evidence to illustrate how this process works.

The second part of the course turns to comparative case studies. Methodological literature often treats cross-case (e.g., comparative) analysis and within-case analysis (e.g., process tracing) as distinct analytical endeavors that draw on different logics of inference. Within a Bayesian framework, however, there are no fundamental distinctions; all evidence contributes to inference in the same manner, whether we are studying a single case or multiple cases. In essence, each piece of evidence we obtain weighs in favor of one explanation over a rival to some degree, which we assess by asking which explanation makes that evidence more expected. Evidentiary weight then aggregates both within any given case, and across different cases that fall within the scope of the theories we are testing. In addition to showing how this process works with examples drawn from published comparative case studies, we will introduce a Bayesian approach to case selection and discuss how to articulate scope conditions and tentatively generalize our hypotheses.
Note: This course does not require any prior familiarity with process training, Bayesianism, probability theory, or logic. The only technical skills that will be assumed are basic arithmetic.

Instructor Bios:
Andrew Bennett is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the co-author, with Alexander George, of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Science (MIT Press, 2005), and co-author, with Jeffrey T. Checkel, of Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Professor Bennett’s substantive research focuses on security issues in international relations, including military interventions, alliances, and decision-making. He has many years of methods teaching experience at Georgetown and at summer methods institutes around the world.

Tasha Fairfield is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics. Her methodological research examines the Bayesian logic of inference in qualitative social science. She is the co-author, with A.E. Charman, of Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference: Rethinking Qualitative Research (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She has been teaching workshops and courses on this material since 2016 at IQMR, APSA, LSE, and other forums. Her substantive research examines the politics of policymaking, redistribution, business power, and inequality.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

This invitation-only workshop is the cornerstone of an NSF-funded initiative to increase diversity in the community of scholars developing methodological techniques for qualitative and multi-method research. It brings together 6 junior scholars, selected by application, and their mentors who have been working with them for 6 months to develop their papers, to present research in progress and to build intellectual and social community.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

Around the world, aid is delivered to conflict-affected populations. In some cases, this aid is delivered for purely humanitarian purposes. In others, aid is used strategically by political actors to win hearts and minds. Scholars have sought to understand the implications of delivering aid in violent contexts, including how aid affects violence against civilians as well as success in achieving counterinsurgency goals. However, divergent findings have complicated the field’s ability to draw concrete conclusions. This full-day short course creates and opportunity for scholars researching the delivery of aid in conflict-affected areas to come together to identify unanswered questions, share and receive feedback on their work, and build a foundation for future collaborations. While connected by their interest in aid and conflict, participants vary in their background, methodical approach, and academic rank, ensuring that participants will walk away from the workshop with a more diverse perspective. The workshop is invitation only to ensure a conducive environment for intimate discussions and to facilitate fruitful future collaborations.

Schedule:
9-9:15/Welcome & Introductions
9:15-10:00/Discussion: Identifying Unanswered Questions
10:00-10:30/Break
10:30-12:30/Presentations & Feedback (5 papers)
12:30-1:30/Lunch
1:30-3:30/Presentations & Feedback (5 papers)
3:30-3:45/Break
3:45-4:30/Discussion: Identifying Possible Collaborations

Half Day Short Course
1:30pm – 5:30pm

This short course outlines the logic and best practices of interpretive process tracing, with a particular focus on practice tracing; it provides students with advice and examples to enable them to use this method in their work. The course does not require any prior background in interpretive epistemology or training in interpretive analysis.

We begin, meta-theoretically and conceptually, by building on the practice turn in sociology and political science. Epistemologically, practice tracing combines continental interpretism with American pragmatism. Ontologically, practice tracing is built on a relational understanding of the social world, which places the analytic focus squarely on process. Proceeding from these meta-theoretical priors, process is now understood as social practices or ways of doing things. We consider various instances of such practices, with examples ranging from the politics of international organizations to the dynamics of identity construction.

The core of the course then examines how we can empirically measure and access social practices, using the data to conduct practice tracing. We start with ethnography and political ethnography, viewed by many as the ‘gold standard’ for accessing social practices. However, we also consider interpretive interviews and document analysis as additional methods to measure practices. In all cases, we consider the practical, data quality and ethical challenges of doing the practice tracing; this sets the stage for articulating an emerging set of best practices for interpretive process tracing.

We conclude this part of the course by sketching the cutting-edge challenges for interpretive process tracing: (1) expanding its understanding of process to capture better insights from related techniques – following methods, for example; and (2) adding ethical reflexivity to how we go about accessing-measuring-seeing ‘process.’

The course’s final hour is devoted to small-group breakout sessions, where participants workshop how they plan to use interpretive process tracing / practice tracing in their research. Are there meta-theoretical, data access, data collection, data analysis or ethical issues with which they are grappling? Instructors and fellow students will offer constructive advice on how best to address such challenges.

Instructor Bio:
Jeffrey T. Checkel: Checkel is a professor at the European University Institute, where he holds the Chair in International Relations. His research interests include international relations theory, international institutions, civil war, identity/identity-formation and qualitative methods. At EUI, he offers seminars on international relations theory, international institutions, qualitative methods, and philosophies of social science. Most years since 2014, Checkel has co-taught the foundational APSA short course on ‘The Logic and Best Practices of Process Tracing.’

Half Day Short Course
9:00am – 1:00pm

The study of causal mechanisms (aka causal processes) is ubiquitous in the social sciences. The promise of process-focused research using in-depth case studies is that we can gain a better understanding of how things work and under what conditions using actual cases instead of using controlled comparisons across cases (for example experimentally manipulating treatments to gain knowledge about mean causal effects). However, the potential gains of process-focused research have not been fully reaped in the social sciences because of the tendency to reduce causal processes to simple one-liners that do not unpack what is actually going on in a case (e.g. that grievances are linked to democratization through social mobilization). By not unpacking process theoretically, we are unable to evidence how they work empirically because empirical material is only processual evidence when we can identify the theorized part of a process that it is evidence of.

Inspired by the mechanistic turns in fields such as medicine, policy evaluation and policy studies, the first session of the course discusses what ’good’ processual explanations can look like in the social sciences. The course introduces a conceptual language of actors, activities and linkages that enables us to move beyond one-liner theories to theorize the inner workings of causal processes, while at the same time not getting lost in the gory details. The second session presents the developing standards in the natural and social sciences for what constitutes ‘good’ mechanistic/processual evidence, and how we can evaluate it. The final session discusses practical applications, including what and how we can ‘generalize’ from processual case studies, and how process-focused research can be used as an adjunct method to improve social science experiments in designing the experiment and interpreting the data.

About the instructor:
Derek Beach is a professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he does research on research methodology and European integration. He has authored articles, chapters, and books on research methodology, policy evaluation, international negotiations, referendums, and European integration, and co-authored the book Process-tracing Methods: Foundations and Guidelines (2019, 2nd edition, University of Michigan Press). He has taught case study methods at numerous workshops and Ph.D. level courses throughout the world and conducted evaluations at the national and international level. He was an academic fellow at the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group in spring 2022. He is an academic coordinator of the Methods Excellence Network (MethodsNet).

Half Day Short Course
9:00am – 1:00pm

This short course covers the underlying logic and best practices of process tracing, which is a within-case method of developing and testing causal explanations of individual cases. We begin by exploring the philosophies of science behind process tracing: scientific realist and interpretive. Next, we highlight, define, and provide examples of the central concept process tracing measures – causal mechanisms – noting their difference from causal effects and interpretive understandings of causation.

The core of the short course is then an introduction to the logic and best practices of process tracing, both its ‘front end’ data collection and ‘back end’ data analysis. For data collection, we consider the typical ways in which process tracing gathers evidence on the observable implications of causal mechanisms, including archival work, document analysis of secondary sources, various field methods (interviews, political ethnography, ethnography), and surveys. In reviewing these methods, we consider the inferential and ethical challenges each raises when accessing process-tracing data. On data analysis and process tracing, we begin by considering the informal manner in which many scholars proceed; more important, we survey the growing number of techniques (e.g., Bayesian logic, directed acyclic graphs) that allow us to conduct the process tracing analysis more formally and transparently. We finish this part of the course by articulating a set of best practices for conducting process tracing.

After this overview of the philosophical, causal and data logics of process tracing, the course introduces participants to two different types. We begin with Bayesian process tracing—comparing rival hypotheses; evaluating the inferential weight of evidence by “mentally inhabiting” the world of each hypothesis and asking which one makes the evidence more expected; updating prior views about which hypothesis is more plausible; and fostering transparency through systemization. We then turn to interpretive process tracing—inductive approach; practice logic; establishing local causation; transparency through ethical self-reflection.
Throughout the course we will emphasize best practices and applications to exemplars of process tracing research. While the examples are primarily drawn from international relations and comparative politics, the methods we discuss are applicable to all the subfields of political science, to sociology, economics, history, business studies, public policy, and many other fields.

The course’s final section is devoted to small-group breakout sessions, where participants workshop how they plan to use process tracing in their research. Are there data access, data collection, data analysis or ethical issues with which they are grappling? Instructors and fellow students will offer constructive advice on how best to address such issues.

This morning short course is designed as an introduction that can usefully be taken in conjunction with Bayesian Reasoning (QMMR B) or Interpretive Process Tracing (QMMR C) in the afternoon. These three courses are complementary and can also be taken separately.

Instructor Bios:
Andrew Bennett is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the co-author, with Alexander George, of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Science (MIT Press, 2005), and co-author, with Jeffrey T. Checkel, of Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Professor Bennett’s substantive research focuses on security issues in international relations, including military interventions, alliances, and decision-making. He has many years of methods teaching experience at Georgetown and at summer methods institutes around the world.

Jeffrey T. Checkel is a professor at the European University Institute, where he holds the Chair in International Relations. His research interests include international relations theory, international institutions, civil war, identity/identity-formation and qualitative methods. At EUI, he offers seminars on international relations theory, international institutions, qualitative methods, and philosophies of social science. Most years since 2014, Checkel has co-taught the foundational APSA short course on ‘The Logic and Best Practices of Process Tracing.’

Tasha Fairfield is Associate Professor in Development at the London School of Economics. Her methodological research examines the Bayesian logic of inference in qualitative social science. Her most recent book – with Andrew Charman – is Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference: Rethinking Qualitative Research (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She has been teaching workshops and courses on this material since 2016 at IQMR, APSA, LSE, GSERM and other forums. Her substantive research examines the comparative politics of business power and inequality.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

What is a job talk? Simple, it is an oral presentation that displays your research. The problem is that you have spent all your time thinking and expressing your research in a medium other than the oral form of communication. Although the underlying ideas you wish to convey are largely the same, the medium in which you are now asked to express them is profoundly different. The primary challenge in crafting a research talk, then, is this: How do I translate my research from one mode of communication to another? This is precisely the question this workshop seeks to answer, and it does so by drawing on storytelling as the central translating device.

This workshop is designed to offer you, first and foremost, a general framework for how to think about the research presentation as storytelling. Our journey will take us through such questions as: What is storytelling? What makes storytelling so compelling? How can it be used in the context of research presentations? Alongside answering these deeper questions, the workshop will also walk through a portion of an actual presentation to demonstrate the principles of storytelling when applied to research. In the afternoon, participants will be afforded the opportunity to start crafting their own research presentation in the form of storytelling.

Morning:

• Introduces a general framework on how to think about the research presentation as storytelling.
• Walks through a portion of an actual job talk to demonstrate the principles of storytelling when applied to research.

Afternoon:

• Building on the principles from the morning session, participants now have the opportunity to start crafting their own research presentation in the form of storytelling.

Who is the audience for this workshop? Anyone interested in learning more about giving research presentations is welcome to join. My immediate goal, however, is to offer this to PhD students about to enter the academic job market — hence the title of the workshop.

Is this workshop mostly lecture based? The workshop will consist of two modes, one where I will be the primary speaker and the other where you will be engaged in small group work. Especially the afternoon session of the workshop will be mostly small group work. Please come ready to participate.

Can participants attend just part of the workshop? Sure. But if you do, I strongly recommend you attend morning session of the workshop. The afternoon will draw heavily on the things introduced in the morning.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

This short course is invitation only.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

This short course is invitation only.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

This short course is invitation only.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

Organized by the Southeast Asian Politics Related Group, this short course features research by six early career scholars from Southeast Asia. Papers will be shared in advance to maximize time for feedback and discussion among attendees. Annual Meeting attendees are welcome to pre-register and join the program.

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm

This short course is invitation only.

Half Day Short Course
9:00am – 1:00pm

Research data management entails developing a data management plan and handling research materials systematically throughout the research lifecycle. Effectively managing data makes research more robust, allows data to be useful over a longer period of time, and facilitates sharing data with the broader research community. This short course equips participants with a range of strategies for effectively managing qualitative data. Hands-on exercises allow participants to practice basic data management tasks in the context of their own projects. The short course particularly emphasizes writing data management and sharing plans (DMSPs), as required by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other funders and organizations, for research involving qualitative data. This is particularly relevant this year, as new policies for sharing data and materials from NSF-funded research will go into effect in January 2025. We also consider the benefits and challenges of sharing data and demonstrate appropriate techniques for mitigating them, again with the help of exercises and tools that participants will be able to use with their own research. Finally, the short course briefly introduces and briefly discusses new techniques for making qualitative research more transparent, including developing interview methods appendices and tables, documenting analysis performed in qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) software, and employing Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI).

Full Day Short Course
9:00am – 5:00pm