Students will learn:
- How to do advanced research in Politics and International Relations, involving sustained argument and a good understanding of the relevant literature and data
- How to formulate a research proposal
- The background information and methodological techniques required to do advanced research
- The skills and discipline required to do advanced, independent research

The course will consist of a series of seminars aimed at introducing students to state- of-the-art research from different sub-fields of politics and international relations. The first and last seminar will focus on research methods and writing an honours thesis more generally, while the other sessions will have guest lectures from different faculty members, each focusing on a different substantive topic. The sessions will encourage you to engage in discussion with the lecturers on how to do research in the various fields. The idea is to make you more familiar with how research is undertaken in the discipline and how there are many different approaches to doing so, in preparation of developing your own Honours Thesis.

Typically the lecturer will provide you with a recent research paper, by themselves or one they are particularly familiar with, to discuss with you things like how this research came about, what the main puzzle or claim is, how it has been approached, what the findings or conclusions are, what the main argument or evidence is, etc.. You will get a good grasp of what the state of the art is in a range of subdisciplines and what social science research looks like at both a methodological and a practical level.

Not applicable to this module.

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment
• Group/class feedback, post-assessment

Not yet recorded.