PhD Social Anthropology / Programme details

For Research Students only

As with Issues in Ethnographic Research 1 (SOAN70641), this course aims to give students the opportunity to explore anthropological research methods, and to encourage experimentation and reflection. It will develop awareness of ethical and political issues in anthropological research specifically, and empirical social research generally. It will help to locate anthropological field methods within social science research methods and to explore the underlying premises of different methodologies and the meaning of data.

The course focuses on techniques for the collection, recording and analysis of data.  It will address questions about the relationship between general theories and empirical research with a particular, but not exclusive, emphasis on ethnographic fieldwork. The module will raise 'foreshadowed questions' about the processes of ethnographic fieldwork such as access to 'the field', ethics, fieldnotes, issues of representation, dissemination and the different genres of academic writing.

The course consists of up to 10 three-hour workshops over one semester. It is organised to foreground student participation and thereby further the development of each project. The aim is to make the course relevant to your own projects and priorities. For those with the intention of authoring a dissertation as a stand-alone degree, the short proposal for this course sets up the dissertation to be researched and written in the summer. For those with the intention of preparing a research proposal for doctoral research the task of writing a short proposal focuses the mind on the larger more comprehensive version to be submitted later. Readings and discussion topics are intended to help you think about how you go about the practical features of your research. 

Workshops, Practical Exercises, and Readings, including short Lectures.   

The assessment for the course is a 4000-word research proposal of a professional standard (for example, in the style of the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research). 

For Research Students only:

This module is the second of two training modules for postgraduate research students who intend to use ethnographic research methods in their doctoral study. It is targeted at social anthropology students on the MA in Anthropological Research (MAAR) and those in the first year of a PhD in Social Anthropology. However, as with IER I, it is not a methods course per se, but a forum for discussing what most anthropologists would see as a, if not the, core aspect of their disciplinary identity: ethnography. At this pre‐fieldwork stage, the course offers the opportunity to consider the strengths and limitations of each method in the company of, and more importantly, with the support of others.