There are two primary goals with this assignment: 1) use the research methods that you have read about and apply them to an exploration of an urban place of your interest, and 2) learn more about a topic that you would like to research in Amsterdam. Your blog post for this assignment is due by midnight MONDAY May 17th.
At this point in the program, most of what you do will be at least partly within your research groups. So an additional task in this assignment is to choose someone with whom you would like to work.
To be clear, you will accomplish this exercise in small groups (2 or 3 people max), but you will individually post the findings in your blogs. If you have no idea who you would like to work with, we encourage you to read your classmates’ blogs to find someone with similar interests. Find one or two others from the class, organize a time and a place to meet for this assignment.
Something to keep in mind: this assignment builds on the requirements for the midterm meeting, where each group will give a presentation of their proposed research project for Amsterdam.
Assignment details:
Choose a place of interest in Seattle. If you have an Amsterdam topic in mind, try to find a place in Seattle that is relevant to your potential topic. In other words, choose a setting in Seattle that will help you understand how to approach a similar setting in Amsterdam.
This exercise builds on the assigned readings (Lynch and Rivkin, Hartmann, Hine, and Ragin). We expect that it will help you 1) sensitize yourselves to the kinds of things you can learn from an urban environment, 2) understand the ways you can approach urban places generally, and 3) give you practical experience formulating social research questions.
There are two parts to the assignment, a field research part and a research question part.
Part 1) Field research: [group exercise]
- find a partner or partners (maximum of 3 per group)
- choose a place in the city to study; a building, a public space, a neighborhood, an historical – site, a piece of public art, an institution, etc.
- explore, observe, inquire, and document (keep notes and take photographs)
Part 2) Research Question
[group exercise]
from your observations in Seattle, develop a research question or questions that can be plausibly researched in Amsterdam (think about Ragin’s discussion of ‘ideas and evidence’).
[individual part]
In your blog, identify your group members, describe the field site, use images/video if possible, and use references from the readings to support your observations.
Indicate your research question(s) and discuss possible ways that you can collect evidence that will help you answer that question. NOTE: urban space and the internet are legitimate places to look for evidence (ref the Hine chapter for online research).
Resources:
- the reading assignments
- student work from past programs
- post questions or inquire about research partners on the discussion board (a discussion has already been set for Assignment 3)
