All Advanced Method Courses will be open for registration from April 1 – 30, 2024 or when the number of registrations is full. Please click the banner below to access the registration page.
*** Please note that this registration is ONLY for Method Courses. If you are also interested in joining the conference, please do the registration at https://gcsmus.org/conferences/thailand/registration/
Grounded Theory & Situational Analysis
Prof. Dr. Jörg Strübing (University of Tübingen, Germany)
24-25 July 2024
The 2-day course aims at introducing students of different levels (see below) to the research styles of both Grounded Theory and Situational Analysis. These are intimately linked to each other both historically and methodologically. The first day of the workshop starts with an in-depth introduction into Grounded Theory, a talk that invites questions and discussions linking participants research problems to principles and methodological issues of Grounded Theory. The afternoon will be dedicated to practical exercises in open coding. The second proceeds in the same manner, only that now we concentrate on how Grounded Theory developed into Situational Analysis and what this means for practical research operations.
Maximum participants: 20
About the Trainer: Jörg Strübing is a professor of sociology based at the sociology department at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where he teaches qualitative methods and methodologies, sociology of technology and knowledge (STS), and social theories. He has published broadly about methodological issues, namely about the research style and the epistemological background of Grounded Theory and Situational Analysis. Recently he has been concerned especially with issues around validation criteria for qualitative studies. Jörg is also Vice-president of the German Sociological Association (DGS) and a former member of the German Data Forum.
Research Design
Prof. Dr. Claire Wagner (University of Pretoria, South Africa)
24 July 2024
This 1-day workshop will introduce participants to research design in a range of methodologies in the social sciences. This includes a conceptual understanding of what research design is and how it relates to research methods. In addition, you will be exposed to various research design typologies and elements of constructing a research project. The topics that will be covered are: (1) What is research design and research methods?; (2) What are some of the research design typologies and methods that can be used to collect data?; (3) How do I construct a research project?; and (4) How do I ensure that my research design is consistent, i.e. that it will meet my study’s aim and answer its research question? Some practical activities/demonstrations will give participants the opportunity to practice their skills, which may be related to their current research as scholars or post-graduate students. The course is aimed at all scholars from the social sciences and related disciplines. Basic knowledge in social science methodology and methods is needed.
Maximum participants: 20
About the Trainer: Claire Wagner (PhD) is full professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She has been teaching social research methods, with a focus on qualitative research, since obtaining her Master’s in Research Psychology in 1996. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of research methods and urban sustainability, often merging these two pursuits in interdisciplinary collaborations. She is also a board member of the Research Committee on Logic and Methodology in Sociology (RC33) and an advanced researcher at the Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (GCSMUS).
Ethnography of Urban Material Circulation
Prof. Dr.Atsuro Morita (Osaka University, Japan)
24 July 2024
How can we understand material, ecological and energy flows in urban spaces and their entanglements with everyday practice? Behind the visual façade of buildings and streets, the city is characterized by material, energy, and water flows that entangle, transform, and constrain ecological and geophysical processes and shape everyday practices.
This course introduces an ethnographic method that combines participant observation with infrastructure studies, DIY, citizen sensing, and historical mapping. The course starts with a lecture introducing the topics including actor-network take on infrastructure and urban hybrid ecologies by mentioning a design anthropological experiment that the lecturer has conducted in Kyoto, Japan. Then we do a short field trip on the Chulalongkorn University Campus to explore how traces of hydrological, ecological, and historical processes make up the place. The fieldwork also includes a brief exercise with historical maps. The afternoon sessions focus on design anthropology, an interventionist approach that collaboratively studies with people material and energy flows and infrastructures that shape everyday life in the city.
Maximum participants: 20
About the trainer: Atsuro Morita is an anthropologist working on science, technology, and the environment. He currently serves as Professor of Science, Technology, and Culture at the Human Sciences School, Osaka University, Director of Ethnography Lab, Osaka, and a Board Member of Osaka University Foresight, co. ltd. He has conducted ethnographic research on engineering, infrastructures, watershed management, and citizen activism in DIY and repair in Japan and Thailand. He also works with designers, architects, and industry to incorporate ethnography into design and architecture. Currently, he is working with activists, designers, and artists in Kyoto to explore the urban landscape as a hybrid watershed where water, ecological processes, industrial material flows, and energy intersect. In this project, he and colleagues are developing critical making, a new method of social research that combines ethnography, DIY, and prototyping.
Videography and the Analysis of Interaction
Dr. René Tuma (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)
25 July 2024
Videography is a method that combines ethnographic surveys and field research with video interaction analysis of recorded interaction and communication situations. It is based on an interpretative methodology and has strong links to the sociology of knowledge, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.
The research workshop introduces the method and aims to give participants a perspective on interaction analysis with a spatial reference. We will cover data collection and selection, analysis and practice of a sequence-analytic view. The workshop is particularly aimed at those who are in the process of collecting and analysing video recordings or who would like to attend such a session to get an impression. Basic knowledge of the qualitative research process is assumed.
The data will focus on video recordings of social situations, ideally recorded by individual participants in the field. For the data analysis session, we will select short sequences of ‘natural’ interactions from the collected data corpus, which we will use to practice analysing video data together. Due to time constraints, we will only be able to analyse material from one or two participants during the course. Participants who wish to contribute their own material to the research workshop and who have registered as active are encouraged to apply with their projects as exemplary data after the organisers have confirmed their participation.
Maximum participants: 15
About the trainer: Dr.René Tuma currently works as the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project “Visions of Policing,” funded by ORA/DFG. He is a researcher at the Department of General Sociology and the Theory of Modern Societies at the Technical University of Berlin. In the year 2020, he worked at the University of Amsterdam on the Group Violence project. He is involved in the CRC1265 at TU Berlin on the topic of control/space regarding the reconfiguration of internet infrastructure since 2022. René Tuma’s research encompasses Sociological Theory and the Sociology of Knowledge, Technology Sociology, and qualitative methods, with a specific focus on video interaction analysis.
Game:Space:Match – Games as tools for teaching, research and design in architecture and urban planning
Prof. Dr. Marta Brković Dodig (FMK, Singidunum University, Serbia, and EPFL / EMPA, Switzerland)
24-25 July 2024
In the 1960s and 1970s, Richard D. Duke and Henry A. Sanoff pioneered the use of games in participatory design, establishing them as effective tools for design, teaching/learning, and research, within architecture and urban planning arenas. Participatory design games facilitate meaningful involvement of diverse stakeholders, fostering democratic processes through structured rules, tangible pieces, and democratic premises. With many new games being constantly developed, sometimes serving even multiple purposes simultaneously, they warrant special attention in the field.
During the workshop the participants will be introduced through a lecture to the state-of-the art in the fields of architecture and urban planning. Afterwards, in the afternoon session, participants will be able to playtest one game Spector – The Sustainability Inspector using the Chulalongkorn University premises as their playground.
Maximum participants: 20
About the trainer: Dr. Ing. Arch. Marta Brkovic Dodig is assistant professor in architecture at the Faculty for Media and Communication, Singidunum University in Belgrade, founding director at the NGO ARQubator and a researcher at EMPA and EPFL Land Lab in Switzerland. She was the Alexander von Humboldt fellow during 2018-2020 at the Chair for Urban Design and Development at TU Berlin, and the Weisser Fellow in 2014 at the University of Michigan. Combining her work in the NGO sector, academia, and previously in design practices she tackled topics such as: design of schools and learning spaces, sustainable architecture, participatory planning and design, activism in architecture, built environment education for children, as well as research methods in architecture and urban planning with a focus on research by design and games. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Games in Architecture and Urban Planning.
Vital Spaces: Wellbeing, mental health and the City
Prof. Dr. Steven Brown (Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom)
25 July 2024
This course will outline the framework of ‘vital spaces’ (Brown & Reavey, 2019) as an approach to mapping and understanding how urban spaces facilitate or impede mental health and wellbeing. Building on the ideas of ‘therapeutic landscapes’ (Gesler, 1992) and ‘enabling spaces’ (Duff, 2014), the concept of vital spaces is designed to identify the relation between the ‘feelings of being alive’ and the environments through which these feelings are experienced and mobilized. The workshop will describe the theoretical background to this approach, including ideas of ‘life space’, ‘vitality’ and ‘assemblage’. It will then work through a series of methodological principles designed to inform ethnographic and other qualitative investigations of urban space. Finally, it will discuss potential applications to design.
Maximum participants: 20
About the trainer: Steven D. Brown is Professor of Health and Organizational Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. His research interests are around service user experiences of inpatient mental healthcare, social remembering amongst vulnerable groups and wellbeing in the workplace. He is author of Vital Memory & Affect: Living with a difficult past (2015, Routledge, with Paula Reavey).