Meet the Instructors: 2024 Methods School winter programme

Molly Andrews is an Honorary Professor of Political Psychology at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and co-director of the Association of Narrative Research and Practice (formerly the Centre for Narrative Research). She is currently a Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and in 2019–2020, was the Jane and Aatos Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Her monographs are Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology and Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (both Cambridge University Press), and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press). She has co-edited Lines of Narrative (2000 Routledge Taylor & Francis), Considering Counter Narrative (2004 John Benjamins), Doing Narrative Research 2008/2013 Sage), What is Narrative Research (2014 Bloomsbury) and Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History (2016 Routledge).

Molly serves on the Editorial Board of five journals which are published in four countries. Her publications have appeared in Chinese, German, Swedish, Spanish, French, Czech, German, Norwegian and Finnish. 

Silvia Fierăscu holds a PhD in Comparative Politics and Network Science from Central European University.

Her research focuses primarily on quality of governance, political-business relations, and statistical analyses of network data.

Silvia is involved in various interdisciplinary projects, translating complex problems into real-time applications for organisational management, political communication, and better governance.

@silviafierascu

Zachary Greene is a Reader at the University of Strathclyde. His research interests include quantitative text analysis and machine learning approaches to studying political parties, parliaments and elections.

His work has been published in journals including, the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of European Public Policy, Party Politics and Electoral Studies. You can find more information on Dr Greene’s research, teaching and ongoing projects at zacgreene.com.

@zacdgreene

Daniel Kovarek is a postdoctoral research fellow at the European University Institute. He studies political behaviour at the voter and the elite level; his expertise lies in the intersection of political geography and distributive politics. Within the context of the ERC SOLID project, he looks at how crises affect European integration using a variety of quantitative models. Daniel has been teaching a wide variety of graduate-level courses on applied statistics, research design and programming at Central European University and colleges of Corvinus University of Budapest. His research has appeared in Research & Politics, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Environmental Politics, among others.

@kovarekd

Seweryn Krupnik is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology of Economy, Education and Methods of Social Research, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. In 2015-2018, head of the Center for Evaluation and Analysis of Public Policies at Jagiellonian University. Currently a Senior Researcher in this unit. A specialist in the field of evaluation research methodology. His research has appeared in leading evaluation and energy policy journals including Evaluation: The International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice and Energy Research & Social Science.

Seweryn has broad experience in policy and business consultancy, including skills development programmes. He provided training on Qualitative Comparative Analysis to both academic and non-academic audiences.

Since 2020 Michał has held the Chair in Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Michał is a leading expert in critical discourse studies. His key areas of interest are political, policy and organisational communication as well as media and journalism. He is particularly known for his work on right-wing populism, anti-immigration rhetoric as well as for his research on neoliberal discourses and dynamics of democracy in the context of socio-political transformations.

Michał is also widely recognised for his work on methodological innovations in qualitative research, including discourse-ethnographic analysis of organisational and journalistic practices or discourse-conceptual analysis of dynamics of policy and political discourse.

Read Michał's full biography on the Uppsala University website.

@mwkrzyzanowski

Andrew is an assistant professor at CEU's Department of International Relations. He obtained his PhD from the National University of Singapore and King’s College London.

His research interests include international political economy, research design, and quantitative methods. He teaches the Research Design and Methods in IR course series at CEU.

@lixiang577

Bojana Lobe is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, where she teaches various methods courses, including Social Science Data Collection and Digital Technologies.

Her research interests include online qualitative research methods, integration of qualitative and quantitative methods online, qualitative comparative analysis, and researching children’s experiences online with mixed methods.

She is the author of the book Integration of Online Research Methods and of several chapters and articles on conducting online focus groups and interviews. She is a member of the research programme Social Science Methodology, Statistics and Informatics at the University of Ljubljana.

Since 2006, Bojana has been actively involved in researching the experiences of children and young people with internet and digital technologies through various projects:

• EU Kids Online
• Mladi na netu
• Small children (0-8) and digital technologies
• COST Action The Digital Literacy and Multimodal Practices of Young Children (DigiLitEY)
• Kids’ Digital lives in Corona times (KiDiCoTi), a comparative mixed-methods study on digital practices, safety and well-being

Karen Lumsden is a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. 

She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Aberdeen and has held a number of academic posts including Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, Associate Professor at the University of Leicester, and Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University.

She has over 15 years’ experience teaching qualitative research methods to doctoral students, academics, practitioners and social researchers. This includes courses at the Universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow, Essex, Kingston, Bristol, Cardiff, Kings College London, Bournemouth, and for the Social Research Association.

Karen has also designed and delivered research methods training for police officers and staff via the East Midlands Policing Academic Collaboration (EMPAC) and for research consultancies. She has written books, edited collections, and journal articles on qualitative research methods and is currently on the Editorial Board of the Qualitative Research journal. Her research expertise is in areas including policing, victims and cyber-crime.

For more information visit: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/socsci/people/profiles/karen.lumsden

Akos Mate is a research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences in Hungary. His key research area is the political economy of the European Union and its members’ fiscal governance.

He uses a wide variety of methods in his research, particularly automated text analysis (and attached various machine learning approaches), network analysis and more traditional econometric techniques.

@aakos_m

Cecil Meeusen is an assistant professor in Social Data Science at the Center for Sociological Research (KU Leuven) where she teaches courses on data-analysis and big data with a specific focus on applications in the field of social science. She conducts research in the field of political sociology and intergroup relations.

Bart Meuleman is a Full Professor at the Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven (Belgium).

His research focuses on cultural and socio-economic conflict lines in increasingly diverse societies. He has studied the structure and roots of intergroup attitudes, and ethnic threat perceptions and prejudices, from a majority and a minority perspective. He is particularly interested in how increasing migration movements and ethnic diversity affect preferences for welfare redistribution and social justice.

Bart's methodological research interests include comparative survey analysis, attitude measurement, structural equation modelling and multilevel models.

Bart is the National Coordinator of ESS Belgium, co-supervisor of the Belgian National Elections Study and the Belgian Ethnic Minority Elections Study 2014 and 2019, and a member of the Methodology Group of the European Values Study.

@meuleb

Marie Østergaard Møller is Associate Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark.

Her research interests include social and political categories, categorisation, frontline work, welfare state research, classic social theory of solidarity, and systematic qualitative methods.

Read more about Marie here.

@MarieOeMoeller

Marie-Hélène teaches qualitative research methods at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and is a freelance methodologist in qualitative data analysis. She was educated in Quebec, Beirut and Oxford where she read social work. A clinician by training, she worked as a mental health officer in humanitarian missions for MSF, MDM and UNWRA in psychosocial aid programs for survivors of war trauma in East Africa and the Middle East. Her clinical work led her to research the harm that INGOs can do in the name of doing good when imposing Western paradigms in culturally and politically different contexts.

Marie-Hélène is an NVivo Certified Platinum Trainer and is a member of the NVivo Core Trainer Team who teaches the NVivo online courses. She is a sought-after methodologist who has taught qualitative data analysis in more than sixty universities and research centres worldwide, in countries including Qatar and Iran. Since 2009, Marie-Hélène has taught the introductory and advanced courses in qualitative data analysis at the ECPR Methods School and teaches similar courses at the IPSA-NUS Summer School in Singapore. Her methodological interests range from advances in qualitative data analysis, qualitative evidence synthesis, decolonising epistemology and participatory methodologies. 

Read more about Marie-Hélène.

@TheQualAnalyst

Julia Partheymüller is a Senior Scientist at the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. 

Julia possesses extensive experience in survey design, being an integral member of the team of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). She has contributed to various other projects involving large-scale survey data collection, including the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP), Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and Rule of Law (RECONNECT), and the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES).

Her research focuses on the nature and origins of public perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours, with a strong emphasis on quantitative methods. She is particularly interested in refining measurement techniques and leveraging the potential of longitudinal and experimental survey designs to enhance causal inference.

Read more about Julia.

@schnizzl

Thomas Robinson is a methodologist and political scientist, whose research focuses on the application of machine learning (ML) methods within experimental research.

His current projects include using deep learning to create synthetic data, using ML to understand how individuals around the world assess government performance, and assessing voters' ability to identify corrupt candidates in elections.

Tom is an Assistant Professor in the Methodology Department at LSE, and obtained his doctorate in Politics from the University of Oxford.

Chiara Ruffa is a full professor in political science (specializing in International Relations) at the Centre for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po. Before moving to Paris, she was an associate professor at the Swedish Defence University and an academy fellow at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University.

Her research is about multilateralism on the ground, peacekeeping operations, norms, cultures and civil-military relations. In particular, her research agenda revolves around multilateral governance and management of peace and security across different regions. Her two main areas of expertise are (1) multilateralism on the ground, multinational governance and management of peace and security (UN peacekeeping, dynamics of transformations of multinational interventions with increased participation of non-Western contributors, and search and rescue missions at sea in particular) and (2) civil–military relations and the transformation of the state. She has written about methods, in particular about case studies, reflexivity and what causality means in qualitative research.

Her work has been published in the European Journal of International Relations, European Political Science Review, Security Studies, Acta Sociologica, International Peacekeeping, Armed Forces and Society, Security and Defence Analysis, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Comparative European Politics, and several edited volumes. She is the author of Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations, published with the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018 and of Composing Peace. Mission Composition in UN Peacekeeping with Vincenzo Bove and Andrea Ruggeri, Oxford University Press, April 2019. She is an editorial board member of Security Studies and Armed Forces and Society.

Alberto Stefanelli is a FWO PhD Fellow at the Institute for Social and Political Opinion Research at KU Leuven and a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Political Science at Yale University and at the Department of Sociology at New York University

His research interests include radicalism, voting behaviour, democratic erosion, and political methodology.

Methods-wise, he is particularly interested in graphical causal models, standardisation techniques and matching algorithms, text analysis, experimental and semi-experimental design, and machine and deep learning.

@sergsagara

Vicente Valentim is Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

He earned his PhD from the European University Institute in 2021. Vicente studies how democracies generate norms against behaviour associated with authoritarianism, how those norms are sustained, and how they erode. He also has a keen interest in political methodology–especially causal inference methods.

Vicente’s work has been published or accepted in journals like the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, or Comparative Political Studies. It has been awarded the GESIS Klingemann Prize for best CSES Scholarship and the EUI Linz-Rokkan Prize for best thesis in Political Sociology. Read more about Vicente and his work.

@ValentimVicente

Annemarie Walter is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. She obtained her PhD in political science from the University of Amsterdam.

Her research interests are parties’ campaign strategies, elite (moral) decision-making, misperceptions and conspiracy beliefs and voters’ responses to politicians’ transgressions. Her work has been published in international journals such as Political Communication, Political Behaviour and Political Psychology. Her most recent book is an edited volume entitled Political Incivility in the Parliamentary, Electoral and Media Arena: Crossing Boundaries.

Her research is based on data collected by conducting survey questionnaires, online survey-embedded experiments, content analysis, (elite) interviews and archival research. She has ample experience interviewing campaign managers, politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists.

Wouter Wolfs is a Lecturer and Senior Researcher at the Public Governance Institute of the KU Leuven. His research is focused on EU politics, political finance, the organisation of political parties and parliaments, and legislative capacity-building. He is an experienced tutor and has applied a process tracing methodology multiple times in his own research.