Meet the Methods School's 2024 Instructors

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. 

Erik P. Bucy is Regents Professor of Strategic Communication at Texas Tech University, where he teaches and conducts research on visual politics, nonverbal communication, and public opinion about the press.

He is the co-author of Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (with Maria Elizabeth Grabe) and is widely known for his studies on the influence of visuals in news and politics.

@erikpbucy

Bruno Cautrès is attached to CEVIPOF – Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (Paris), at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris.

He is a senior CNRS research fellow with interests in voting behaviour, political attitudes and behaviours, comparative survey research and quantitative techniques.

Bruno is involved in a variety of projects, including the European Social Survey, European Values Studies, International Social Survey Programme and European elections studies; and he participates in the development of elections studies in France. His current research programme concerns political trust and attitudes to democracy in France.

@BCautres

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

Jo Howard is a Research Fellow and Leader of the Participation, Inclusion and Social Change Cluster at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She also co-convenes the Master’s programme in Participation, Power and Social Change.

Jo's work is focused on participatory and action research processes with people living in poverty and marginalisation. Additionally, Jo designs, delivers and advises on training and learning processes in Participatory Research and reflective and collaborative learning.

@johoward_ch

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

Alice Mattoni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. Previously she was an Assistant Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the European University Institute, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute.

For the past 10 years, she has taught qualitative research design and qualitative methods to MA and PhD students, including courses, workshops and lectures on constructivist grounded theory and computer-assisted qualitative data analysis at the European University Institute, the Scuola Normale Superiore, the Leibniz Institute for Global and Regional Studies in Hamburg, the University of Padova and the University of Bologna.

She has extensive experience in using qualitative methods to conduct empirical research on grassroots political participation and its interaction with digital technologies and media, also in the context of cross-national comparative research designs. She is currently Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded research project BIT-ACT, which uses constructivist grounded theory to investigate the role of digital media in grassroots anti-corruption initiatives in 9 countries around the world and at the transnational level.

She has published widely in international journals, including European Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Information, Communication and Society, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, and Visual Studies.

She is the author of Activists in the Data Stream. The Practices of Daily Grassroots Politics in Southern Europe (in press, Bristol University Press), with Diego Ceccobelli, and Media Practices and Protest Politics. How Precarious Workers Mobilise (Routledge 2016). She is the editor of Digital Media and Grassroots Struggles Against Corruption. Contexts, Platforms and Data of Anti-Corruption Technologies Across the World (in press, Edward Elgar Publishing), Mediation and Protest Movements (Intellect 2013), with Bart Cammaerts and Patrick McCurdy, and Spreading Protest. Social Movements in Times of Crisis (ECPR Press 2014), with Donatella della Porta.

For additional information, please visit this link.

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.