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Monday 1 – Friday 5 August 2022
2 hours of live teaching per day
15:00 – 17:00 CEST
This seminar-type course provides a highly interactive online teaching and learning environment, using state of the art online pedagogical tools. It is designed for a demanding audience (researchers, professional analysts, advanced students) and capped at a maximum of 12 participants so that the Instructor can cater to the specific needs of each individual.
Concepts are foundational to the social-science enterprise. This course introduces you to two distinct ways to think about and work with them.
One is the positivist approach to what is called concept 'formation' or 'reconstruction' – the formulation of a technical, neutral vocabulary for measuring, comparing, and generalising.
The other is an interpretivist approach that focuses on what I call 'elucidation.' Elucidation illuminates the worldviews of the people whom social scientists wish to understand, and the ways in which social scientists’ embeddedness in particular languages, historical eras, and power structures shapes the concepts with which they do their work.
3 credits Engage fully with class activities
4 credits Complete a post-class assignment
Frederic Schaffer is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches comparative politics. His methodological area of expertise is the investigation of concepts. Substantively, he studies the meaning of democracy, the practice of voting, and the administration of elections.
What sets much of his work apart from other empirical research on democracy is his methodological focus on language. By carefully examining the differing ways in which ordinary people around the world use terms such as 'democracy', 'politics', and 'vote buying' – or their rough equivalents in other languages – he aims to arrive at a fuller appreciation of how they understand and make use of electoral institutions.
He is the current chair of Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and past chair of the Committee on Concepts and Methods of the International Political Science Association
Frederic is a board member of the Committee on Concepts and Methods of the International Political Science Association. He is also an executive board member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association.
Among his publications are:
This course will teach you about the presuppositions, aims, and tools of positivist reconstruction and interpretivist elucidation.
With regard to reconstruction, you will learn how to how to construct concepts by defining and organising properties; how to situate the concept on a ladder of generality; how to build more complex ladders of generality that include diminished subtypes; and how to assess the goodness of a concept using the criteria of external differentiation, internal coherence, explanatory utility, and content validity.
With regard to elucidation, you will learn basic elucidative strategies derived from ordinary language philosophy and Foucauldian genealogy and how to assess the goodness of social-science concepts by recognising problems of one-sidedness, universalism, and objectivism.
This course takes advantage of the flexibility afforded by online teaching to offer a rich, multi-modal learning experience that includes:
During the week, you should expect to spend roughly four hours each day on homework (readings, watching videos, completing exercises) in addition to the two-hour live class sessions.
A concept or two
You will need to identify one or two concepts relevant to your own research interests. You'll be working with these concepts during several hands-on exercises.
Hardware, software and database requirements
None
Each course includes pre-course assignments, including readings and pre-recorded videos, as well as daily live lectures totalling at least two hours. The instructor will conduct live Q&A sessions and offer designated office hours for one-to-one consultations.
Please check your course format before registering.
Live classes will be held daily for two hours on a video meeting platform, allowing you to interact with both the instructor and other participants in real-time. To avoid online fatigue, the course employs a pedagogy that includes small-group work, short and focused tasks, as well as troubleshooting exercises that utilise a variety of online applications to facilitate collaboration and engagement with the course content.
In-person courses will consist of daily three-hour classroom sessions, featuring a range of interactive in-class activities including short lectures, peer feedback, group exercises, and presentations.
This course description may be subject to subsequent adaptations (e.g. taking into account new developments in the field, participant demands, group size, etc.). Registered participants will be informed at the time of change.
By registering for this course, you confirm that you possess the knowledge required to follow it. The instructor will not teach these prerequisite items. If in doubt, please contact us before registering.