Glasgow Multi-Methods Workshop – October 3-5, 2018

BEAR 2018 Multi-Method Workshop
University of Glasgow
October 3-5, 2018

This three days workshop was designed to help (post)graduate students acquire advanced methodological and pedagogical skills that will be instrumental not only for their theses but also for their broader training as scholars and teachers.

The workshop schedule

Day 1, October 3 – Samuel Greene and Graeme Robertson: Protest Event Analysis (PEA) workshop
To understand how diverse societal groups navigate between the EU and Russia, between varied economic and political integration projects, and between different values, ideas, and visions of society, the BEAR Network researchers largely focus on collective action and contestation as an alternative way to deliver a message to decision-makers. This second part of the workshop concentrates on PEA methods that allow us to map, analyze, and interpret the occurrence of protests by means of content analysis of secondary sources such as newspapers.

Day 2, October 4 – Philip Leifeld: Social Network Analysis (SNA) workshop
To understand the political and socio-economic transformations in the contact zone between the EU and Russia, the BEAR Network focuses on interactions between regional, state, and society actors. Because social contexts of any action, decision, or change matter, we need to acquire methods and instruments for measuring social relationships linking actors and objects. This part of the workshop concentrates on SNA methods that gained much in popularity since the late 1990s.

Day 3, October 5 – Adrian Florea: Simulations workshop
Our BEAR Network academic participants work on and teach courses related to EU-Russia relations, broadly understood. Simulation games largely proved to be an excellent pedagogical tool in classes. Students acquire team-building skills together with policy analysis and debating abilities. They also learn about the structure and the issues at stake within the organizations they are simulating. This last day of the workshop is designed for the BEAR participants as teachers in order to develop this pedagogical tool in relation to the EU and the Eurasian organizations (such as the European Parliament or the Eurasian Union).

The detailed program is available here.