Research Design and Grant Writing

Catalog description

This seminar for advanced graduate students considers strategies for designing and conducting theoretically driven research in anthropology, and it considers the principal characteristics of major paradigms and theoretical perspectives that shape anthropology in its contemporary forms. Designing research plans and making linkages between theory, strategies of inquiry, specific methodologies, and empirical datasets is both challenging and rewarding, and research design can take considerable amounts of time and effort. Crafting research proposals can also be both challenging and rewarding, especially given the need to communicate research plans to specialists in particular disciplines and proposal reviewers from fields of study and practice other than our own. Each student in this course will develop theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that form the basis for the research she or he plans to conduct as a dissertation project. Each student will write a draft a proposal for dissertation research. Some discussion throughout the course will be devoted to professional development and to specific funding programs that support doctoral and postdoctoral research in anthropology and related fields of study.