Información del curso

The Critical Methodologies PhD course is an initiative of the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN), in collaboration with Paris Nanterre University and Jaume I University, Spain.

The course offers innovative critical methodological perspectives on doing research through interdisciplinary lenses. We will visit key research methodologies on the entanglements of the social, the spatial, the cultural, and the political as we explore some of the limitations of current practices in academia.

Drawing on critical, decolonial, and participatory perspectives, the course will discuss methods in practice in connection with decolonising research and endeavours to think otherwise. Tailored to students' own research interests, the course will address cross-disciplinary approaches such as visual, participatory, multisensory, decolonial, feminist, and Indigenous methodologies, and intersectional, musical, post-structural, and critical discourse analysis. 
Critical methodologies engage and problematize global approaches in social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies in dialogue with perspectives from the margins on research practice across disciplines and in cross-cultural contexts with regional and local cases in the global South and beyond. The course provides insights from research in interdisciplinary environments such as studies of urban space, critical heritage, migration, human rights, religion, music, and diversities. 
The course provides PhD students with new insights into critical methodologies aiming for dialogue across structural, physical, and disciplinary boundaries challenging binary thinking by learning and unlearning and thinking otherwise. Southern and decolonial perspectives imply a dialogue and critical interrogation of the politics of knowledge and research methodologies in various contexts across the world. We reflect critically on the politics and ethics of knowledge, research design and impact, inequalities, power relations, coloniality, intersectionality, positionality, reflexivity, and the unforeseen and failure in doing research.  
The course is blended. It begins with digital lectures and seminars introducing the main research approaches in the field. In introductory seminars, PhD candidates work on their research projects with fellow students and academic staff. This is followed by an intensive five-day in-person week of lectures, seminars, and multisensory workshops at the University of South-Eastern Norway providing empirical research experiences in the field. Students will have the opportunity to present their own research in seminars, relating the research perspectives introduced in the course to their own research topics. The course will include participatory, decolonial, and multisensory workshops.