Chapter 8 Projects

Introduction

Project work is a core element of the course, but it is not part of your formal assessment. Individual tasks are designed to quickly deliver research skills necessary at graduate level. The group project is designed to get you used to performing research as a team. For this reason, don’t be intimidated by the scale of the output required in group projects - it is calibrated to be too much for an individual, but easily manageable for a small group.

8.1 The Projects

  • Book Reading
    • Deadline: By the seminar in week 2
  • Research Design Prototyping Project
    • Deadline: February 4th, 2022

Aims

Why do this? There are four reasons that I have included this activity in the course (and like activities in other courses that I convene). First, people come to KCL from a wide variety of backgrounds, with differing expectations and understandings of graduate study - these activities allow me to establish a baseline and explain the expectations. Second is that group projects enables you to practice and develop teamworking skills. Third, the research design prototype allows Dr McDonald to give feedback that enables all participants to calibrate their expectations about the major assessment in the course. Lastly, this activity is intended to get you to think about the possibilities inherent in open and collaborative research efforts.

8.2 Book Reading

The book reading project is a task that is designed for you to fail. It’s okay - everyone will fail and that is the point. The idea for this project is to get an understanding of the possibilities and limits of processing books as sources of information. We’re going to be working through a method called the Sandage method of reading books, and tracking ourselves as we go. The Sandage (or X-Ray) method is an efficient way of mining academic books for information.24 It is as much about inverting the way you read a book as it is about extracting information from a book itself.

The key thing to remember is that, again, there is no wrong answer. That is, the point of the exercise is to try your hand at a method of extracting information from a book, not getting the right answer.

We’re going to read David Armitage’s Civil Wars, and we’re going to read it in a very particular way, and the output is tracking yourself as you read. At each stage in the process, I want you to write down 1-2 sentence answers to two questions:

  • What is this book about?
  • What is the author’s argument?

This task will take 3 hours from start to finish (in fact, that’s an order: don’t go over 3 hours in this task). The early stages will be very short, the last couple will take most of your time.

Stages:

  1. Read the book’s title and subtitle, then note down your answers (best guess is better than “I don’t know”, but “I don’t know” is fine if you really have no clue)
  2. Read the table of contents, then answer the questions again
  3. Read the book’s index, then answer the questions (don’t spend more than 15 minutes on this stage)
  4. Compare what you have read in the index to the table of contents, then answer the questions
  5. Skim through the footnotes/endnotes of the book, then answer the questions (this is where you can take a while)
  6. Read the acknowledgements section, then answer the questions
  7. Read chapter 1, then answer the questions
  8. If you still have time, read as much as you can read until the three hour mark, then answer the questions

You should have 7 or 8 pairs of answers. Read through the progression of your answers, and try to identify when and how your answers changed as you read through the book. In the lecture we will discuss this progression as a group discussion activity.

8.3 Research Design Prototype

The group project feeds directly into the final research assessment. This project requires you to read and consider the readings for week 16 of the course, and then to discuss it with your group so as to produce a short prototype of a research project.

The idea for the discussion, which can be synchronous or asynchronous depending upon your group’s preferences is to sketch out a skeleton of a research project. That is, imagine this as the first draft of a research project where you bounce some ideas around and come up with an idea that is interesting and coherent. This task isn’t meant to require you to do any independent research, instead approach it as a way of discussing the previous lecture material and course topics and thinking through how to create a research essay.

The theme for this year’s prototypes is “Dirty Wars in the Contemporary World” - You are free to draw from any of the themes of the main lecture series, so long as the problem is a contemporary one (last ten years).

Your prototype should identify:

  • A research problem
  • The importance of the research problem (academic/policy/both)
  • A relevant theoretical disagreement
  • A research puzzle
  • A research question
  • Research methods
  • 1-2 candidate case studies

There is a word document on KEATS which you should use as your group’s template which contains detailed instructions for each step. Please send in your completed word document by the 18th of January at the latest.

During the workshop I’ll be giving feedback on these prototypes, and we will discuss the process of research design so as to identify common problems.