Month: August 2017

Conference presentations this week

We’re having a busy time presenting our work at conferences this week. Anu and Jessie are presenting a paper on the construction of students in English newspapers and policy documents, as well as by students themselves, at the European Sociological Association in Athens. (The abstract of their paper can be found here.) Predrag is also presenting at the ESA – on the construction of students in university websites across Europe. (His abstract is here.)

Rachel has organised a two-part symposium (on spatial variations in the construction of higher education students) at the Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference – to be held on Friday. As part of this, she’ll be giving a paper on her analysis of English policy documents. More details about the symposium can be found here.

At the start of the week, Predrag was at the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers’ annual conference at Jyväskylä in Finland – again talking about his analysis of university websites across Europe.

Using creative and visual methods in comparative research: a one-day seminar

We’re delighted to announce that we have received funding from the International Journal of Social Research Methodology to run a one-day seminar on the use of creative and visual methods in comparative research during the 2017-18 academic year.

Increasing use is made of both creative and visual methods in social research. Nevertheless, to date there has been very little discussion of the extent to which such methods can be used in comparative research. Our seminar will explore some of the challenges of using these methods cross-nationally, examining the different cultural associations that may be brought to bear in different national contexts, and how these are accounted for in research design, data collection and analysis. It will also draw on the experiences of researchers working in this area, to explore how such challenges can most effectively be addressed.

We’ll be issuing a call for papers later in the year, and more details will appear on this website.