Research Strategies, theoretical and rhetorical of humanities and social sciences (Introductory seminar) 3700-AL-PSEML1

This preparatory seminar will be an introduction to the students’ own research and to participation in the system of scientific communication in the humanities and social sciences.

First, the course will discuss the main features distinguishing the humanities and social sciences, their common and different characteristics, on examples of selected areas and fields of research.

The key issues covered by the course will include, firstly, ways of defining fields of research, ways of putting forward a research problem, research methodologies and the main theoretical paradigms in the humanities and social sciences. The next major group of issues will be related to strategies of conducting empirical research and verifying research hypotheses. Finally, the next element of the seminar will be issues of scientific communication, including the language of scientific works, their styles and genres, the rhetoric and structure of a scientific work, and the formal aspect of scientific texts, i.e. editing, layout and references.

Another important element of the seminar will be the matter of seeking sources of inspiration for scientific research and writing. We will consider the problem of intuition, rational methods of building research hypotheses and other ways of arriving at key research questions and choosing research problems. One important aspect will be the extent to which sources of inspiration may and should be sought within the existing scientific literature, and to what extent – in the social world being researched. This is linked to another major dilemma, i.e. how strongly scientific research and works should be targeted at an inside, academic audience, and to what extent they should be addressed to the broader, non-academic public.

It will be an important part of the seminar work to develop a strategy for dealing with the challenges of today’s information environment, its special feature being an excess of information and sources of knowledge around us. The course will be devoted to developing a strategy for selecting sources of knowledge and defending oneself against a flood of texts and materials that appear to be important but in fact are irrelevant. Therefore we will consider ways of identifying the key forums of scientific and intellectual debate in individual disciplines, key authors and their most important statements. These issues are linked to the question of strategies of one’s own scientific activity, especially the choice of where to position scientific publications and presentations, the problem of meeting the requirements of publishers, editors, and also organizers of conferences and other forums of scientific discussion.

This will lead us to the matter of styles, rules and forms of conducting scientific debates, and polemics in particular. An in-depth analysis of selected scientific disputes will enable us to trace the dynamic of the development of scientific thought in selected fields and the development of the rules of scientific cognition.