GPEP-Qualitative Methods

blurry people walking through an intersection during the day in a big city

The transformational nature of today’s politics demand multiple methods, including qualitative methods, to better understand the complex interactions of social, political, and economic forces. Our goals for GPEP-Q are twofold: first, to give graduate students access to senior scholars with experience and expertise using the tools of qualitative inquiry, and second, to establish a network of scholars advancing qualitative research in the field of political economy. We aim to help students approach and present qualitative research in a rigorous, generalizable, and parsimonious manner for triangulating evidence, studying both ongoing and rare events, illustrating complex causal processes, and identifying new research questions.

In April and May 2021, the Global Political Economy Project (GPEP) hosted a graduate student workshop on qualitative research in political economy. Over three weeks, our invited doctoral students participated in master classes, break-out sessions, and individual one-on-one meetings with leading scholars of comparative and international political economy, including Layna Mosley (Princeton University), James Ashley Morrison (LSE), and Jacqueline Best (University of Ottawa). Our last meeting was open to the broader GPEP community, focusing on how to publish qualitative work successfully, whether based on interviews, focus groups, ethnography, archival and historical approaches, or process tracing. This experience should help upgrade the next generation’s scholarship to better understand the workings of the global political economy.

Watch the recording of the GPEP Qualitative Methods Publishing Roundtable here.

 

Faculty Mentors

Jacqueline Best

Faculty Mentor

Layna Mosley

Faculty Mentor

James Ashley Morrison

Faculty Mentor

Participants

Aditi Sahasrabuddhe

GPEP Fellow (2020-2021)

Nicholas J. Bell

GPEP Fellow (2020-2021)

Siyao Li

GPEP Fellow (2020-2021)

Adam Parker

Columbia University

Alisson Rowland

University of California, Irvine

Claire Ma

University of Pennsylvania

David Talbot

University of Cambridge

Gloria Xiong

GPEP Fellow (2023–2024)

Kennedy Mbeva

University of Melbourne

Oren Samet

University of California, Berkeley

Robert Shaver

New School for Social Research

Signe Predmore

University of Massachusetts Amherst