Summer School Free Midday Sessions

Scientific Cooperation and Strategic Networking

Instructor: Bruna Távora
Description: Transnational cooperation lies at the very heart of scientific advancement. Funding bodies increasingly prioritize and actively support collaborative research across regions, recognizing its critical role in producing innovative and impactful knowledge. However, building such meaningful connections, particularly among early-career scholars, requires time, trust, and carefully facilitated exchange. This session is designed as a strategic starting point for the development of future transnational collaborations. It will create a structured space to explore how common and distinct interests in methods, topics, and geographical focus can be transformed into concrete opportunities for cooperation. Through participatory and focused interactions, participants will be encouraged to envision and actively shape potential future collaborations, both in the short and long term, ranging from joint publications to the development of long-term international research collaborations, networks, and institutional partnerships. 

How to Think about Sciences: An Introduction to Philosophy of Science.

Instructor: Maria Elisabeth Kronfeldner
Description: This four-day intensive taster explores the epistemic and social functions of science. Participants will engage with core methodological styles of reasoning, the demarcation between science and pseudo-science, and the role of social values in research.

Format: Mini-lectures, group exercises, and “performative re-enactments” of scientific reasoning.

Key Questions: How do we distinguish falsification from confirmation? Is science inherently political?

Creative Methods in Qualitative Research: Participatory Documentary and Listening Practices

Instructor: Sophie Raehme
Description: This 45-minute lunchtime taster session introduces arts-based methods in qualitative social science. Focusing on participatory documentary making and listening practices, the session explores how creative approaches can support collaborative and co-creative forms of data generation, as well as reflexive and relational engagement in fieldwork. A short experiential exercise and brief audiovisual example will provide hands-on insight and is followed by time for discussion and questions.

Writing Up the Methods Section of Your Reports and Articles: Tricks of the Trade

Instructor: Benoît Rihoux and Anka Kekez
Description: How do you write up the methods section of your research when preparing a report or manuscript? What key elements of the research and data cycle should be reported, and how? How can you do this effectively when working within the word limits and space constraints of a manuscript submitted to a journal? In this session, we will share good practices and practical “tricks of the trade” for structuring and presenting methods sections. We will also connect these recommendations to broader principles of academic writing and reporting.

Qualitative Data Analysis with MAXQDA

Instructor: Tamara Pataki
Description: MAXQDA is a powerful toolkit for qualitative and mixed-methods data analysis, offering a wide range of features to support your research process—from manual coding and memoing to word-based searches, auto-coding, and AI-powered analysis. This session showcases an exemplary research workflow using MAXQDA, focusing on how its core features can enhance the analysis of qualitative and mixed-methods datasets