Project seminar "Empirical research in Social science"

Since the end of September, within the framework of the master's program “Politics. Economics. Philosophy” of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, we launched a project seminar, conducted by the staff of the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies (IIMS) and the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (ICSID). The peculiarity of this course is that the subject of each seminar is associated with one of the projects of the Institute implemented during the current year. Anton Kazun, Yuliya Rodionova, as well as postdocs Amanda Zadorian and Milos Resimic organize the joint course.

“Project seminars pursue one simple goal - to improve students' ability to apply the acquired knowledge in practice,” says the head of the master's program “Politics. Economics. Philosophy" Oleg Ananyin. “The point is that students, having united in small groups, independently, but under the supervision of a teacher, go through the entire cycle of work on a specific project from concept to implementation.”

For several years of the existence of the course and after processing of the previous students’ experience, the idea arose to organize the project seminars together with existing research units, and even better, by involving the students into subprojects within the framework of real research, expert or other projects.

The seminar will focus on four main areas: rule of law and legal mobilization, public procurement, financialization in emerging markets, approaches and analysis of the concept of “state capture”. During the first seminars, students select and analyze literature, get acquainted with the process of collecting and analyzing data, develop the necessary competencies. At the next stage, students work independently, formulate a research problem and its technical solution. Moreover, during this work, each step is discussed with the selected mentor, and the process is finalized by the presentation of the results.

The seminar consists of two modules and will finish by the end of December 2020.