Course Details

The objective of this seminar is to introduce students to the city of
Amsterdam as an object of study and to develop interdisciplinary
research designs that enable students to collaborate in small group
research projects.

Students will choose topics and work in groups of 2 to 3 students.
There are a couple of ways this can work. You can work together to
identify a single research question. In this case the work would be
divided up among the group participants. Alternatively, a group can
be formed around a particular topical domain. In this case each group
member would develop an individual research topic within the larger
domain. In both cases, students will work together, collaboratively,
both in Seattle and in Amsterdam.

Throughout the seminar you will be introduced to a number of research
methods intended to provide a practical means of conducting research.
E-Research practices will augment these methods and will be
incorporated into your research designs. Data collection and analysis
techniques will include still image photography, sound and voice
recordings, short video clips, and the use of geo-location tagging
(eg. Google Earth and Geographical Information Systems software.)
Each student will start a blog to use as a lab notebook to publish
research progress as well as a kind of travel journal while in
Amsterdam. We will experiment with video pod-casting as the end
product of your research.

We will look critically at our assumptions about knowledge. This
means being reflexive about how we collect data, the methods we use,
and how our assumptions about reality influence research designs.
International research is an interesting way to do this because many
of our assumptions, particularly the unconscious ones, are put into
relief as a result of being outside of our cultural context. Our use
of e-Research collaborative practices makes this reflexivity all the
more salient.

http://depts.washington.edu/uwhonors/international/amsterdam.htm