Teaching
Since February 2024, I am a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in Political Science at the University of Cologne WiSo Faculty. In this capacity, I teach two courses per semester, detailed below.
Reproductive Justice
MA Seminar, Summer Semester 2024
This special topics seminar offers an introduction to the politics of reproduction and sexuality. We will cover a variety of topics in reproductive health from a political and social view, going beyond simply what should be legal or possible under various laws and treaties to explore what patients and advocates actually experience. We will consider who has access to reproductive healthcare and under what conditions, building on the perspective of “reproductive rights” into the more expansive “reproductive justice” framework pioneered by multiply-marginalized Black women whose perspectives were not represented by the mainstream (often white) feminist movements. This course will take a comparative politics perspective rather than being anchored in one specific geography.
Accordingly, the course will be structured along the three principles of reproductive justice: 1.) the right not to have a child, 2.) the right to have a child, and 3.) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments. This will take us through a variety of topics in reproductive politics such as contraception, abortion, social support for pregnant people and new parents, and parental leave policies. The reproductive justice structure will also draw the connections between these more obvious reproductive topics and other policy areas, such as climate, policing, and children’s health and safety as components of parenting children in safe and healthy environments.
Introduction to Qualitative Methods
MA Lecture, Summer Semester 2024, coordinated with labs taught by Friedrich (Kersting) Haas
This course is intended to be a practical guide for how to do social science research at the Masters level using qualitative methods, complementing other courses offered on quantitative methods and general research design and research logic. We begin by understanding what qualitative research is, and why you might choose to use qualitative methods to answer specific research questions. This includes an overview of the sort of data that can be used in qualitative research. We then will discuss what a “case” is and methods for choosing an appropriate case or cases. With this foundation, we then will discuss some specific qualitative methods, namely process tracing, interviews, and grounded theory. We will conclude the semester by considering generalizability from qualitative case studies and practices of transparency that ensure qualitative methods are scientifically rigorous.
By combining the lecture with hands-on lab sessions, students will gain experience applying these research methods. Students will work in groups over the course of the semester to discuss the research design of qualitative case studies, collect and analyze qualitative data, conduct qualitative coding exercises in MaxQDA, discuss coding strategies and schemes, and conduct analyzing semi-structured interviews. Each student will contribute a portion to a group project with written assignments during the course, then the group will come together to present their results at the end of semester
Research Design and Research Logic
MA Seminar, Winter Semester 2024-25
By the beginning of your MA studies, you have presumably heard the cautionary words “correlation does not necessarily imply causation.” Perhaps you are also familiar with examples of this phenomenon: when sales of ice cream increase, there is an increase in shark attacks. But are sharks irresistibly drawn to ice cream carts? No – but during the summer, people are likely to be on the beach. With more people swimming, more of them are exposed to the potential of a shark attack. People on the beach also like to buy ice cream. The apparent relationship between ice cream and sharks is just a coincidence. Change in both variables is actually caused by something else: the summer heat.
In this course, you will learn how to systemize your causal thinking and reasoning and learn about different research designs for answering causal research questions. We will first discuss how to formulate a good research question, an essential first step in any research project. With a clear research question formed, the next step is to design a logical research plan. What data will you need to answer the question you posed? What alternative explanations do you need to rule out? If you cannot get exactly the data you would want in a perfect world, what substitutions can you make that
still follow the same logic? We will cover different ways of making causal inferences in political science research, the elements of good research design, a general overview of research questions, what a research design is, and how to structure a research paper.
In the later part of the course, we will have an overview of different types of research designs and methods that you may need to answer your research question. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods designs will be introduced. We will structure and compare the designs across common dimensions: studying few cases vs. many cases; experimental vs. observational; qualitative vs. quantitative data, considering the unique strengths and weaknesses of each. This course is intended to prepare you for a deeper dive into these methods in the other required modules on quantitative and qualitative methods.
Gender & Politics
BA Seminar, Winter Semester 2024-25
This course serves as an introduction to the role that gender plays in contemporary comparative politics. We will begin with discussions on how social scientists can and do study gender as a concept and how gender differences appear in society in general. We then turn to the sphere of public office and discuss what it means to represent the interests of an entire gender as an elected official. We will review the ways political institutions are and are not built to acknowledge gender and what society imagines a “good leader” to look like. After a discussion on the function of quotas to enforce greater gender equality, we will turn to several policy areas that have particularly gendered outcomes (though one could argue that all policies are gendered to some degree). Finally, we will end the semester with a discussion of the modern “anti-gender movement” and the backlash to feminist gains over the last century.