Qualitative research is more than a set of techniques for collecting and analysing data. What counts as knowledge, whose experience matters, who participates in research, who can research and how one enters and represents a field as well as what happens to knowledge after a study ends are all shaped by social relationships, institutional contexts and structures of power.
Building on Qualitative Research Methods (SDP 201), this elective moves from conducting qualitative methods to designing and critically examining qualitative research. It begins by mapping a wider landscape of qualitative research designs—including case study, ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory and narrative inquiry—before considering how different theoretical perspectives shape research design and practice. Feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, postcolonial, participatory and arts-informed perspectives form the critical core of the course. Particular attention is given to positionality, power, participation, representation, reciprocity and researcher–participant relationships.
Since SDP is an applied field the course also introduces applied qualitative research and Action Research, asking what changes when research is meant to inform practice, policy or action, and when participants become active producers of knowledge. A fieldwork component lets students apply these ideas through a small-scale inquiry in a physical, digital or hybrid field, and a strand on visual, sensory, narrative and arts-informed methods invites students to experiment with alternative ways of generating and representing qualitative knowledge.
