“Multi-sited fieldwork and planetary processes in an era of geoeconomics”
Methods seminar in the doctoral programme in Social Sciences
1–9 October 2024

Across the social sciences, there is a growing interest in processes that are transnational or even global in scope: climate crisis, energy transition, cross-border migration, Great Power conflict, and more. But such processes pose a challenge to empirical research: How can we rigorously study processes that are unfolding in real time, uncertain in their outcomes, and multi-sited and multi-scalar in their geographies? This course would tackle this methodological challenge. It takes as one point of departure my publication From Cases to Sites: Studying Global Processes in Comparative Politics, a chapter in a recent Cambridge University Press edited volume, which charts out an approach to studying global processes via multi-sited research designs, wherein global process and local sites are grasped as co-constitutive scales. The course also has a substantive focus, drawing on examples from the growing literature on the energy transition and green industrial policy as both a domestic and a global/inter-state phenomenon in an era defined by intensifying geopolitical tensions, accelerating climate crisis, and deepening inequalities. Lastly, we would explore the intersection of the energy transition with systemic developments in global capitalism, via debates over contested concepts such as political capitalism, secular stagnation, neo-mercantilism and green extractivism.

For more information please visit the course directory.

Thea Riofrancos

Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College

Paul Lazarsfeld Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna, Department of Development Studies

Contact
triofran@providence.edu