Wednesday 16 April 2008

The third course

Well, after these first six months of the PhD education, all three obligatory courses at CUReS are over. The third course, Politics and Democracy in Cities and Regions, ended with two interesting seminars. The last one about other PhD students' dissertations, the one before about classical Political Science texts. For that one, I chose Patrick Le Galès book about European Cities. It provided some good insights but didn't leave a lasting impression for my own thesis. I had been thinking about reading Esping-Andersen's "Three worlds of welfare capitalism" or one of Castells' works in urban sociology. However, after reconsideration, it seems as though they won't be significant for my study. Moreover, I have already read "Three worlds" and four of Castells' books. So it was worth trying something new. However, at the time of writing I cannot spontaneoulsy think of what European Cities has contributed with. I am already getting oblivious!
On the other hand, the thesis that I chose for the final seminar was very interesting. Written by a human geographer from the "Umeå school", it provides many valuable insights in sparsely populated areas and their struggle for economic, demographic and social survival. Linda Lundmark wrote this compilation thesis, and it is interesting to see the structure of such a thesis, including the articles and the first few chapters. I am also thinking of writing a compilation thesis and I have started thinking in the direction of interesting purposes and subjects for my articles.
This third course, with the parts about discourse analisys, research design and the like, together with the other coursers, offers a broad base for the coming time! Now, our works focuses on the research proposal and other courses that we're doing (Pedagogics for Higher Education, e.g.). More news about that soon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good for people to know.