Presentation

This workshop cycle aims at creating a space for multidisciplinary dialogue, open to the whole academic community, focused on the issue of research and action methods in Social and Human Sciences.
This activity emerges from a concern, shared by researcher from these areas, which, in this space, will seek pathways to improve practices, based on the dialogues carried out at the workshops about the different research methods. This concern sticks to the macro context, in which occur the contemporary reforms at the level of the higher education and, also, the research policies. In both cases, there is a tendency towards an epistemological standardization of neo-positivist nature, where the criteria of scientificity and objectivity prevailing in exact sciences reign. In addition to this, there is yet another tendency: seeking an instrumentalization of knowledge in order to guarantee a greater technical and technological translation and an interventionist efficiency.

In this macro context, a certain subalternity of the scientificity models which characterize the approach of Social and Human Sciences has been produced. The challenges and tasks which have been historically defined, namely the production of comprehensive and plural readings which crave for the complexity, instead of simplicity, of the world and its experiences, tend to be sidelined and questioned about their validity and appropriateness.
Presenting and discussing the methods which guide the scientific and professional research and action of the Social and Human Science researcher thus constitute an important opposition to the technical-technological trend of knowledge, allowing not only thinking and showing how comprehensive readings of the world can open new horizons to the research, but also exploring the analytical richness of these methodologies, and, thereby, rediscovering the heuristic validity of the plural understanding as an advanced model for scientificity in Humanities.

With this motivation as background, the workshops will focus on the methods, empirical challenges and theoretical implications of the different researches being carried out by post-doctoral researchers at CES. These researches' plural nature will allow approaching the methodological specificities of Humanities in a comparative perspective and with a view to identifying bridges of interdisciplinarity capable of developing the cross-areas dialogical relevance, as well as the constant rethinking of scientific practices in Social Sciences.
It should be pointed out that these workshops will have a character of reflection about issues related to the empiricism in what concerns the implementation of research methodologies to the theoretical implications of those same methodologies, like issues related to the professional and academic experience and that reveal the problem of the status and place of Humanities and, particularly, Social Sciences.

Program

Evolutionism is dead! Long live Evolutionism. Evolutionist imaginaries in science teaching
Catarina Gomes
13 October 2011, 5.30 pm, Room 2, CES-Coimbra

Multivariate Statistics with SPSS
Carmen Diego Gonçalves
3 November 2011, 5.30 pm, Room 2, CES-Coimbra

Interpretive approaches for policies studies. Some remarks from a water policymaking’s research.
Chiara Carrozza
19 January 2012, 5.30 pm, Room 2, CES-Coimbra

The use of focal groups in qualitative research
Maria Madalena Gracioli
16 February 2012, 5.30 pm, Room 2, CES-Coimbra

Rhetorical speech analysis: approaches in Social Psychology
Virgílio Amaral
15 March 2012, 5.30 pm, Room 2, CES-Coimbra

Thinking about non-capitalist exchange circuits from a participatory perspective
Luciane Lucas dos Santos
19 April 2012, 5.30 pm, Room 2, CES-Coimbra

Organization: Catarina Gomes and Gisele Wolkoff