Prof Priscilla Alderson | Ten two-hour sessions running through the Autumn and Spring terms: 17:30 - 19:30 on October 4, 18 + November 1, 15, 29 + January 10, 24 + February 7, 21 + March 7 | Autumn dates = Room 777 / Spring dates = Room 736

Convened by Priscilla Alderson p.alderson@ucl.ac.uk

In each session: part 1 explains basic concepts in CR, part 2 reviews how they have been applied in an example of research and we will discuss how they could apply to students’ work.

1.    Positivist and interpretive research and how CR helps to resolve the contradictions between them; being and knowing, sorting out epistemology and ontology.

2.    Realism and idealism; bases for interdisciplinary research; closed and open systems; facts and values.

3.  Three levels of reality, researching causes.

4.    Four planes of social being (physical, interpersonal, social structural, inner being) and connecting research on the four levels.

5.  Summary and review of course so far.

Spring term

6.  Absence and change; difference and transformative change in research over time; emergence.

7.  Dialectic through four stages of practical research through the acronym MELD; 1M non-identity and initial observing.

8.  Negation; intervening to negate problems; the myth of TINA.

9.   Totalities and the bigger picture.

10. Transformation, personal and political, towards freedom and justice.

Main background texts:

General reading

Bhaskar, R. (1979/1988) The Possibility of Naturalism, Routledge.

Collier, A. Critical realism: an Introduction to Bhaskar’s philosophy, 1994, Verso.

Hartwig, M. 2007 Dictionary of Critical Realism, Routledge. 

Applied example

Alderson, P. (2013)  Childhoods Real and Imagined: An Introduction to Childhood Studies and Critical Realism. Routledge