HCRI60170 Essay guidance 2022-23

MINI CRITICAL ESSAY (2,000 words)

Critically discuss the methodological boundaries, ethical issues, and challenges of using one
research method when conducting research on HCRI’s taught and research themes. This is
an opportunity to engage with a method in more depth and connect this methodological
understanding to your area of interest. You may draw on case studies or a single case study
to illustrate your ideas. Please submit via Turnitin on 6TH March 2023 Midday.

This is a relatively short essay. It is important that it is focused and critical. It is not your
research proposal, it is an academic essay about a method. You are expected to write and
reference in an academic way.

This is not an essay where you describe how to do a method to us. That would be
descriptive and uncritical. Assume I know how to do any method you are selecting. Instead,
you are focusing on a particular challenge or combination of challenges for your chosen
method and developing an academic argument to write an essay about it. In this way the
essay is about the challenge and the method is the context. You do not refer to your
planned dissertation research.

Possible challenges could be: ethics (not all ethical challenges though, pick the relevant one,
e.g., confidentiality, doing no harm, inclusive opportunity), positionality, insider/outsider
issues, representation of voice or demographic, using an interpreter and so on.

Make it explicitly clear in your introduction what challenge you will discuss related to your
chosen research method and be clear about what HCRI theme you are applying it to.
Themes could include: displacement in the Global South, Asylum seekers, bottom-up
peacebuilding, local responses to disasters and so on. Basically, any topic that you have
encountered in HCRI’s classes or research seminars.

So, an example title could be:
The ethics of conducting semi-structured interviews on refugees in subSaharan
Africa.

The challenge of selecting sources for desk-based research on Responsibility to
Protect

Discourse analysis and humanitarian responders’ experiences from the field: which
story to tell?

You should use the SALC marking criteria for coursework, this tells you how your written
coursework will be marked.

The essay is about a challenge as it relates to one method.