Teaching
Since February 2024, I am a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in Political Science at the University of Cologne WiSo Faculty. In this capacity, I will teach two courses per semester, detailed below.
Reproductive Justice
MA Seminar, Summer Semester 2024
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This special topics seminar offers an introduction to the politics of reproduction and sexuality. We will cover a variety of topics in reproductive health from a political and social view, going beyond simply what should be legal or possible under various laws and treaties to explore what patients and advocates actually experience. We will consider who has access to reproductive healthcare and under what conditions, building on the perspective of “reproductive rights” into the more expansive “reproductive justice” framework pioneered by multiply-marginalized Black women whose perspectives were not represented by the mainstream (often white) feminist movements. This course will take a comparative politics perspective rather than being anchored in one specific geography.
Accordingly, the course will be structured along the three principles of reproductive justice: 1.) the right not to have a child, 2.) the right to have a child, and 3.) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments. This will take us through a variety of topics in reproductive politics such as contraception, abortion, social support for pregnant people and new parents, and parental leave policies. The reproductive justice structure will also draw the connections between these more obvious reproductive topics and other policy areas, such as climate, policing, and children’s health and safety as components of parenting children in safe and healthy environments.
Introduction to Qualitative Methods
MA Lecture, Summer Semester 2024, coordinated with labs taught by Friedrich Kersting
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This course is intended to be a practical guide for how to do social science research at the Masters level using qualitative methods, complementing other courses offered on quantitative methods and general research design and research logic. We begin by understanding what qualitative research is, and why you might choose to use qualitative methods to answer specific research questions. This includes an overview of the sort of data that can be used in qualitative research. We then will discuss what a “case” is and methods for choosing an appropriate case or cases. With this foundation, we then will discuss some specific qualitative methods, namely process tracing, interviews, and grounded theory. We will conclude the semester by considering generalizability from qualitative case studies and practices of transparency that ensure qualitative methods are scientifically rigorous.
By combining the lecture with hands-on lab sessions, students will gain experience applying these research methods. Students will work in groups over the course of the semester to discuss the research design of qualitative case studies, collect and analyze qualitative data, conduct qualitative coding exercises in MaxQDA, discuss coding strategies and schemes, and conduct analyzing semi-structured interviews. Each student will contribute a portion to a group project with written assignments during the course, then the group will come together to present their results at the end of semester