Practice of Fieldwork & Research Methods - LAW00117M

«Back to module search

Module summary

This module aims to prepare students to conduct human rights research. The first five weeks of teaching will be shared with the Practice of Fieldwork, a core module of the MA in Applied Human Rights offered by the Department of Politics and International Relations, and they will focus on conducting human rights field research. The second four weeks of teaching will be shared with the Legal Systems and Research Methods module offered by the York Law School, and they will focus on develping the skills you will need to be able to design your dissertation proposal.

Related modules

Co-requisite modules

• Human Rights Placement (LAW00066M)
• LLM Dissertation (LAW00069M)

Additional information

This module prepares students for two core modules of the LLM in International Human Rights Law and Practice, the Human Rights Placement module and the Dissertation module. The first part of the module will be assessed with a reflective piece that focuses on one aspect of the Human Rights Placement in Semester 1. The second part of the module will be assessed with a dissertation proposal that will form the basis of your independent research for the Dissertation module in Semester 2.

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 1 2026-27

Module aims

Human rights, development and peace activism, in order to be effective, require good research skills that inform our practice and that shields them from factual challenges.

The first part of the module addresses the political, ethical, logistical and methodological challenges of conducting fieldwork related to human rights, peacebuilding, and development in challenging contexts. Students will gain the awareness and skills to conduct fieldwork in a safe, reflective and ethical manner, both individually and in groups. Students will learn how to undertake research into their own professional practice and in fieldwork settings with others. It will also examine different qualitative methodological approaches to research, in particular interviews and focus groups. Specific attention will be paid to reflective ethical practices in engagement with vulnerable individuals and communities.

The second part of the module will introduce you to legal skills in relation to locating legal sources and prepare you for drafting an effective dissertation proposal. In particular, this part of the module aims to develop techniques and methodologies appropriate to legal research and applicable to the students' own work, introduce students to the process of formulating and developing questions suitable for advanced legal research and designing a research framework around those questions, and to equip students with the skills needed to complete a substantial piece of independent legal research.

Module learning outcomes

Subject content

At the end of the first part of the module, students should:

• Be able to show a critical understanding of the political, ethical, logistical and methodological challenges of conducting research in complex contexts
• Be able to design appropriate research related to human rights, peacebuilding, and development
• Be able to explain the particular importance of reflective and ethical practices when engaging with vulnerable individuals communities

Furthermore, by the end of the second part of the module, students should have:

• An ability to undertake legal research (including finding and using primary sources such as cases and statutes/codes and secondary sources such as academic journal articles) from the University library and its on-line resources
• An understanding of research methodologies appropriate to legal research and applicable to their own work
• An ability to identify a legal issue that has the potential to be the subject of legal research

Academic and graduate skills

At the end of the module, students should:

• Understand the ethical challenges of research.
• Be able to engage in reflective practice and exercise reflexivity, including on their own learning in the course
• Be able to think critically about complex (methodological and theoretical) issues
• Be able to communicate effectively in both verbal and written forms
• Act autonomously and in a group to define legal problems and determine how to research legal issues relevant to those problems
• Make use of appropriate legal materials
• Carry out independent research on a topic related to law
• Act autonomously in developing a research proposal and plan
• Identify, locate and use relevant primary sources
• Critically analyse and engage with a wide range of the secondary literature relevant to their topic
• Construct coherent and logical arguments at an advanced level, addressing theoretical, doctrinal and policy issues relevant to their chosen issue
• Make use of appropriate referencing techniques
• Apply what they have learned in the preparation for and writing up of the dissertation

Module content

The module is structured into two parts, which share teaching with the Practice of Fieldwork module (Department of Politics and International Relations) and the Legal Systems and Research Methods module (York Law School).

The first part of the module is structured around the first five weeks of teaching (Week 1 to 5) of the Practice of Fieldwork module. Each week students will attend a 1-hour lecture and a 1.5-hour seminar. Each week will focus on a specific aspect of human rights field research as follows:

Week 1 - Introduction - Reflective Practice

Week 2 - The socio-political context of fieldwork

Week 3 - Security, risk, and logistics

Week 4 - The ethics of fieldwork

Week 5 - Methods for data collection

The second part of the module is structured around the last four weeks of teaching (Week 7 to 10) of Legal Systems and Research Methods module. Each week students will attend a 1-hour plenary session. There will be no seminars in the second part of the module. Each week will be structured around one topic as follows:

Week 7 - Different approaches and methods for the study of law

Week 8 - Critical reading and thinking

Week 9 - Literature searches and use of databases 

Week 10 - Q&A session

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	50.0
Essay/coursework	50.0

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

The module is assessed through a combination of written outputs, which map onto the two parts of the module.

1. The first five weeks of teaching will be assessed with a 2000-word reflective essay. This is an essay in which you record thoughts and reflections about your experiences, focusing on key lessons learnt. This should be based on a fieldwork diary, where you record thoughts and reflections as you go, and should not just be written with hindsight. If you are reflecting on a previous experience, try to see if it is possible to find evidence (e.g. emails or diary entries) of what you were thinking and reflecting during the experience, as well as your reflections now. In preparing the essay, you should focus on one or two aspects of your experience in the Human Rights Placement module, for example preparing for the placement, experiences during the placement, and/or reflections or experiences afterwards. If you are not sure about what experience to focus on, please speak to the Module Convenor ahead of time.
2. The second four weeks of teaching will be assessed with a 2000-word dissertation proposal. The topic of your dissertation needs not be fully fleshed out or final, but you should have an idea about your field of inquiry, which should fall broadly in the field of international human rights law and practice. This will enable us to match you with an appropriate supervisor. You will have one supervision meeting with your allocated dissertation supervisor prior to submitting your dissertation proposal. A sample structure for your dissertation proposal will be shared at the beginning of the module.

At the end of the first five weeks of teaching, you will be able to submit a 500-word fieldnote diary about your experience starting your LLM at York. This will be a formative assessment and could include reflecations on:

1. the habits and assumptions underpinning how things are approached in the university
2. the power dynamics that underpin those habits and assumptions

You could reflect on the politics of space, knowledge, power disparities, positionality, etc. You might want to identify and elaborate on one or two key experiences that you found particularly insightful.

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	50.0
Essay/coursework	50.0

Module feedback

There are four key forms of feedback for this module:

• There will be oral feedback in seminars to help you with those areas you do not understand. This type of feedback depends on you asking the academic staff member to explain something. You will be encouraged to ask questions about reading/learning that you have done.
• You will be encouraged to give feedback to (and receive feedback from) your peers, when you discuss your research.
• You will be given individual written feedback on your formative assessment by the module leader of Practice of Fieldwork.
• You will be given individual written feedback on your assessed work by the module leader and dissertation supervisors, linked to the assessment criteria.

Indicative reading

PART 1:

For the first part of the module on the "Practice of Fieldwork", there is no primary 'textboo' but here is a reading list divided by week:

Week 1

• Browne, Brendan Ciarán, 'Writing the wrongs: Keeping diaries and reflective practice', in Althea-Maria Rivas, and Brendan Ciarán Browne (eds), Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence: Fieldwork.
• Fujii, L. A. (2015). Five stories of accidental ethnography: turning unplanned moments in the field into data. Qualitative Research, 15(4), 525–539.

Week 2

• Thomson, Susan M. 2009. 'That is not what we authorised you to do...' Access and government interference in highly politicised research environments. In Surviving Field Research Working in Violent and Difficult Situations, Chandra Lekha Sriram, John C. King, Julie A. Mertus, Olga Martin-Ortega, Johanna Herman (eds), pp 108-123.
• Autesserre, Séverine , 2014. 'Fumbling in the Dark'. In her Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, pp.115-143.

Week 3

• Séverine Autesserre, 2014. Security Routines and Intervention Rituals. In Chapter 7 of her Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention, pp. 216-239.
• Gyda M. Sindre, 2020. ‘Gatekeepers’ , in The Companion to peace and conflict fieldwork , Ginty Mac,Roger, Brett, Roderick Leslie; Vogel, Birte, Springer Nature , 237 – 247.
• Ali Hines, 2022. Decade of defiance: Ten years of reporting land and environmental activism worldwide. Global Witness.

Week 4

• Gallaher, Carolyn, 2009. Researching Repellent Groups: Some Methodological Considerations on How to Represent Militants, Radicals, and Other Belligerents. In Surviving Field Research Working in Violent and Difficult Situations, Chandra Lekha Sriram, John C. King, Julie A. Mertus, Olga Martin-Ortega, Johanna Herman (eds), pp 127-146.

Week 5

• Satterthwaite, Margaret L., and Justin C. Simeone, 2016. 'A Conceptual Roadmap for Social Science Methods in Human Rights Fact-Finding', in Philip Alston, and Sarah Knuckey (eds), The Transformation of Human Rights, pp. 321-354.
• José Antonio Gutierrez, Pat Gibbons, 2020, ‘A walk with the lads’: Masculinities’ perspectives, gender dynamics and resilience in Soacha, Colombia. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 49.
• Fujii, L.A. (2018). Strategies for Conducting Interviews. In her Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach. New York & London: Routledge, 53-72.

PART 2:

For the second part of the module on “Research Methods”, there is no primary ‘textbook’, but here is a selection of materials that you may find helpful:

• S Halliday (ed), An Introduction to the Study of Law (W Green, 2012)
• M Salter and J Mason, Writing Law Dissertations (Pearson, 2007)
• D Watkins and M Burton (ed), Research Methods in Law (Routledge, 2013)
• M McConville and W Hong Chui, Research Methods for Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2007)
• P Dunleavy, ‘Chapter 5: Writing Dissertations’ in P Dunleavy, Studying for a Degree in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Macmillan, 1986)
• P Samuelson, ‘Good Legal Writing: of Orwell and Window Panes’ (1984) 46 U Pitts L Rev 149
• M Siems, ‘Legal Originality’ (2008) 28(1) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 147164
• M Van Hoecke, ‘Legal Doctrine: Which Method for What Kind of Discipline?’ in Van Hoecke, Legal Doctrine: Which Method for What Kind of Discipline?