Call for applications
The Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School is pleased to announce its Fourth Annual Workshop on Research Methods in Fundamental Rights, taking place from 7-9 June 2023 at the Hertie School, Berlin, Germany and online. The workshop is hosted by the Hertie School as a member of CIVICA - The European University of Social Sciences, and is co-financed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
The workshop aims to provide doctoral and early-career legal researchers with an opportunity to reflect on diverse research methods in human rights research. Over three days, successful candidates will attend master classes with renowned faculty, who will provide guidance and reflections on the methods they have applied in key pieces of their own research. Participants will have assigned readings that they prepare in advance and will receive video recorded presentations by the faculty for each class. In additional sessions, participants will submit reflections on their own research questions and methods, and will receive individual feedback on their projects from the faculty and fellow participants.
We encourage applications from PhD and early-career legal researchers carrying out fundamental rights research employing any of the methodological approaches covered in the workshop.
Sessions and Faculty
Sessions and Faculty
This opening session will be led by Professors Başak Çalı and Cathryn Costello.
Başak Çalı is Professor of International Law at the Hertie School and Director of the School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. She is an expert in European and international human rights law, with a special interest in comparative human rights law. She has written extensively on the purpose, interpretation, legitimacy, standards of review and domestic impact of human rights law. Her work places human rights law in its broader normative and political context and has a dual interest in legal interpretation and law in action.
Cathryn Costello is Professor of Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School and Co-Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights. She is an expert in European and international refugee and migration law and has written about EU asylum and migration law, international refugee law, and the relationship between migration and labour law. Cathryn is currently the Principal Investigator of RefMig, a five-year ERC-funded research project exploring refugee mobility, recognition and rights. She has also done studies for UNHCR, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. She holds a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford.
Archival methods offer access to rich historical data as primary sources. The aim of this masterclass is to train researchers on both the practical dimension of how to gather data from archives as well as the analytical dimension of how to evaluate the data gathered. The class will explore how to identify archival materials that are relevant to your research, assess the means of access to these archives, undertake the actual process of data collection in archives, and evaluate the information correctly. We will draw upon examples of social science research that have used archives in their analyses and evaluate their merits and pitfalls.
This masterclass on 'Archival methods' is led by Professor Shubha Kamala Prasad, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Hertie School. Her research examines domestic sources of foreign policy, spanning substate conflict to diaspora mobilization. She was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute (2020-22), Fiesole, Italy. Shubha was awarded her PhD in Political Science in 2020 from the Department of Government, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA. Her prior work experience also includes organizing Track II Dialogues between India and Pakistan.
This masterclass will first explore the concept of a case study and how to design one, in particular how we select a single or a small number of comparative cases for intense examination from a universe of cases. We will review a range of logics developed in social sciences that help justify selecting cases and consider examples of case study research in human rights. We will then turn to comparative method, in particular drawing on insights from comparative political science that have been applied in comparative constitutional and comparative international law, in both large ‘n’ and small ‘n’ studies. We will explore the rationales of comparison, and what questions may be answered by comparative study.
This workshop will be led jointly by Professors Başak Çalı and Cathryn Costello.
Başak Çalı is Professor of International Law at the Hertie School and Director of the School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. She is an expert in European and international human rights law, with a special interest in comparative human rights law. She has written extensively on the purpose, interpretation, legitimacy, standards of review and domestic impact of human rights law. Her work places human rights law in its broader normative and political context and has a dual interest in legal interpretation and law in action.
Cathryn Costello is Professor of Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School and Co-Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights. She is an expert in European and international refugee and migration law and has written about EU asylum and migration law, international refugee law, and the relationship between migration and labour law. Cathryn is currently the Principal Investigator of RefMig, a five-year ERC-funded research project exploring refugee mobility, recognition and rights. She has also done studies for UNHCR, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. She holds a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford.
This masterclass will discuss the assumptions, the use, and the potential application of case law annotation and manual coding of legal outcomes. The method can be used to study doctrinal developments or broader trends and general patterns in the case law. Moreover, it can serve to produce the so-called training sets for the automated coding of judgments using various machine learning techniques (such as recurrent neural networks). The discussion of the methodology will be grounded in the judgments of the European Court of Justice, issued in the area of the free movement of persons and European citizenship over six decades.
The masterclass on 'Digital methods for doctrinal legal research' is led by Professor Urška Šadl, Professor at the European University Institute. Prof. Šadl's primary research interests include the empirical studies of European courts and their jurisprudence, the language of courts, and topics in European constitutional law more generally. She is the Principal Investigator of the project 'Judging Under the Influence' (the Sapere Aude Research Leader Grant awarded by the Danish Council for Independent Research) investigating the role of national courts and Member State governments on the formation of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice. Her research appears in the Common Market Law Review, the American Journal of Comparative Law, European Law Review, European Law Open, and other field journals. Her most recent project is the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior, which she is co-editing with Lee Epstein, Gunnar Grendstad and Keren Weinshall.
This masterclass will support participants in preparing qualitative fieldwork for their research projects. Based on 1-2 pieces of her published work as well as readings in qualitative methods and mixed-methods design, Prof. Christine Reh will introduce and discuss the role of qualitative interviews in research projects. The masterclass will: 1) discuss why we conduct interviews; 2) analyse how we access, sample, and prepare interviews; 3) reflect on key challenges of and biases in interviews and interviewing. Class participants are encouraged to bring examples from their own interviews and interviewing in their research—be this research academic, policy, or legal.
This masterclass on 'Mixed methods research design and interviews' is led by Professor Christine Reh, Professor of European Politics at the Hertie School. Her work focuses on the European Union’s institutions, politics and legitimacy, with a particular interest in decision-making processes, informal governance and politicisation. Her current research explores the impact of national (electoral) politics on supranational actors and law-making. She previously held academic positions at the College of Europe in Bruges (Belgium) and at University College London, where she maintains an affiliation with the Department of Political Science. She is also an editorial board member of the Journal of European Public Policy.
This masterclass aims at introducing normativity in human rights research from a theoretical and methodological perspective. The lecture is three-fold. First, it will define 'normative' in relation/in contrast to other epistemologies, such as the 'doctrinal' or the 'empirical', and explain how each epistemology grounds a distinct methodology for researching (human rights) law. Second, the lecture will explore and exemplify the normative approach to human rights and locate where the 'normative' may intersect with, and benefit from, other epistemologies and their associated methods. Third, the lecture will engage with the lecturer's own research as well as the papers submitted by the participants as vantage points to further discuss and illustrate these definitions, distinctions, and locations.
The masterclass on 'Normative theory and method in human rights research' is led by Dr Alain Zysset, Senior Lecturer in Public Law at the School of Law, University of Glasgow. From 2019 - 2020, Zysset was a visiting fellow at the Hertie School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. His research lies at the intersection of public law, international law and political theory and his main area of research is the theory and practice of the ECHR. Zysset is the author of The ECHR and Human Rights Theory (Routledge, 2016).
This mastercalss will explore process-tracing - a qualitative social science method used for unpacking causal relationships and examining processes of change. We will explore a number of questions such as: 1) different varieties of process-tracing methods; 2) their applicability to legal and human rights research; 3) the limitations of process-tracing; and 4) to what extent your own research projects involve causal relationships and how these processes might be observed and analysed. We will also consider some existing examples of applying process-tracing to human rights research.
The masterclas on process-tracing will be led by Professor Mark Dawson, Professor of European Law and Governance at the Hertie School. Prof. Dawson's research focuses on EU law and particularly on how EU law affects and is affected by European politics and policymaking. He recently co-wrote a textbook on this topic with Cambridge University Press (here). His work has been cited by leading courts such as the European Court of Justice (here) and German Constitutional Court (here). He is currently the co-editor of the series Cambridge Studies in European Law and Policy (here) and a member of the Editorial Board of the European Law Review.
This Masterclass outlines ways in which interview techniques can be used to study legal processes related to the formation of legal institutions or doctrinal developments. Based on basic ideas derived from reflexive sociology of law, the class will introduce participants to interview methods for exploring how actors and constellations of actors influence the development of law and legal institutions. The class will draw on examples from studies of both international human rights courts and broader fields of human rights.
The masterclass on 'Using interviews to study legal processes and fields' is led by Professor Mikael Rask Madsen, Professor of European Law and Integration at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen and Director and founder of iCourts, Centre of Excellence for International Courts. Prof. Madsen has published widely on international law and institutions and his research has been recognized by a number of prizes, including the Elite Researcher Prize and the Carlsberg Research Prize.
When and where?
Date: 7 – 9 June 2023
Location: Hertie School Berlin and online
Application process
Deadline for applications: 20 March 2023.
Please submit your application by sending an email to fundamentalrights[at]hertie-school[dot]org with the subject line 'Research Methods in Fundamental Rights'. Applications should include one single pdf file, containing the following information:
- A CV
- A letter of motivation. Please indicate clearly the method(s) that you apply/interested in applying in your research, and whether you wish to attend the workshop on-site or online.
- An outline of your research project, including your research question, research methodology and current stage of the research (2 pages)
For PhD candidates a letter of recommendation written by their PhD supervisor should be sent separately by 20 March 2023 to fundamentalrights[at]hertie-school[dot]org with the subject line 'Letter of recommendation – Name of the candidate - Research Methods in Fundamental Rights'.
Download the full call for applications here.
Successful applicants will receive a written confirmation of acceptance no later than 3 April 2023 and are expected to submit a draft research proposal with a dedicated methodology section as well as a recorded 15 minutes presentation by 10 May 2023.
A detailed programme and list of readings will be made available by 10 May 2023. Video presentations will be available for the participants 10 days prior to the workshop.
Fee and scholarships
The fee for attending the workshop is 250 EUR.
The Centre for Fundamental Rights offers a stipend in form of tuition waiver for up to three PhD candidates taking into account the quality of their projects. Priority will be given to participants from the Global South. Candidates who have no source of funding and wish to apply for tuition waiver should indicate so in their application.
Impressions from the 2022 Research Methods Workshop
Read what participants of the 2022 Research Methods Workshop thought about the workshop and its contribution to their research here.
Watch Tainá Garcia Maia, PhD candidate at the University of Münster and the Federal University of Minas Gerais, talk about her experience as a participant in the 2021 workshop:
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