The topic
It has been argued that human rights research is characterized by methodological sloppiness with little awareness of methodology. At the same time, human rights researchers often cross disciplinary borders and use data and approaches from different disciplines. Some argue that human rights research is becoming an academic discipline of its own, while others insist on disciplinary rigor and separation.
This research panel will address such overarching questions, but more importantly issues on application of methodologies in practice.
We are open to a range of topics relating to methodological challenges in human rights research and encourage papers with a special focus on:
- Methodological criteria for sound human rights research
- Crossing, mixing and combining research approaches from different disciplines in human rights research: dangers and achievements
- Disciplinary approaches – methodological lessons from case studies and comparative analysis
- Case studies of applied human rights methodology in law, social science and the humanities, e.g. methodological approaches of PhD projects
- Methods in assessment studies: impact analysis, fact finding, monitoring etc.
- Human rights field work: Practices and challenges of data collection, verification, reliability
- Challenges and opportunities of comparative and qualitative human rights research
- Ethical issues in human rights research
Practical matters
The venue of the research panel is Hotel Schloss Wilhelminenberg in Vienna.
The overarching topic of the Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI) Annual Conference is Empower human rights!; the AHRI conference is hosted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna.
Limited funding is available through the Nordic Network in Human Rights Research for travel and accommodation costs. Only presenters of a paper are eligible for financial support, on the basis of an application.
See the call for papers for additional details.