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Lead Instructors |
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Ted L Gragson University of Georgia 706.542.1460 tgragson@uga.edu |
Laura Ogden Florida International University 305.348.6663 ogdenl@fiu.edu |
J. Morgan
Grove USDA Forest Service-Burlington 802.951.6771 ext. 1111 mgrove@fs.fed.us |
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Course Description The social sciences represent a diverse and intellectually rich array of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, geography, and sociology. In the past 50 years, these disciplines have moved toward more integrative, interdisciplinary, and collaborative research contributing to the collection and analysis of long-term data sets often with the purpose of influencing environmental decision-making. This convergence is in response to the environmental challenges faced by society, which demand solutions that meet human needs and protect essential ecosystem functions that vary in complex ways across different temporal and spatial scales. We will examine in this course the implications of these shifts for the practice of research. How does the current conception of humans as biological and cultural organisms embedded within social and ecological systems affect the way questions are framed? Questions need to be posed within interdisciplinary collaborations that are sensitive to the human condition, but recognize the data-driven expectations of the activity. Static or linear descriptions of human populations and individuals have given way to explanations of the processes that create social identity and enable human agency within complex socio-ecological structures. Within the realm of decision-making, the information needed to influence both public choices and the policy process is often inconsistent with the information provided by research and monitoring requiring a trade off between timeliness and certainty. In short, how can socio-ecological research be integrated into the deliberative process that ensures the science is judged both relevant to environmental decision-making and credible to the interested or affected parties? Course Objective Our objective in this course is to examine reliable, functional, usable and extensible approaches for advancing social science understanding within the context of interdisciplinary research now and into the future. This entails considering which data are suitable for answering which questions. It also requires identifying the methodological and procedural standards to be used that will ensure comparability of practice and results in such collaborations. We will do this by drawing from our own experiences and that of numerous social science colleagues actively engaged in interdisciplinary research within the U.S. Long-Term Ecological Research Network and other collaborative research programs. This course uses cyber-technologies to link students and researchers at multiple sites. The course’s novel approach emerges from the growing recognition that graduate students should be enabled to communicate across geographically-distant sites in order to prepare them for careers in interdisciplinary research. Coursework As a registered student in this course you will be expected to read broadly to learn about the conceptual and methodological dimensions of long-term socio-ecological research; think critically by drawing connections between and among the material covered; and participate actively in discussions with students and presenters. For the final project, you will work in groups of three and identify a topic of interest to you from the recently submitted LTER Science Research Plan. Your group will decide on an appropriate set of three methods that could be used to address your chosen topic then write convincingly on why you chose them (i.e., suitability), what the strengths and weaknesses are of each method (i.e., appropriateness), and how you could combine them to achieve success (i.e., integration). You will then present succinctly and professionally your findings to the class. |
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Calendar of Topics and Presenters
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From
Yardstick to Gyroscope -