IPSA-USP Summer School

The IPSA-USP Summer School in Concepts, Methods and Techniques in Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations! After a challenging 2020 we are looking forward to joining you virtually in 2021. In light of the covid-19 pandemic, the IPSA-USP Summer School has adopted a new (temporary!) format for 2021.

Recognizing the difficulties students face in advancing their research projects in the current context, the Summer School will focus this year on providing short targeted online workshops from our leading international faculty. Thanks to the generosity of our long-term faculty supporters, we are also able to offer this year’s Summer School to you for free, so we are excited to have a large and diverse participation! The 2021 Summer School is scheduled to take place during the week of February 22nd – 26th, with morning sessions from 11am – 1pm and afternoon sessions from 2.30pm-4pm (São Paulo times). In order to make the workshops manageable and encourage active participation, the number of participants will be limited, as described below. We will provide links to the online platform for approved participants nearer to the start date.

The format will be as follows: Each day, a team of two or three faculty members will focus on a specific methodological area, reflecting the long-standing areas of focus of the Summer School, according to the following schedule:

• Monday 22nd Feb: Comparative Historical Methods – Derek Beach (Aarhus) and Matthew Lange (McGill)
• Tuesday 23rd Feb: Comparative Research Design – Allyson Benton (City, London) and Glauco Peres da Silva (USP)
• Wednesday 24th Feb: Causal Inference – Florian Foos (London School of Economics), Mark Pickup (Simon Fraser) and Jonathan Phillips (USP)
• Thursday 25th Feb: Surveys/Public Opinion – Bruno Cautrès (Sciences Po) and Laron Williams (Missouri)
• Friday 26th Feb: Time-Series Analysis – Lorena Barberia (USP), Andrew Philips (Boulder) and Guy Whitten (Texas A&M)

In the morning, the faculty will provide an applied overview of the research topic, with key concepts, methodologies and practical tips to apply in your research. In the afternoon, the faculty will discuss participating students’ research papers from the same methodological area, illustrating the relevant methods, highlighting how conceptual and theoretical issues can be applied to the specific paper, and providing feedback and suggestions to help improve students’ work.

The participants for the 2021 Summer School will be required to submit a research paper that utilizes one of the five daily methodological topics listed above. While papers will need to meet some minimum criteria (eg. the paper should be your own, unpublished, work, written in English, and contain some empirical results, i.e. not be just a research proposal), we are looking to include a diverse set of papers that are of pedagogical value to the whole group and can benefit from faculty feedback, so please don’t worry at all if your paper is not finalized or has some weaknesses – that’s where the value of the workshops comes in!

The first step is to submit an abstract describing your research paper through the online form here by 15th January. We will verify the abstracts to make sure they fit into the correct methodological focus areas and approved applicants will have until January 31st to submit their paper.

We sincerely hope you consider applying to participate. For more details, and to keep up to date with the Summer School, please check our website !