Resource Wars, Popular Movements, and Gender Dynamics in Bolivia and Ecuador:

A Multi-Year Collaborative Approach to Social Movement Research

Paul Dosh, Political Science, Macalester College
A New Research Collaboration project

This project attempts to stretch the frontiers of faculty-undergraduate collaboration in two respects:

1. by completing a multi-year collaborative research cycle involving overseas field research; and
2. by contributing to the growing trend of treating student collaborators as junior colleagues rather than as assistants.

Within many social science fields, the lengthy time frame of a research cycle (typically three or more years) makes it challenging to involve a student collaborator at every stage -- by the time most students have developed the needed professional maturity and research and language skills, they are too close to graduation to initiate and complete a three-year research cycle prior to Commencement.

This project, however, attempts a pedagogically bold approach that aspires to faculty-student partnership at every stage of the research process: project conception, literature review, research design, grant-writing, intensive fieldwork in Latin America, conference presentations, journal submission and revision, and publication of a co-authored article in a major peer reviewed journal, printed in time for Commencement. Thus, our work aims to introduce the Complementary Collaboration approach in order to encourage other faculty-student teams to emulate this "best practices" precedent.

Read the blog about Dosh's collaboration with student Nicole Kligerman.