Knowledge:

• The main ingredients in a developing a solid research design for the student’s PhD-thesis.
• Knowledge of different qualitative methods e.g. case study methods, film as a research tool, interview techniques and mixed-methods forms of working.
  

Skills:

• Writing about, visualizing, presenting, discussing, and reflecting on one’s own research design.
• Practical skills in using different qualitative research methods e.g. case study methods, film as a research tool, interview techniques and mixed-methods forms of working.
• Ability to provide thoughtful and useful feedback on the research design of peer students.

Competences:

• An expanded toolbox of different qualitative research methods e.g. case study methods, film as a research tool, interview techniques and mixed-methods forms of working.
• Written and oral competences in building and communicating the students’ individual research design.
• Moving between individual and collective work forms and contributing to building an inclusive and generous environment for sharing research ideas and processes.
  

Lectures, workshops, exercises, dialogues, student presentations, feedback and discussions – concluded with an individual report (during the month after the course days) for final assessment (pass or failed / + written feedback to students).
The course will be structured as a largely power-point free zone around a core module exploring questions of how to make a workable research design and choosing the appropriate methodological tools.
By developing a space of collaborative work, discussion, reflection and imagination around particular methodological choices, the course will enable PhD students to make active choices about their own research design and how to give and receive constructive commentaries from peers and senior academics.

The course is convened by the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.

Jytte Agergaard is Professor at the Section for Geography where she is PhD coordinator. Trained as a human geographer, her research focusses on the importance and intersection of mobility, migration and urbanisation in explaining major trends in societal transformations of the Global South. In doing this, Jytte has been engaged in interdisciplinary and collaborative research projects in Africa and Asia and undertaken extensive fieldwork in Nepal, Vietnam, Tanzania and Ghana. She is currently leading the research project RurbanClimate (Climate resilience across the rural-urban continuum), that addresses small town growth in Ghana and Burkina Faso and how different governance actors (government at different levels, civil society, NGOs, user groups etc.) are positioned and equipped to manage these changes, while being impacted by
climate change within and beyond the towns.

Manja Hoppe Andreasen is Assistant Professor at the Section for Geography. Her research is concerned with city dynamics and urban expansion processes in the context of rapidly urbanizing low- and middleincome countries. Her research engages with a wide range of pressing urban issues, including informal housing, land investments, residential mobility, transport systems and climate change resilience. She has extensive research experience from developing countries, particularly Ghana, Tanzania and Bangladesh. While strongly bent towards qualitative methodologies, she has an aptitude for combining qualitative, quantitative and spatial methodologies.

Peter Carl After 30 years teaching graduate design and history and philosophy of architecture at the
University of Cambridge, Peter established the PhD Programme in Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He has taught at both University of Kentucky, Lexington, at Rice University, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Now retired, Peter has lectured and published on diverse topics and is presently researching the contribution of architectural and urban metabolism to practical wisdom. He holds an M.Arch from Princeton University and a Prix de Rome 1974-76.

Trine Agervig Carstensen is Associate Professor at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning where she is head of the research group Spatial Change and Planning. She is trained in social geography, and at the core of her research is the relationship between people’s everyday life and the built environment and its implications for urban planning and governance, sustainable urban mobility and urban liveability. Her research has a focus on how marginalised citizen groups use, experience and prefer public space and living environments. She has explored how novel methods for citizen sensitive knowledge production on living conditions, daily mobility and place attachment can inform and improve the inclusiveness and sustainability of urban planning. Her current research is about governance models in support of urban agriculture and on the potentials of constructed meeting places in-between neighbourhoods for enhancing the social capital among social housing residents.

Sonja Dümpelmann joined the Rachel Carson Center in July 2023 as co-director and as the new
chair of the environmental humanities at LMU Munich. Dümpelmann is a historian of urban
landscapes and environments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among other things, she
brings concerns related to the built environment, its use, form, design, and representation as well as
plants into discussions in the environmental humanities. Before moving to Munich, she was a tenured
full professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania
Weitzman School of Design. More information can be found on her website: https://www.sonjaduempelmann.com.

Patience Mguni is Assistant Professor in the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning. She is an urban researcher interested in understanding the realities and possible futures of African cities, investigating the dynamics of governing informal urbanisation in the face of climate change. She graduated in 2015 with a Phd in Sustainability Transitions in urban water management, and has an Msc (Eng) in Planning and the Environment from Aalborg University (2010). She currently is Work Package Leader on the Danida-funded 'Pathways to Water Resilient South African Cities' project and also holds an honorary reseach fellowship at the Future Water Institute at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests are Nature-based Solutions, urban water management, the Water-Energy-Food nexus and governance of sustainability transitions in cities in East and Southern Africa.

Rikke Munck Petersen is Associate Professor at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning. Her artistic practice-based research, teaching and municipal and governmental consultancy work bridges machinic, posthuman, aesthetic, caring, and speculative perspectives centered around experimental design and planning methods, aesthetic experience, mediation, affect, care, transformation, heritage, ecological thinking and nature-cultures. Her latest films and publications, Gudena°dalen Pilotfilm (2023), TOUCHING VISIONS (2021), Machinic Visions of the Planetary” (Media and Environment, forthcoming 2023), “Drone affect: Folded Points of Views as a Co-affection Method for Empathy and Care”, (Emotion, Space and Society, 2021) and The dispatched drone and affective distance in fieldwork (The Senses and Society,2020), deal with fieldwork, machine vision and collective filmmaking’s sensorial and affective co-creative capacity to strengthen experience
sharing, attunement, care, design and action in relation to heritage and landscapes as a common good. 

Henriette Steiner is an Associate professor and Head of Section at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in history and philosophy of architecture from the University of Cambridge and works with issues of diversity and justice in architecture and urban history often through feminist writing collectives. Recent books include Tower to Tower. Gigantism in Architecture and Digital Culture (with Kristin Veel, MIT Press, 2020) and Touch in the Time of´Corona. Reflections on Love, Care, and Vulnerability in the Pandemic (with Kristin Veel, De Gruyter, 2021; Danish translation 2023) and Untold Stories: On Women, Gender and Architecture in Denmark (with Jannie Bendsen and Svava Riesto, Strandberg Publishing, 2023 (English and Danish editions)).

Thaïsa Way is the Director of Garden and Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks. She also serves as the PI for the Mellon funded “Democracy and Landscape: Race, Identity, and Difference Initiative.” Dr. Way holds a PhD from Cornell University, a Master of Architectural History from the University of Virginia, and a BS from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (2016) and a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (2018). She is a scholar of landscape history teaching in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University and previously at the College of Built Environments, University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Way served as founding director of Urban@UW, a coalition of urban researchers and teachers collaboratively addressing complex urban challenges. She also founded and leads the Deans Equity and Inclusion Initiative, comprised of 40 leaders of design and planning programs across the nation. This initiative seeks to collectively move design and planning practices towards a more just future through how we teach, train, and educate the next generation, with a focus on mentoring early career faculty.