The thesis as a goal. How to prepare a research project

This seminar is designed for students and graduates in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts who wish to formulate a research project at any level of academic qualification. Students are expected to creatively grasp the fundamental components of a research project, both epistemological and textual, and apply this knowledge to planning their future dissertation. The first part of the seminar will explore the meaning, interrelationships, and discursive formulation of the research topic, problem, and objectives within a research project; how these elements are linked to the theoretical framework, the state of the art, the development of a working hypothesis, and the determination of the methodology. The second part will examine how these elements are epistemologically and discursively repurposed within a dissertation.

The seminar promotes the creative and practical appropriation of the content it presents. To this end, it is grounded in the cognitive-communicative epistemological approach that has informed research on the teaching of academic discourse genres in recent decades. The following principles are drawn from this research: a. the interdependence of reading and writing in the text production process; b. the relevance of developing reading and writing skills in collaborative and public (classroom) correction processes; c. the advantages of comparing several versions of the same text. In this way, participants will work intensively with model examples and will be encouraged to engage in concrete and guided participation.