LibGuides: SOC 0315: International Migration: Prepare for research

Introduction

How do you ask useful, impactful, critical questions in sociological research? Why do questions, sources, and searches matter so much?

Here are some steps to guide you in your journey:

Adopt a critical approach to research
Develop your research question
Review background guides and resources to refine your question
Use BruKnow + keyword search strategy to find background items

Adopt a critical approach to research

Note: This section is still in-progress and based on the work of our talented colleague, Dr. Leo Lovemore!

The Brown University Library facilitates and supports critical research practices that ask how bias, power, and uneven access to resources are at work in the labor of scholarship.

Consider reflecting on the following set of questions and resources to develop and integrate critical perspectives into your research plans:

What makes a source authoritative in economics? Who decides?
How do dynamics of power shape citational practice?
What does it mean to decolonize knowledge?
Is sociology an objective deicipline? What counts as evidence?
How is bias embedded in knowledge-making?

Key resources for learning more:

"Authority is Constructed and Contextual," Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. ACRL, 2016.
"Re-examining Authority," Frame: Authority Is Constructed and Contextual, PALNI Consortium, October 27, 2022.
"Why Citational Practice?" Teaching Citational Practice.
Shanelle E. Kim, "The Paths We Were Told To Follow" A Citational Practice Worksheet for Students." Teaching Citational Practice 1 (2021): Progressive Pedagogies for Humanities Research and Citation.
Annabel L. Kim, “The Politics of Citation.” Diacritics 48, no. 3 (2020): pp. 4–9.
Eve Tuck and K.Wayne Yang, "Decolonization is not a Metaphor," Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.
Adam J. P. Gaudry. “Insurgent Research.” Wicazo Sa Review 26, no. 1 (2011): 113–36.
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.

Review background guides and resources to refine your question

How do researchers in your discipline approach the topic you'd like to investigate? Before diving into case studies, working papers, and other specific evidence, it may help you to take a step back and look at what we call background resources. These include:

Handbooks and subject encyclopedias
Annual reviews
Books with an overview/pedagogical approach
and more!

Below are some specific places to start with sociology research:

Oxford Handbooks Online - Results in Sociology
OHO is a collection of the best Handbooks in 14 subject areas. The series contain in-depth, high-level articles by scholars at the top of their field. All Handbooks are available online as well as in print, and monthly updates introduce articles in advance of print publication. This link will direct you to articles across all handbooks which are tagged with Sociology (n > 1800)
Annual Review of Sociology
Like Handbooks, annual reviews are curated publications that attempt to capture the most important developments across a field - in this case, year by year. You may find a direct source to cite here; read a review article to add to your understanding; and/or follow the works cited within a review article to find relevant articles for your research.

Oxford Handbooks Online This link opens in a new window
Provides access to review essays that evaluate the current thinking on a field or topic, current.
2012-2020; Oxford Handbooks Online: Scholarly Research Reviews brings together the world's leading scholars to write review essays that evaluate the current thinking on a field or topic, and make an original argument about the future direction of the debate. OHO is a collection of the best Handbooks in 14 subject areas. The series contain in-depth, high-level articles by scholars at the top of their field. All Handbooks are available online as well as in print, and monthly updates introduce articles in advance of print publication.

Find background texts with BruKnow: The Library Catalog

BruKnow is the Library Catalog. It is a simple and powerful search tool for finding books, ebooks, articles, journals, videos, digital media, and more.

You can paste citations into BruKnow for easy access to books and articles, or you can use keyword searches to discover sources for your research.

Example Boolean Search

Topic 1: migrat* OR refugee* OR ("displaced person" OR "displaced people")
Topic 2: climate OR environment OR weather
Geography: North Africa
Search: (migrat* OR refugee* OR ("displaced person" OR "displaced people")) AND (climate OR environment OR weather) AND "North Africa"

When you want to add a geographic area, consider the following:

How is this area defined in the existing research? by different governments? organizations? How or has it changed over time?
How granular or specific is geography defined in your research question?
Am I searching in a general database or something that is already focused on this region?

BruKnow results include material from a wide range of disciplines and sources. For the topic of migration, you may want to exclude medical sources by clicking the red box to the right of the source name.

You may also include the name of specific frameworks, theories, methodologies if there are too many results.

For more detailed instructions on using BruKnow, including how to use advanced search features to narrow by title and subject see: