Area studies | EPFL Graph Search

Area studies (also known as regional studies) are interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national/federal, or cultural regions. The term exists primarily as a general description for what are, in the practice of scholarship, many heterogeneous fields of research, encompassing both the social sciences and the humanities. Typical area study programs involve international relations, strategic studies, history, political science, political economy, cultural studies, languages, geography, literature, and other related disciplines. In contrast to cultural studies, area studies often include diaspora and emigration from the area. Interdisciplinary area studies became increasingly common in the United States and in Western scholarship after World War II. Before that war American universities had just a few faculty who taught or conducted research on the non-Western world. Foreign-area studies were virtually nonexistent. After the war, liberals and conservatives alike were concerned about the U.S. ability to respond effectively to perceived external threats from the Soviet Union and China in the context of the emerging Cold War, as well as to the fall-out from the decolonization of Africa and Asia. In this context, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York convened a series of meetings producing a broad consensus that to address this knowledge deficit, the U.S. must invest in international studies. Therefore, the foundations of the field are strongly rooted in America. Participants argued that a large brain trust of internationally oriented political scientists and economists was an urgent national priority. There was a central tension, however, between those who felt strongly that, instead of applying Western models, social scientists should develop culturally and historically contextualized knowledge of various parts of the world by working closely with humanists, and those who thought social scientists should seek to develop overarching macrohistorial theories that could draw connections between patterns of change and development across different geographies.

An End-to-End Data Pipeline for Managing Learning Analytics

Denis Gillet, Juan Carlos Farah, Sandy Ingram, Joana Catarina Soares Machado

Despite the importance of learning analytics in digital education, there is limited support for researchers in education to generate, access, and share experimental data while complying with ethical and privacy legislation. We propose a set of related tool ...

2021

Short-term field study programmes for developing interdisciplinary skills in engineering education

Florence Graezer Bideau, Roland John Tormey, Marc Laperrouza, Johanna Susette Gonçalves Martin, Eric Hoesli

Short-term field study involves groups of students working in an off-campus (sometimes international) setting, and often involves working on realistic, open-ended problems, in interaction with a host community. Such learning experiences are intended to dev ...

2019