Political scientists recently have taken great strides in addressing sexual harassment and assault in the discipline. Little has been said, however, about sexual violence that political scientists may confront during field research. Field research involves any data-collection activity that occurs away from a researcher’s home institution, including visiting a prominent archive, interviewing political elites, and conducting direct observation of political phenomenon, and fieldwork is widely considered essential to data collection and career development across political science subfields. Field researchers may experience numerous power disparities that put them at acute risk for sexual or gender-based violence in the field, and evidence suggests that such experiences are pervasive and professionally devastating. In an effort to reduce gender-based violence and discrimination across academic worksites, several disciplines and institutions have developed specific guidelines and protocols to prevent and address sexual harassment and assault during fieldwork (Berkeley PATH to Care Center 2020; University of California, Riverside 2018; University of Toronto, Department of Anthropology 2019; Woodgate et al. 2018). Political scientists, however, have largely failed to conceptualize field placements as work settings or to address gender-based violence during fieldwork in our curriculum, training, and policies. Instead, they rely on deeply held methodological fallacies that insist on a field researcher’s absolute privilege, trivialize experiences of sexual violence, and weaponize rape myths to portray survivors as professionally incompetent (Hunt 2022).

What are the ethical responsibilities that social science researchers have, not only to the people we study but also to ourselves as scholars and other scholars? This article argues that as political and social scientists, we need to expand our notion of research ethics, to adopt a notion that embraces treatment of our subject–participants and ourselves as researchers. This study is anchored in the still-growing literature on research ethics in fieldwork and draws on political science work on the ethical implications of the risks and realities of sexual violence for scholars who conduct fieldwork. The article looks beyond political science to feminist-informed research in the social sciences as it develops the argument about the ethical responsibilities of social scientists. In investigating the overarching question, the article addresses resources for survivors of sexual harassment and assault during field research.

Field research, defined as “leaving one’s home institution in order to acquire data, information, or insights that significantly inform one’s research” (Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015, 1), is a beneficial research practice. It also is a practice with significant safety risks, including sexual harassment, that can undermine the research process and harm researchers. Thus, combatting sexual harassment in the field is fundamental to maintaining the integrity of the research enterprise.

Social scientists with data science skills increasingly are assuming positions as computational social scientists in academic and non-academic organizations. However, because computational social science (CSS) is still relatively new to the social sciences, it can feel like a hidden curriculum for many PhD students. To support social science PhD students, this article is an accessible guide to CSS training based on previous literature and our collective working experiences in academic, public-, and private-sector organizations. We contend that students should supplement their traditional social science training in research design and domain expertise with CSS training by focusing on three core areas: (1) learning data science skills, (2) building a portfolio that uses data science to answer social science questions, and (3) connecting with computational social scientists. We conclude with practical recommendations for departments and professional associations to better support PhD students.

This article introduces a bundle of active learning activities for an introductory undergraduate course in research methods. In particular, the activities aim to help students develop core knowledge and skills that provide a foundation for reading and conducting quantitative and qualitative research. Active learning is a pedagogical practice with well-established benefits such as better student attitudes and improved content comprehension and application. I build on this conventional wisdom by applying a student-centred evaluation method, demonstrating that students perceive active learning as an effective complement to traditional lecturing and assignments for learning core methodological topics in political science.

Fieldwork is fraught with methodological and ethical concerns, particularly for those junior scholars seeking to establish themselves. There is a pressure to conduct research that pushes the boundaries of emerging techniques and brings our theories to bear on case studies that are underrepresented in the literature. Although this pressure is felt by nearly everyone, the barriers to accessing fieldwork and the premium of privilege lead to significant inequalities (Fujii 2016), which are becoming increasingly apparent as the academy diversifies. Being a white cis-male, I have benefited from overarching systems of privilege across my education, my career, and my international fieldwork. Yet as a gay man, international fieldwork poses potential challenges, illuminating additional realities with which researchers must contend.1

Feminist standpoint theorists highlight how relations of power and inequality impact our knowledge of the social world (Smith 1974). The hierarchical positioning of different social groups creates a world in which the experiences and perspectives of certain people are acknowledged while others are silenced (Hartsock 1998; Hekman 1997). Moreover, a researcher’s personal background—her race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other factors—condition what she is able to learn and how (Collins 2000). Together, this literature underscores how the social world—and who we are within it—shapes knowledge production.

This article discusses the integration of research methods training into a third-year elective undergraduate course. We suggest that the building blocks of research design can be embedded in courses without compromising their content. This introduces research methods to students who have no prior methods training or gives students with methods training more opportunities to engage in research design. We present evidence that this approach increased students’ self-assessed knowledge of and confidence with research-related skills, especially among those without prior methods training. Additionally, the analysis of research proposals—the final assignment of the course—revealed that most students were able to apply core research design skills. These findings demonstrate that progress in research methods skills is possible across the curriculum.

The articles in this symposium underscore at least three common points about understanding and combatting sexual harassment in the context of social science fieldwork:

The US-China relationship has worsened dramatically in recent years. After decades of pro-engagement policies toward China, a bipartisan consensus began to emerge around 2016 that engagement had neither accomplished US policy goals (such as encouraging China to liberalize politically) nor served US citizens well.1 At the same time, political changes within China have pointed to a declining appetite for engagement with the United States and sidelined the domestic constituencies who remained interested in cooperation and exchange. Further restrictions have shrunk the already limited space for media, civil society groups, and academic exchange in China. Pandemic-related border closures eliminated in-person exchanges almost completely for nearly three years. And some are concerned that China’s 2021 Personal Information Protection Law could be used to prosecute foreign researchers who conduct research in China (Lewis 2023).

The past decade has been a difficult time to be a scholar of Chinese politics. After Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, opportunities for international collaboration began disappearing, and local interlocutors became increasingly nervous about speaking with foreign researchers. Since 2016, these problems have been compounded by the increasingly tense US–China relationship. Changing attitudes and policies in both countries have hindered those who conduct research on China, work with Chinese collaborators, and recruit Chinese students. The Fulbright Program in China and Hong Kong was closed; National Institutes of Health investigations into foreign influence in US science have caused US-based scientists’ research productivity to decline; and visa restrictions have hindered efforts to recruit Chinese graduate students (Jia et al. 2023). Legal changes in China, including the 2021 Personal Information Protection Law and the 2023 revised Counter-Espionage Law, could be used to target foreign scholars who conduct research in China (Lewis 2023; McCarthy and Gan 2023). The COVID-19 pandemic compounded these challenges in several ways: it caused a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States and created severe pedagogical challenges for those teaching Chinese politics and other courses containing “sensitive” material that could put students—some now physically located in China—at risk (Gueorguiev et al. 2020).

Civic education is essential to the health of any democracy. When COVID-19 emerged in the spring of 2020, almost all civic education efforts went online. This increased interest in the effectiveness of online civic education. Does it lead to similar outcomes as in-person education? I used student evaluations from a youth civic engagement conference co-run by Latinx and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) non-profit organizations to compare learning outcomes on multiple dimensions of civic education, from an in-person conference in 2019 and an online conference in 2020. I find that although students improved over the course of both conferences, the 2019 in-person conference yielded slightly greater improvement in civic knowledge confidence than the online conference. Other dimensions—verifiable knowledge, self-efficacy, and community consciousness—increased after participation in the conference in both years; however, the increases were similar between the online and in-person formats.

During the past century, protest has become a shared experience around the world, as citizens across the continents have taken to the streets to demand political, social, and economic changes. In Asia—from China to India, Thailand to Myanmar—people have organized mass demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with colonial and state governments and their policies. Often, people shared news and supported protests in neighboring countries, using it as an opportunity to mobilize and coordinate their efforts for protest and leading to a growing sense of regional solidarity. Solidarity is possible despite differences in culture, history, and language because the citizens in the region share universal values.

Increasing tensions between the United States and China, a rise in anti-Asian sentiment, and the risk of government surveillance has dramatically altered the teaching and research contexts for scholars of Chinese politics. In this conversation, Dan Chen (University of Richmond), Rongbin Han (University of Georgia), and John Yasuda (Johns Hopkins University) discuss how questions of identity, politics, and security have affected classroom dynamics and their future research endeavors.

Engaging with higher education institutions from the People’s Republic of China (China or the PRC) raises difficult tensions for universities in liberal democratic contexts. Universities in China are overseen by a political party that routinely silences dissent and does not respect principles of academic freedom in the social sciences and humanities. For decades in the post–Mao era, this tension remained relatively muted outside of the PRC, but it has gained newfound significance as China’s power and assertiveness have grown globally.