RSS


This ERASMUS Intensive Programme course provides scientists and postgraduate students with a multipurpose platform to stimulate biocultural diversity studies, an emerging multidisciplinary endeavour dedicated to understanding the complex and dynamic interrelationships between humans, other species and ecosystems. Over a three year period, BIOCULTURE  IP will train a critical mass of young students in biocultural diversity research methods and facilitate the exchange of experiences between leading scientists and young researchers within Europe. Coordinated by and initiated in 2010 at Kent’s Centre for Biocultural Diversity (CBCD), BIOCULTURE consists of a two-week intensive course followed by a web-based virtual classroom engaging all participants. The first course was held in April 2010 in Canterbury ,UK, the second is scheduled for Barcelona in 2011, and the third for Vienna in 2012. Lectures and seminars address key concepts such as co-evolution, agrobiodiversity, historical ecology and biocultural diversity, and European issues, such as traditional agriculture, crop diversity, urbanization, migration, and the conservation of natural resources, languages and agricultural heritage. In interactive methods workshops, Masters and Doctoral students design and refine research proposals and then communicate their field experience via the virtual classroom. Programme alumni will form a community of researchers whose subsequent research and continued interaction via the BIOCULTURE website will promote understanding of European biocultural diversity.

Current partners: University of Kent (UK), Wageningen University (NL), Autonomous University of Barcelona (ES), Uppsala University (SE), University of Natural and Applied Sciences (AT), Tallinn University (ET)

Taught by Europe’s leading educators and researchers in Biocultural Diversity Studies

  • The latest theoretical concepts, contemporary issues, policy debates
  • Cutting edge qualitative and quantitative methods and data analysis techniques and software
    • Research Design
    • Participant Observation, Interviewing, Questionnaires
    • Cultural domain analysis (freelists, identification, pile sorts, triads, paired comparison, weighted ranking, ratings, consensus analysis)
    • Social Network Analysis
    • Measuring ecological knowledge
    • Ik of Temporal Dimensions and Change
    • Home garden/plot inventory
    • Market survey
    • Visual Anthropology techniques
    • ANTHROPAC, ATLAS TI, UCINET and others.
  • Innovative interactive teaching sessions, and learning-by-doing practical workshops
  • Focus on developing student research topics, design and ethics
  • Special ethnographic focus on Europe and its migrants, but open to all areas
  • Featuring an innovative virtual classroom and interactive forum that will open in March and close in September, to facilitate both preparation, in-the field-consultation and follow-up to the course.
  • Links to GDF’s Biocultural Diversity Learning Network
  • 10 days, 80 contact hours + virtual classroom participation; 5 ECTS credits