Project Lead: Prof. Jonathan Larson (Assistant Professor of Education)
Vivero Fellow (2026-2027): Reid Singer
Vivero Fellow (Fall 2025): Jude Morgan
For Fall 2026 I seek a Vivero Fellow to help me follow up on a Fall 2025 Vivero project that focused on analysis of policy texts concerning how institutions of the European Union have approached the topic of inclusion over the past 75 years of the EU’s existence. After a pause for my own research leave in Spring 2026, I look to fine-tune that initial work, informed by additional sources for potential analysis.
This project explores how topic modeling or software such as Antconc can help detect useful patterns in word usage, frequency, co-occurrence etc to complement my own qualitative research training in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology. One model for how topic modeling can inform the use of qualitative methods and analysis in social research is a book by Cambridge University Press that I had the opportunity to review while I was on leave. Among the adjustments that I foresee to go deeper into this work are more selective comparisons of policy documents and how they developed over time as well as better contextualization of the degree of significance of word frequency.
Secondary work in the project could include continued play with visualizations, building on experiments from Fall 2025. However, I foresee that this semester’s phase of the project also allows more potential space to explore what ideas the Fellow has for which digital tools might be generative for analysis or presentation. There is some potential that time might need to be allocated for data cleaning, such as converting pdf files to text, as well as refining systems of organizing data.
Although this project is about a different global context, no knowledge of a language other than English is necessary, as I expect from my research to date that all of the published texts of interest (including possibly transcripts of publicly available video recordings) are available in English. There is some potential to join me in online interviews with persons working in a European educational policy space, as time and schedules with potential interviewees allows. This semester’s work might involve some support and collaboration from DASIL students.
This semester’s research builds on five previous semesters of working with a Fellow or research assistant or supervising directed research for credit related to my project’s broader interest in how the European Union tries to influence how its member states educate for diversity and inclusion. This project is intended to offer alternative perspectives for the US context on how topics have been taken up in policy environments involving different scales or levels of governance, and where educational policy has been decentralized. I believe that previous students working with me in these other capacities have appreciated the mentoring that I have provided about the research process as well as expanded knowledge about international affairs. I have over twenty years of experience as a qualitative (ethnographic and historical) researcher.
