How to choose a topic for your own case study?

Selecting a topic for your case study may seem like a trivial thing to do. After all, it's just a topic, a label, a direction - what could be difficult or tricky about it? 

Well, we found out the hard way that this is probably the single most important decision  you will make with regard to your case study. The topic is not a label or title, it is neither generic, nor vague. The topic is your anchor and a bracket where all case study elements need to fit. In a nod to Lord Ismay, NATO's first Secretary General, who once said that NATO was created to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down, a De Facto case study topic is meant to keep the debate on a clearly controversial issue in the bracket, and leave adjacent debates or issues out.

Structural criterion

While the general domain of the case study can be generic (e.g. 5g networks controversies), the topic itself must refer to a specific controversy or contentious issue (e.g. 'Health threats from 5G towers' air waves' or 'Illegal use of 5G networks by governments for population mind-control'). To put it bluntly, each topic must provide field for debate and arguments pertaining to two clear and opposing claims, e.g. 'Governments use 5G for mind-control' vs '5G networks have nothing to do with mind-control or government influence'.

Relevance criterion

De Facto was, without exaggeration, a monumental effort with regard to the case studies. We had to adjust our approach several times to account for unexpected obstacles. But even there, we had a shared acknowledgement from the start that any case study must be relevant in each of the participating countries. In practice, this means that the underlying issue must be easily recognizable: across countries, but also across different social layers. For more educators to use it, their respective students must have heard - and perhaps heard a lot - about the issue. For the De Facto approach to work, there must be already a critical knowledge base - regardless of whether it is comprised of facts or speculations. Students will learn more about the topic, and developt their critical thinking skills and new cognitive patterns, but they should have a head start. Alongside brain biological development concerns, the build-up of awareness and engagement in broader social issues comes in mid- to late teen years.

In pragmatic terms, this means that you cannot just choose any topic you like. You will need to think, and probably collect some advice and feedback from others around you, on what could become a topic that your class will find engaging and worthy of spending time on.

Next, you need to consult your topic proposal with your peers in the course. They will provide you with feedback as to the relevance of the topic in other countries. And, perhaps most challenging and rewarding, you may find people for form a team and work on the case study development as a team!

How will all of this work? We will be setting a deadline for topic proposals - and we will expect them from each of you in the course forum. Please suggest at least one topic. We will then put together a qucik voting opportunity and see which topics get most approval and what are the possible teams. There will also be a feedback from a teacher with initial comments on the selection and some custom-tailored recommendation and advice for the topics who you will ultimately have chosen.

Last modified: Wednesday, 29 July 2020, 1:43 PM