Eastern Exploits: SSRC Eurasia Program Summer Workshop in Quantitative Methods

After returning to the US last Thursday I spent the weekend at home in Minnesota and then headed on Sunday to Madison, Wisconsin for the Social Science Research Council Eurasia Program Title VIII Summer Workshop in Quantitative Methods. The workshop was an intensive week long qualitative training on survey research and data sets available in Eurasia. We had a lecture style class in the mornings and then in the afternoons we presented our research papers. I presented a research design for the quantitative section of my dissertation. I was having some problems operationalizing a couple of the variables to the comparative context and I received some really great feedback and ideas for my project. Plus it was nice that we spent an entire hour discussing my paper and I had two very involved discussants, one who wrote her dissertation on human trafficking in Russia. In the afternoons we also had a couple of thematic lectures by UW-Madison professors. This workshop was a really great experience and I was happy to be a part of it even though I had had a cold and was only able to spend two days at home between retuning from Russia and the going to the workshop. It was also nice that the workshop was in Madison which is only 3.5 hours from Minnesota and so I got to drive instead of being stuck in airports. Also it was fun to be in Madison again because I lived there for a summer internship during college and really loved the city! Here are some pictures from my trip.

I always thought this was a library but it turns out it is the State Historical Society building.