Research Project in History and Politics
Course Material 2023/24
The Research Project in History and Politics provides an opportunity for Part IB students to develop their extended writing skills in diverse areas of study. The paper allows students to choose between the two pathways outlined below:
| History Pathway | This pathway gives students an opportunity to engage closely with a historical problem and to develop their extended writing skills. Questions on the paper have been devised by multiple supervisors with diverse interests; the paper therefore lends itself to a range of approaches. Some questions are likely to entail close examination and analysis of various kinds of primary source material and consideration of the issues presented by using these. Other questions explore crosscutting themes, potentially over longer periods of time, and may foreground historiographical discussion. Questions may also entail a combination of theme-based and source-based approaches. |
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Politics Pathway |
This pathway enables students to develop their skills further in diverse areas of research in the fields of politics and international relations, in critical engagement with key texts, and in the presentation of arguments and writing on varied topics related to debates in these fields. The approach to these topics may be primarily theoretical or empirical. Many of the questions are generally phrased in order to allow the student to decide, in discussion with the supervisor, whether to answer them in a general way or to concentrate on particular aspects or examples of the issue at hand. In doing so, conceptual issues should be considered, although not to the exclusion of relevant facts or specific arguments. |