Investigative Methods: An NCRM Innovation Collection

This Innovation Collection on investigative methods brings together investigators working in different domains, sectors, and on different topics of interest to help capture the breadth, scope and relevance of investigative practices over 10 substantive chapters. Each of the papers presents a different investigative method or set of methods and, through case studies, attempts to demonstrate their value. All the contributions, in different ways and for different purposes, seek to reconstruct acts, events, practices, biographies and/or milieux, to which the researchers in question lack direct access, but which they want to reconstruct via the traces those phenomena leave behind, traces themselves often produced as part of the phenomena under investigation. These include reports of methods used in investigations on: - The use of force by state actors, including into police violence, military decisions to attack civilians, the provenance of munitions used to attack civilians, and the use and abuse of tear gas; - Networks of far-right discourse, and its links to criminal attacks and state-leveraged misinformation campaigns; - Archives to establish the penal biographies of convicts and the historical practices of democratic petitioning; - Corporate structures and processes that enable tax avoidance and an avoidance of legal responsibilities to workers and the environment. A working principle of the collection is that investigative methods may be considered, alongside creative, qualitative, quantitative, digital, participatory and mixed methods, a distinct yet complementary style of research

Representations of Iran(ians) in Mainstream European News Sites

What role do media play in promoting or impeding intercultural understanding and international relations in times of conflict? With this question in mind, Leyla's research focuses on Iran's coverage in three mainstream European media during a period marked by tensions at home and abroad. Adopting Critical Discourse Analysis as theory and method, the study examines articles published on selected British, French, and German news sites juxtaposed with their attached comments, with the aim of contributing to scholarly work on cross-national comparative examination of foreign news coverage and 'top-down' Othering in journalistic texts in addition to incorporating an investigation into non-institutional discourse and 'bottom-up' Self/Other representations in comment sections.Welche Rolle spielen die Medien bei der Förderung oder Behinderung der interkulturellen Verständigung und internationalen Beziehungen in Konfliktzeiten? Vor diesem Hintergrund konzentriert sich Leylas Forschung auf die Berichterstattung über den Iran in drei europäischen Mainstream-Medien in einer Zeit, die von Spannungen im In- und Ausland geprägt war. Die Studie übernimmt Kritische Diskursanalyse als Theorie und Praxis und untersucht Artikel, die auf ausgewählten britischen, französischen und deutschen Nachrichtenseiten veröffentlicht wurden, und stellt sie den beigefügten Kommentaren gegenüber, mit dem Ziel, einen Beitrag zu wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten zur grenzüberschreitenden vergleichenden Untersuchung ausländischer Berichterstattung zu leisten und ‚top-down‘ Othering in journalistischen Texten, zusätzlich zur Aufnahme einer Untersuchung des nicht-institutionellen Diskurses und ‚bottom-up‘-Selbst-/Andere-Darstellungen in Kommentarsektionen