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Member rate £527.50
Non-Member rate £1055.00
Save £45 Loyalty discount applied automatically*
Save 5% on each additional course booked
* If you attended our Methods School during the calendar years 2024 or 2025, you qualify for £45 off your course fee.
Date: Thursday 21 – Friday 22 August and Tuesday 26 – Thursday 28 August 2025
Location: Online and Leontos Sofou Building, CITY College
Time: 13:30 – 17:00 EEST
The course is designed for a demanding audience of scholars, professional analysts, and advanced students, including PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers. Participation is limited to a maximum of 16 participants to ensure that your instructor has the opportunity to focus on your specific needs during the course.
It focuses on the current state of populism research within political science and beyond. It will familiarise you with the long history of populist phenomena as well as with the various attempts by political research to map, interpret and theorise them diachronically. Special emphasis will be given to the limitations of mainstream approaches and to the conceptual, methodological and analytical challenges marking contemporary populism research. Last but not least, a set of conceptual and methodological innovations will be presented and discussed in a bid to facilitate the reinvigoration of populism research.
By the end of this course, you will have developed:
3 ECTS credits awarded for engaging fully in class activities.
1 additional ECTS credit awarded for completing a post-course assignment.
Yannis Stavrakakis is Professor of Political Discourse Analysis at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he is currently directing the Postgraduate Programme in Political Theory and the Laboratory for the Study of Democracy (both at the School of Political Sciences) as well as the POPULISMUS Observatory: www.populismus.gr. His research primarily focuses on contemporary political theory (with emphasis on psychoanalytic and post-structuralist approaches) and the analysis of ideology and discourse in late modern societies (with emphasis on populism and anti-populism, post-democracy and the role of artistic practices). He is the author of Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999), The Lacanian Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), and Populist Discourse: Recasting Populism Research (New York: Routledge 2024). He is also editor of the Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of the Research Handbook on Populism (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2024).
What is usually debated as ‘populism’ in public debate? Why does it emerge? How have the social sciences and especially political science tried to identify and make sense of it? What are the main questions emerging through a brief overview of the field? Special emphasis will be given to the relationship between populism, democracy and representation within political modernity.
Starting to tackle the questions highlighted in the previous session, the second day will be devoted to a mental journey through the main populist phenomena in the last two centruries from American populism of the 1890s to Russian populism of the same era and then to Latin American populism and the European experience. The list is far from exhaustive, but it will help us move beyond eurocentric accounts of a rather complex phenomenon.
Moving from the realm of populist politics to the different ways in which the social sciences have approached the phenomenon, one is bound to encounter and register the ambiguities of the influential work of Richard Hofstadter and his intellectual co-travellers, still underlying standard contemporary understandings of populism and its relation to democracy. A critical assessment may be in order. How should this proceed in concrete terms?
As global populism research is entering a terrain of methodological pluralism, what are the new research sensibilities allowed to emerge? What are the new thematic foci forcing themselves into our interellectual horizon and how can diverse methods (discursive, performative, socio-cultural, psycho-social, etc.) enrich populism research as it is unfolding today? Our discussion will also cover issues of definition, mixed methods and the resulting typologies.
How can you use such methods in your own research on populism? What are the new methodological directions emerging that could be useful in addressing your own research questions? This is your chance to put forward challenges you face in your own research work and seek innovative orientations and new research techniques.
We will make extensive use of the chapters in:
Further references
You will be expected to attend two online sessions on Thursday 21 and Friday 22 August, for around six hours in total. The in-person classroom sessions will take place on Tuesday 26 - Thursday 28 August at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, for three hours each day. You must attend all sessions to complete the course.
You will get access to the learning platform at least 2 weeks in advance to prepare for the courses with pre-readings and pre-recordings. You are expected to spend around 20 hours per week of preparation, 40 hours in total, ahead of the course starting.
The instructor will conduct Q&A sessions during the course and offer designated office hours for one-to-one consultations.
No specific prerequisite knowledge is required. However, participants should be familiar with populist politics and populism research to a degree incorporating a comparative perspective encompassing developments beyond the European radical right and a minimal awareness of the methodological pluralism currently emerging within populism research.
You will be expected to engage with conceptual reflexivity and multi-disciplinary methods in order to move beyond stereotypical perspectives and capture the complexity of populist phenomena and of the research effort required to interpret them rigorously.