Permalink Submitted by Paul Nugent on 11 September 2025
Organization/ affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
A Research Masters is quite unlike a taught Masters degree, which many Universities have come to regard as their cash-cow. It involves much more active learning and mastery of a given field, but crucially it also requires the pursuit of original research. In the case of the ASC, this involved periods of fieldwork across different parts of the African continent. This volume provides a poignant testimony to the voyage that graduates of ResMA embarked upon and how it shaped their ways of thinking and future careers - whether in academia or beyond it. The individual contributions reflect on the personal experience of engaging with the challenges of fieldwork and distil the main findings from some markedly different projects. It is a standing testimony to what ResMA has achieved, both for the contributors personally and for serious scholarship about Africa. It would be a great pity if it all had to end here.
A Research Masters is quite unlike a taught Masters degree, which many Universities have come to regard as their cash-cow. It involves much more active learning and mastery of a given field, but crucially it also requires the pursuit of original research. In the case of the ASC, this involved periods of fieldwork across different parts of the African continent. This volume provides a poignant testimony to the voyage that graduates of ResMA embarked upon and how it shaped their ways of thinking and future careers - whether in academia or beyond it. The individual contributions reflect on the personal experience of engaging with the challenges of fieldwork and distil the main findings from some markedly different projects. It is a standing testimony to what ResMA has achieved, both for the contributors personally and for serious scholarship about Africa. It would be a great pity if it all had to end here.