While the Area Studies Seminar introduces students to the ideas and institutions of a particular country, the Research Methods Seminar introduces students to methods for engaging those ideas and institutions as they investigate local culture. The course is taught as a workshop, with independent field exercises forming the basis of the course's schedule and discussion.

Students complete a series of assignments that introduce increasingly complex fieldwork methods (observation, participation, surveying, interviewing, analysis, etc.) and that explore the challenges of language ability, ethical issues, theorizing about experience, and synthesizing field knowledge into formal academic writing.  While the emphasis is primarily on how students are learning about a culture, their discussion about the issues and encounters they have each week also create a larger, interconnected web of meanings about the place they are investigating and help them to develop stronger ideas about what they might pursue in their Field Research Project.