GCAS College Dublin
GCAS College Dublin
The Global Centre for Advanced Studies
The World’s First, Global Debt-Free College Owned by Faculty and Graduates Offering EU Accredited Degrees.
At the Global Centre for Advanced Studies we encourage, promote and cultivate the spirit of innovation and research. Our research fellows and student researchers have produced excellent research findings and ideas.
The GCAS Research Fellows Programme (GCAS-RFP) is designed to increase our academic and research resources by attracting top-level researchers through which our global network will multiply.
A GCAS Research Fellow is someone whose research and scientific findings align with, support and extend the values of GCAS. Our core values include: inclusivity, emancipation of all things living, debt free education, democracy, equality (economic, culturally, socially, educationally), original research, global and local organizing, courage, truth-telling, reclaiming and preserving common public spaces, creating and preserving alternative thinking
GCAS’s mission is high-quality, debt-free education that provides the resources for creative and new forms of research that is not possible in a traditional university setting. We believe that education is inherently an intersubjective experience that requires sharing ideas openly, proposing, and establishing new and bold lines of thinking and actions in rigorous scientific ways. Thus, what is essential to our academic community is respecting fellow researchers with different and sometimes challenging lines of thinking, performance, and action. The heart of what we do is to establish and maintain an open, inclusive, and challenging environment within which one can develop ideas and research, critically, what they find important for the world.
GCAS provides an alternative to traditional academia by providing support that allows researchers to do serious scientific and interdisciplinary research when compared to the traditional model of higher education, which is premised upon student debt, profit, and research that too often fails to address the most vexing issues confronting our planet’s survivability and further, true human flourishing. GCAS believes that a researcher/student has a responsibility to the public good through rigorous academic research. Our MA and Ph.D. programmes provides students with the opportunity to conduct serious and sustained scientific research in partnership with our faculty and academic community.
All MA and Ph.D. student-researchers have the option of conducting independent research under faculty supervision provided that the research aims and objectives are not satisfied through the courses/seminars that GCAS is currently offering in the current term (i.e., fall, winter, spring, summer).
Student-researchers must have a faculty member agree to work with them and both parties (i.e., student-researcher and faculty-researcher) must agree on the terms and conditions of the advanced independent study. The advanced independent study syllabus must be:
Definition: A fundamental practice within academic practice is peer review. By ‘peer review’ we mean that one’s research peers (i.e., fellow researchers/ students within the GCAS Graduate School) exchange ideas, critical but constructive responses to research programmes. To practice this GCAS College has implemented the Research Peer Group (RPG) which is a programme in which rigorous peer review practices take place that ensures quality assurance and review.
Purpose: The purpose of the Research Peer Group (RPG) is to hold doctoral researchers to the highest academic and scientific standards in order to contribute and publish their sound, coherent, creative and original research findings to the public. Dissertations at GCAS-College Dublin will be made public. This purpose will be accomplished through the following practices:
Research continues to show that working in peer groups favors more creative and rigorous research outcomes. Owing to this GCAS College has implemented a Peer-2-Peer “P2P” pedagogical infrastructure in our Ph.D. programme and now in the MA programme. To that end, students in this programme will be required to meet once a month with their P2P research group unless otherwise specified. Students are expected to read and engage with each other’s research with the aim to strengthen individual research findings. Researchers are also expected to present their research findings in a manner conducive to P2P networking. The format for P2P MA Research Groups will be held online in our Research Platform platform or in person as the context dictates. Each researcher is expected to attend, share and contribute. For this each researcher will be awarded requisite credit that is needed to fulfill the required credits needed to complete the programme. Should a student fail to meet this requirement they will “fail” this crucial portion of the programme and will have to repeat the requirements at a later date, which likely will delay graduation.
In the digital age, the basic concept of a “library” is itself being redefined. Although the physicality of books, journals, and libraries remains important it is no longer necessary. Course materials for classes can now be procured in multiple ways and in a manner two decades ago was unimaginable. Nevertheless, a school and research institute like GCAS must provide a way to guide students in good research materials. Access to JSTOR and similar databases remains essential. This is why we have planned to provide access to our students as we develop Phase Il of our Master Plan below.