Peter Tamas
Dr. Tamás specializes in qualitative and collaborative approaches to research in complex environments. He has taught research methods for post-conflict regions, qualitative analysis, proposal development, globalization, ethnographic methods, development theory and international education at all levels. He has supervised at the BSc, MSc and PhD levels. He has designed and taught both in the classroom and on-line using a variety of educational approaches.
His current research interests are:
• Collaboration, capacity building and validity in research in conflict and post-conflict regions
• Inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural dynamics in research
• Recipients' understandings and uses of both development and the developers who bring it
• Front line personnel's (both civilian and military) understandings and uses of development
• Narrative methods within poststructural and psychoanalytic theory
Dr. Tamás has worked in development both domestically and internationally on long-term and short-term development assignments in Bolivia, Afghanistan, Thailand and the Sakhalin Islands, and with police and marginalized urban groups in the United States.
Dr. Tamás has a doctorate in International Education from the Center for International Education at UMass Amherst, where his studies included a broad analysis of international social and economic development and subsequently an examination of the factors that condition the conduct of development professionals. His doctoral research looked at three things: how individuals become competent development professionals, how they work within the constraints of their institutions and how they make decisions in uncertain environments. Since graduation Dr. Tamás has continued to test the limits of research methods in his studies of development and development practitioners in complex environments