The Fast-Track in the Master Cultures of the Global South is intended to allow students with a promising academic profile to combine the Master's and doctoral phases and thus make qualification paths for an academic career more effective.
Requirements and procedures:
Students must submit an application to the program coordinator for admission to the Fast Track program for doctoral studies.
The application must be accompanied by a description of the thesis project and the Transcript of Records (ToR), which gives evidence of excellent research skills (grade average of at least 1.5, modules completed of at least 1, 2 and 3).
The application must be accompanied by a confirmation from a professor of the Master Cultures of the Global South that he/she agrees to supervise the Master's thesis and to be available as the first supervisor for a doctorate.
Comments on the exposé:
The exposé of around 2000 words must:
present the topic,
present the theoretical approach,
present the research question and corpus,
and show how the project can be expanded to a doctoral thesis.
"Thanks to the Fast-Track module of the M.A. program, I am able to expand my Master's thesis and develop it into my own Ph.D. research. In other words, my Master's thesis constitutes a fundamental part of my doctoral research. The Fast-track module has three advantages I would like to briefly mention based on my personal experience. Firstly, it helps students to further develop complex understandings of the theoretical and methodological approaches they are interested in. Secondly, it allows students to conduct in-depth research on relevant aspects of their research proposal that would otherwise have been limited by the scope and specialization of a Master's thesis. Thirdly, it may shorten the timeframe needed for finishing a PhD. In my specific case, with the Fast-Track module, I can analyse the practices of resistance of the Minga Indígena in Colombia by integrating a theoretical framework based on the concepts of nonviolence, temporalities, and territory. Thus, the Fast-Track module is a great opportunity for young scholars who want to engage in research from a decolonial and critical perspective."
