Walking Seminar on Ethnographic methods and guiding questions

The next walking seminar will be on October 16^th (from 13:00 o’clock until early evening, depending on the chosen destination). The theme will be Ethnographic methods and guiding questions.

Here is the tension: if you go into the field without a question your investigations risks to lack direction and you may not get any kind of grasp on what is going on. However, with a question that is too tight or too tightly handled, you may not be open enough to surprises. What are good ways of handling that tension in the practice of doing ethnographic research – that is to say what are good ways in your research?

If you are in the very last stage of a project, this tension has not gone away. For even if you are no longer in the position to gather more stories from the field, you still face the question how to tell those stories: as answers to questions you (ever so astutely) asked or as surprising findings that unexpectedly hit you in the face? (There may be other variants.. discuss!)

For those who would like to orient their thinking beforehand, here is a possibly inspiring text:

Taylor, Janelle S. 2014. “The Demise of the Bumbler and the Crock: From Experience to Accountability in Medical Education and Ethnography.” American Anthropologist 116 (3): n/a – n/a. doi:10.1111/aman.12124.

Anecdotalizing talking about anecdotes

  

During the planned slot for the walking seminar on Anecdotes it was raining heavily, and thunderstorms were closing in on the UvA building. But that could not deter us from meeting anyway! A large group gathered in the common room of the fifth floor. After a plenary start, we wandered in pairs through the one-year-old building of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. We discussed the role of anecdotes in our research with the following questions:

What makes a ‘good’ anecdote? How can ‘mere anecdotes’ be turned into essential parts of our work? How much ‘data’ does it take to make ‘an anecdote’? How many ‘anecdotes’ does it take to for materials to become ‘data’?

It was an fruitful Friday afternoon in which many anecdotes were told, and many events were ‘anecdotalized’ (Mike Michael 2012). Unique to this edition was that after three rounds of pair-discussion, we could come back together and discuss some of our insights, along with the suggested reading – Michael, M. (2012). Anecdote. In C. Lury & N. Wakeford (Eds.), Inventive methods the happening of the social (pp. 25-35). London: Routledge.

Thank you all for participating and hope to see you all next time!

Anecdotes

The next walking seminar will be on September 4^th (from 13:00 o’clock until early evening, depending on the chosen destination). The theme, inspired by the Lancaster Walking seminar, is Anecdotes.

“Merely anecdotal” is often a put down for social science research – But when is something an anecdote? And when is it more than that? Taking Mike Michael’s chapter as an inspiration we’ll be thinking about how we may use anecdotes in our writing in a way that is not “merely anecdotal”.

Here are the questions: What makes a ‘good’ anecdote? How can ‘mere anecdotes’ be turned into essential parts of our work? How much ‘data’ does it take to make ‘an anecdote’? How many ‘anecdotes’ does it take to for materials to become ‘data’?

Recommended reading:

Michael, M. (2012). Anecdote. In C. Lury & N. Wakeford (Eds.), Inventive methods the happening of the social (pp. 25-35). London: Routledge.

"If you have a spongy term, squeeze it!"

During our walk through the dunes nearby Sandpoort we discussed 'spongy terms'. 

While they may blackbox what they contain, and hide that they cover many realities, some of us concluded that the trick is to find what they do in the site we are looking at.

Others argued we may put them to good use – as one of us said he uses STS as a spongy method, to soak up ever more sites that he previously had not connected to his topic.

Yet others preferred the thought of 'squeezing them' to see what would come out.

We would like to thank all participants for walking with us. We look forward to a new edition, on which we will update you as soon as possible. And in the meantime, you could check out this twin-initiative:

http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/walkingseminar/

From Absences to Spongy terms

Last time we set out to walk in Abcoude. We discussed 'absences', while great weather, an inspiring atmosphere and a beautiful landscape were present among and all around us. We would like to thank those who were present for your valuable contributions. Also, We would like to invite to our next edition on June 5^th (from 13:00 o’clock until early evening, depending on the chosen destination).

The theme of the seminar on 5. June will be 'Spongy terms':

The words that as social scientists we work with may, in the course of long years and as they move between discourses, come to absorb ever more meanings. They may become ‘spongy terms’. Take examples such as care; body; health; but also power; culture; local; global; or empirical and theory.

When to avoid such terms as they have become all too fluid, gassy even, so that they come to evaporate? When to revitalise them? Throwing away – avoiding – a term sounds fine, but where to find other words, and don’t they have similar problems? And revitalising a term sounds fine as well, but how to do so – by attending to all its layers and meanings at the same time – or by just carving out a single, simple definition, sticking to it, and hoping you can master your text and your readers?

And the problem is not just confined to conversations between academics. There is also the traveling of terms between academia and informants. When to go along with the ways in which your informants use a spongy term – when to avoid using this term yourself, because your informants use it already (in another meaning) – when to work hard to reshape, push and pull, craft, invent and invert, terms and their meanings – as you think this might be good to do, a possible contribution?

And now for the walking seminar questions: what are the spongy terms that you come across in your work? Which ones bother you? What are so far your tactics in relation to them? What, in this respect, would you like to improve on? How might you want to do this?

First walking seminar edition 2015: Absences

There will be another edition of the Amsterdam Walking Seminar on 8 May 2015!

The theme of this first edition of 2015 is Absences.

As a researcher, one tends to remark on what is present in one’s field. You may talk about this with informants; observe it ethnographically; read about it in earlier literatures. But how to also remark upon the absences? How to notice what is not said and what is not done and what is not present – for better or worse?

Here are the questions we would like to address: 
what might be relevant absences in your research field? Do you think it would be worthwhile to attend to them? If so, which kinds of absences might be most relevant?  How have you tried so far to ‘catch’  them? What other possibilities deserve to be explored? Which ways of writing might help in highlighting relevant absences? And what about the concept absent/present, does that help (as it sensitises to the traces of what’s absent in what’s present) or hinder (as it holds on to this paired opposition)?

We are looking forward to walking and talking together.