Last Walking Seminar September 22nd

Last Friday September 22nd, 13 scholars walk-talked a hike from Overveen to Sandpoort-Noord, discussing the topic: Questions to do with doings.

What started off as a rainy introduction round at the platform in Overveen, turned into a beautiful, sunny hike along dunes, a fairy-tale-like swan-lake and early-autumn-coloured woods. 

 As we walked, we discussed about ways to capture practices and doings in ethnographic fieldwork and writing. How to phrase questions in ways that will help us understanding what our interlocutors do- and that they might take for granted? How to write about practices in a way that is not just descriptive? How to create a text that is touching (or provocative) while writing about practices that are often mundane? These discussions also brought us back to more fundamental questions, such as: why is it that in this specific research, we want to study practices, rather than narratives for example, or what do we mean by “practices” in the first place? Meanwhile, the walk reminded us to keep looking around, to not just look down to our feet but also up to the tips of the trees. Sometimes lost in deep or confusing thoughts, we were interrupted by small details that reminded us to keep our feet on the ground. 

Tired, but “good tired”, we checked in at Station Sandpoort-Noord around 5 pm to take the train back to Amsterdam. Although we didn’t gather our thoughts into a final collective conclusion, the array of topics and questions that was discussed reminded us of the importance and challenges of staying with practices.

Next Walking Seminar on September 22nd

The topic of our next walking seminar will be "Questions to do with doing". As present day researchers, we tend to not just want to learn about people’s opinions (beliefs, feelings), we also seek to know what they do. Classically, this is where participant observation comes in. This allows for the observations of doings. However, sometimes such observation is not so easy to accomplish. The doings are too intimate or too rare or too dangerous and so on. 

Which leaves us with interviews. How to do interviews that teach you about doings? Which questions to ask? How to get through too self-evident, or non-verbal and/or contentious aspects of practices? 

And then, at a later stage (for if you have gathered all your materials this walking seminar is still for you!) – how to write about practices – on which/whose terms? How may we best navigate in our writing between academic language(s) and field/interview words?

Be welcome to join our walk-talk on september 22nd.