Collecting words

What a heterogeneous group that had gathered for this walking seminar! The stories from the field and the people came from Lancaster and Japan, New York City and Mali, Bangladesh and New Newfoundland, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Europe and Afghanistan, Cameroon and Paris, Madrid and Barcelona, Brazil and India, Sweden and Belgium, Cambodia and the United States.

The format of the conversations was slightly different this time. Instead of discussing a topic, we talked about words. Everybody had brought three words that are decisive for her/his research project which made us end up talk about:

belief

policy

practice

ordering

life

place

browkerage

social rist

care

persuasion

attraction

aesthetics

appreciation

bad

will

drive

surprise

pictoresque

wasting

saving

recycling

freezer

coffee

intervene

crisis

guilt

womanhood

technology

scale

order

objectivity

chocolate

experience

embeddedness

resistance

body

recalcitrance

between

value

waste

The empirical in Brooklyn

Did you ever wonder what the "empirical" part of your "empirical research" was all about? This is the topic we discussed about while walking through Brooklyn, or, at least, the Dutch original version of it: Breukelen.


How is empirical research empirical?

Over the course of our research we collect material. We interview people, observe practices or gather other kinds of "data", papers, pictures, numbers. We do "empirical" research. But how?

What is "empirical" about your research? What kind of material do you use? What kind of material do you find easy to engage with? Which one is more difficult?

How do you mobilize your material? How do you mobilize it in papers? How in conference presentations or discussion?

What do you make your material do? Does it guide the reader or disconcert him/her? Does it convince, demonstrate, puzzle or to upset the reader?

And what does your material make of you – and of your plans, politics and theories?

new dates

The dates for the next walking seminars have been set:

30th March
13th April
16th May

What has not been decided yet are the walks that we will take. Any suggestions?

Attending to appreciations

Appreciations are everywhere. Diners enjoy a tasty dish in the restaurant, readers love a book at night times, and commuters stop their hasty pace to listen to a string quartet playing in the underground corridors of the subway network. But how to think of such moments of appreciation? How to write about them? These were the challenges we faced during our last walking seminar to the sea where snow, sand and water variously lay upon each other.




Before this walking seminar Annemarie had sent around a brand new not yet published (or reviewed!) article with the title: Is het lekker? Articulating appreciation. The paper itself concentrates on the issue of articulating appreciation. Its main concern is with relations between ‘language’ and ‘bodies’. It has been written for a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society with the title Social theory after Strathern. Engaging with the work of Marilyn Strathern, the article demonstrates how tracing a term (here: lekker) may be a way to link up sites and situations without seeking a ‘structure’ beneath them. It also plays with what it is to write in one language (here English) about field work done in another (here Dutch).

During the discussion in the morning and the walk in the afternoon we talked about the article a little bit. But we mainly used it as a good occasion to think about the relevance of “appreciations” in our own varied research projects and, from this, develop a lot of new questions that arise from attending to appreciations in practice.

Dangerous expectations

Walking is dangerous. Snow and avalanches are serious threats in the Alps. The water and inundations can become a real peril in the Netherlands and had been warned of when we headed off for the walking seminar. But as it turned out we were lucky. The water level was extraordinary high, yet the paths had remained dry.


While walking we talked about - sometimes also dangerous - expectations of audiences.


There is your research. You know what you have done so far, what you are doing at the moment and what your plans are for the next couple of month. In other words: You know what this is all about. But not so others. Your colleagues or professors, your friends or family have little knowledge, sometimes no clue about what your research is about. As you meet them you give short descriptions, introductions and explanations. Then, you hear comments and remarks. These moments of encounter are both, brief and instructive.

How do you introduce your research topic to which audience? For instance, what do you say in academic research seminars and what to "the public", your family sitting next to the Christmas tree? What do you have to explain where?

Once you have introduced your topic, what are the comments that you hear most often? What does your audience expect? For example, what approach do they assume that you take? Or which topics/chapters might they expect in a thesis like yours?

In which ways do you fulfill these expectations? And more importantly: In which ways does your research differ? How can you steer the expectations? How do you frame your object in a way that clearly indicates what you are doing and what not?

And how - on a good day - might you even play with the expectations of your audiences?

Getting lost while walking and talking about nasty situations in the field

On the 18th November we went for another walk/talk. The path we strolled along this time was new. Our way lead from the trainstation of Castricum through the dunes back to the point we started from. And I must say, I found it the most beautiful of all the walks we did in the last months.


The route was new, but another thing remained the same. As usual we got lost on the way - despite iPhone and several maps.


And these were the questions we discussed:

You are doing fieldwork. In the field a lot is going on. You do not just find answers to your research question, as so much more is happening. Your informants may hope that you will help them. Or they may act in ways that make you feel uncomfortable. Bad things happen. What to do?

How to engage with nasty situations? How to do so, then and there, and how later, when you are writing? When do you stress them, highlight them, or when might it be wiser not to mention them?

If to you it seems best to write about "the bad", then how might this be done? On which platforms: social science journals, the newspaper, the web? In which tone: critical, with wonder, concerned? Who are you talking to: ‘the public’, the masters of capital or the guardians of the state, your informants, who else? And how does all of this relate to writing a PhD thesis, which is also doing an exam?

What is the question?

The question we dealt with this time - while walking in the rain through a wood full of autumn leaves - was a particular one, namely: What is the question?




You have an interesting case, a case that so far has not been studied or not in the right way. You are gathering or have gathered great material, experienced disconcerting moments, have plenty of stories to tell.

But what is the question?

How to invent a good question? And what makes a question 'good'?
Which questions open up a space to think and write in and which others lead on to dead ends? How to recognize how questions work out? And can a question be what comes out of a study: the point?