sutton074

Some of you might have wondered why there has been no walking seminar for the last couple of months. This was for two reasons. Annemarie can't walk. She has problems with her feet. And I decided that I should not walk, but write up my thesis instead.

Thanks everybody for joining the walking seminar at the 4S/EASST conference in October in Copenhagen!    

Words matter, as Carol Gluck's and Anna Tsing's global lexicon "Words in Motion" exemplifies. How which words matter where in our research was the topic we talked about during the last walking seminar in Breukelen. Which terms, whose terms? There it is your object of research. But how to call it? And, more generally, in which terms to talk and write about it? Terms, notions, words differ between theoretical traditions, between academia and field, between one field and another. So, what to do? How to navigate these differences? What words do your informants use to talk about the object you are interested in? Or, which different words - and how do the words differ? Are there (contrasting) word-experts? Are there typical practices where either one term or the other is prominent? When do you bring out these differences and when do you gloss over them? What kind of practices are there in your field where your object, rather than talked about, is dealt with in other ways? A...

A couple of days ago we headed off to Breukelen where we discovered a newly built ferry. Next to having fun with this mobile gadget we discussed some tricky questions. Most of us talk-walkers work on a case. A case is neither unique, nor representative. So, what is a case ? And what does it imply to do a case study? Which case studies in the literature do you find inspiring? How do the authors present their case? What about that is similar to / different from other case studies? What is the case you are studying and of what is it a case? What is specific about it? What does it share with other cases? In which ways does your case study differ from other methods that you come across in the literature on your topic? Oh, you are not doing a case study? Good. Which form does your research take? And what are the differences with case studies?

The next walking seminars will take place on the following days: 31st August 21st September 17th October (before the 4S/EASST conference in Copenhagen)

 Not long ago we headed off to Castricum for another walk through the Dutch countryside. While moving our legs, our thoughts circled around the topic of language and materiality. These were our questions: What to do with language?   During our fieldwork we gather material of different kinds. We interview people and listen to their accounts. We also observe, pay attention to things, objects, materialities. But how to relate these different kind of "data" with each other? Or, in other words, what to do with language? What are the strength and weaknesses of language as material and in the material? How to get at events, objects, materiality through language, for instance interviews? But/and also how to situate language, for instance interviews, in relation to other kinds of material, observations, artifacts from the field, pictures?

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