sutton074

The next walking seminar will take place on the 19th September . During the last one we talked about different ways of knowing...    ... and un/doing, the themes of two workshops we had had.

A couple of days ago we headed off to the Amsterdamse Bos where we walked and talked about: The difference that makes a difference… As ethnographers we go into the field, observe what happens there, talk, listen. What we learn is not the same from one site or situation to the next. Different kinds of things happen and one ‘kind’ of thing may still take a different shape in a subsequent moment or another setting. One informant says that all X are P and the other tells they are Q instead. What is a problem here, seems a blessing a bit further along – and vice versa. How to deal with such differences? What kind of differences are relevant in and to your field? To you? To ‘the literature’? Which ones do you follow? Which ones do you let go? In which ways are these differences different? In the social sciences some differences get a lot of attention: geographical ones (between countries), socio-economic ones (between classes), functional ones (between professions, or fields,...

Unfortunately not in the scenery that you see above, but we will walk again! The next two walking seminars will take place on the  25th April and   2nd June . We are looking forward seeing you!

Last Friday we set out for another walk. This time we did not head off to Breukelen, but to a place called the Zaanse Schans. Compared to Breukelen it has even more and even prettier "typically Dutch" windmills.    But this was not our topic of conversation. We talked about beginnings. And these were our questions: How to start? The introduction of a paper/article/chapter is crucial. The first sentences set the tone. They frame what is to come afterwards. And they might decide whether a reader lays to the side the paper or actually continues reading. So, how to start a paper or chapter? How to write the introduction? Take the paper/chapter you are working on at the moment with its topic, material and argument. How do you plan to start the paper? What might be a good first sentence? And more generally, how do you introduce the topic? Do you begin with the case? A general problem? A puzzle? A gap in the literature? What do you give away in the beginning? What do you...

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...