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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 ...

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!