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In keeping with tradition, but also to enjoy the advent of spring, the next  walking seminar will take place on Thursday 24 March 2016 . A quick recap of what the walking seminar is: the Walking Seminar is a seminar. However, it does not take place behind closed doors. Instead, seminar participants leave the city and go to some place where it is green. There they walk two by two. For some time (say, 15 minutes) their conversation focusses on the work of person A. Then roles shift and they talk (for another 15 minutes) about the work of person B. After 30 minutes there is a shift in walking partners and the process starts again. And then again. If need be, you may discuss acute research problems. However, as seminars go, we also have a shared topic/theme.  For this edition the theme is is The field before and after you.  We want to address the question how to handle things/events/figures that precede or come after you. What to do with everything that happened in ...

Never mind the wind!  Never mind the cold!  Never mind the mud!  Despite all of this 18 University of Amsterdam PhDs and  Professor  Annemarie Mol set out to walk and talk  about ethnographic methods.  What are good ways to handle the tension between asking a research question that is too open,  risking to lack direction,  and one that is too closed,  risking to miss surprises? Each walking-pair arrived at answers and new questions for their research. Thanks to all participants for such a fruitful afternoon! The next walking seminar will take place on 24. March. The theme will be announced shortly.

With the best wishes for 2016, we would like to announce the first edition of the Walking Seminar 2016. It will take place on the 29 th of January and will carry the theme that we never got to walk and talk about last year due to excessive rain. Ethnographic methods and guiding questions Here is the tension: if you go into the field without a question your investigations risks to lack direction and you may not get any kind of grasp on what is going on. However, with a question that is too tight or too tightly handled, you may not be open enough to surprises. What are good ways of handling that tension in the practice of doing ethnographic research – that is to say what are good ways in your research? If you are in the very last stage of a project, this tension has not gone away. For even if you are no longer in the position to gather more stories from the field, you still face the question how to tell those stories: as answers to questions you (ever so astutely) asked or as surprising...

The next walking seminar will be on October 16 th (from 13:00 o’clock until early evening, depending on the chosen destination). The theme will be Ethnographic methods and guiding questions. Here is the tension: if you go into the field without a question your investigations risks to lack direction and you may not get any kind of grasp on what is going on. However, with a question that is too tight or too tightly handled, you may not be open enough to surprises. What are good ways of handling that tension in the practice of doing ethnographic research – that is to say what are good ways in your research? If you are in the very last stage of a project, this tension has not gone away. For even if you are no longer in the position to gather more stories from the field, you still face the question how to tell those stories: as answers to questions you (ever so astutely) asked or as surprising findings that unexpectedly hit you in the face? (There may be other variants.. discuss!) For tho...

    During the planned slot for the walking seminar on Anecdotes it was raining heavily, and thunderstorms were closing in on the UvA building. But that could not deter us from meeting anyway! A large group gathered in the common room of the fifth floor. After a plenary start, we wandered in pairs through the one-year-old building of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. We discussed the role of anecdotes in our research with the following questions: What makes a ‘good’ anecdote? How can ‘mere anecdotes’ be turned into essential parts of our work? How much ‘data’ does it take to make ‘an anecdote’? How many ‘anecdotes’ does it take to for materials to become ‘data’? It was an fruitful Friday afternoon in which many anecdotes were told, and many events were ‘anecdotalized’ (Mike Michael 2012). Unique to this edition was that after three rounds of pair-discussion, we could come back together and discuss some of our insights, along with the suggested reading – Michael, ...

The next walking seminar will be on September 4 th (from 13:00 o’clock until early evening, depending on the chosen destination). The theme, inspired by the Lancaster Walking seminar , is  Anecdotes. “Merely anecdotal” is often a put down for social science research – But when is something an anecdote? And when is it more than that? Taking Mike Michael’s chapter as an inspiration we’ll be thinking about how we may use anecdotes in our writing in a way that is not “merely anecdotal”. Here are the questions: What makes a ‘good’ anecdote? How can ‘mere anecdotes’ be turned into essential parts of our work? How much ‘data’ does it take to make ‘an anecdote’? How many ‘anecdotes’ does it take to for materials to become ‘data’? Recommended reading: Michael, M. (2012). Anecdote. In C. Lury & N. Wakeford (Eds.), Inventive methods the happening of the social (pp. 25-35). London: Routledge.

During our walk through the dunes nearby Sandpoort we discussed 'spongy terms'.  While they may blackbox what they contain, and hide that they cover many realities, some of us concluded that the trick is to find what they do in the site we are looking at. Others argued we may put them to good use – as one of us said he uses STS as a spongy method, to soak up ever more sites that he previously had not connected to his topic. Yet others preferred the thought of 'squeezing them' to see what would come out. We would like to thank all participants for walking with us. We look forward to a new edition, on which we will update you as soon as possible. And in the meantime, you could check out this twin-initiative: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/walkingseminar/