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From: Dvora Yanow <D.Yanow@fsw.vu.nl> Date: April 23, 2007 6:40:16 AM EDT To: "Interpretationandmethods (E-mail)" <interpretationandmethods@listserv.cddc.vt.edu> Subject: [Interpretationandmethods] Summer course in Political and Policy Ethnography Reply-To: interpretation and methods group <interpretationandmethods@listserv.cddc.vt.edu>
Colleagues:
May I bring to your attention I course I am teaching this summer and ask that you pass the notice along to anyone you think might be interested? There are still a few spaces left.
Course: Political and Policy Ethnography
ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Monday, 23 July to Saturday, 4 August 2007
Short Description: This advanced seminar in interpretive research methods is intended for students who are embarking on a field research project or finishing one up and who are thinking about, starting to or working on writing up their field notes and/or research "reports." Political and policy ethnographies include traditional ethnographic or participant-observer studies, such as a community or organizational study, but also "shadowing" a political leader or policy-maker, formal interviewing (conversational interviewing, not administering a survey questionnaire), and/or the use of ethnographic methods to generate data which are then analyzed using some other method (e.g., discourse analysis; metaphor, category or other language-focused analysis; space analysis; and so on). Course topics will include: writing as method; questions of reflexivity and positionality; power and politics in researcher roles; and the interpretive ontological and epistemological presuppositions and philosophies underlying these methods. The final course requirement is a draft of a conference- type paper or thesis/dissertation chapter.
Prerequisites: A basic course in interpretive (or "qualitative") methods; some field research experience (i.e., observational, with whatever degree of participation, including conversational interviewing and/or document analysis as appropriate to the research question). Longer description follows below; additional information on the course (a daily schedule plus readings) is available at the website below, on the course page. Registration and other details: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/ summerschools/ljubljana/index.aspx
Yours, Dvora Yanow
3. Long outline
Participant-observer ethnographic methods - central among the many methods that fall under the umbrella of interpretive research methods - have been "borrowed" from sociology and anthropology into many fields in political science, including comparative governmental studies, area studies, international relations, public policy (domestic/state, regional, and local, international, EU, etc.), public administration/local government studies, organizational studies, and public law/legal studies. They are not new to political science, however, having been employed since the 1950s, if not earlier. They are useful in a wide range of settings for research questions that seek to explore the meanings of particular political practices, concepts or processes to situational actors, often in order to illuminate a wider-ranging or more theoretical issue of political concern. These might include studying how policy-makers or legislators actually think about the decisions they make and how they go about them; how workers shape their work practices and their relationships to managers; how organizational administrators implement national policies; and so on.
The course is designed for students who are about to embark on a field research project, are in the midst of conducting one, or have just come out of the field and who are thinking about, starting to or working on writing up their field notes and drafts of dissertation chapters. Students might have conducted a traditional ethnographic study or a participant-observer study - a community or an organizational study, for example; the study may have involved "shadowing" a political leader or policy-maker; it might have included formal (expert, elite or other) interviews as well. (Note: This means conversational interviewing - engaging people in talk - not administering a survey questionnaire.) Students may also have used ethnographic methods (observing, with whatever degree of participation; talking to situational members) along with reading topic-relevant documents to generate data which they are intending to analyze using other methods (e.g., discourse analysis; metaphor, category or other language-focused analysis; space analysis; and so on).
We will focus on several of the concepts and issues central to current debates about political and policy ethnography. These include: * questions of reflexivity and positionality, especially as these bear on the generation of data, and the trustworthiness of one's truth claims; * power and politics in the conduct of field research, especially with respect to its relational character; * writing as method, but also reading as method - looking at one's truth claims and their evidentiary base, and the ways in which these are presented from the perspective of a prospective reader, whether situational member or colleague. One lecture will be devoted to situating these methods in interpretive ontological and epistemological presuppositions and the philosophies they emerge from, including how these philosophies engaged questions of knowledge and truth claims being debated at the time of their development. Throughout the course, we will be addressing what is perhaps the central question today for those doing such work: in what ways is political and policy ethnography similar to and different from participant-observer ethnographic research as done in anthropology or sociology?
Classes will be conducted as a seminar, with the exception of the opening meeting and the lecture on 26 July. Students will be expected to come to class prepared to discuss the readings and to draw links between them and their own research designs and field experiences. The final course requirement will be a draft of a conference-type paper discussing issues emerging from the research, a draft of a methods paper that might appear in a thesis/ dissertation or conference panel, or some equivalent to be determined.
Course readings: 1. Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, eds., Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, 2006; YSS in the reading list). 2. Other journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters.
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Jeremy Hunsinger Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (www.cipr.uwm.edu) Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. --Byron