Qualitative Research Designs Making domestic work visible

Womens reproductive work, paid and upaid, often remains invisible, both in the public and in official labour statistics. Over the last decades, qualitative researchers from various disciplines and womens organisations contributed to make domestic work visible and to pressure policy makers to combat bad working conditions. The 2010 Internatinal Labour Conference will start formal discussions on an ILO convention on domestic work. We will take this raising political interest as a starting point for our own research on domestic work. Participants in the seminar can choose from a wide array of qualitative methods. Examples for methods and topics are: Carrying out life-history interviews with domestic workers in Kassel, conducting expert interviews with members of the European network of/for domestic workers RESPECT, working on a discourse analysis of the issue of domestic work in policy papers over time, reconstructing the emergence of domestic work as a political issue by an event-analysis. In this course small groups (3-5 persons each) will select a topic in the field of domestic work. After having developed a research question and a research design, the analysis will be carried out. The participants will document the whole process in a research diary and present the results and the research process at the end of the course. This course can only be taken in combination with the lecture on Advanced Research Methods and Writing Skills (Christoph Scherrer).

FB 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften Uni Kassel WS 2008/2009 Global Political Economy Prof. Dr. Schwenken Helen