Seminar Decolonial Approaches to Qualitative Methods in Postmigration Studies

This seminar invites students and social researchers to look for dynamic, alternative, and unconventional ways to work with qualitative data. It aims at showing to its participants that embracing the disorder and chaos that marks any research setting can produce creative and surprising outcomes. Being aware of the postmigration condition' that we are living in, we will look for qualitative methods/methodologies that provide new ways of thinking, beyond the linear, and neatly ordered way of data analysis that would challenge the essentialist, eurocentric sociological interpretations.  We will divide this seminar into two parts: In the first part, we will mainly deal with the theoretical and critical approaches to qualitative methods and methodologies. In the second part, we will look at emergent methods and methodologies such as Situational Analysis, conversational interview, digital ethnography, art-based research practice.  In this course, we will encounter questions such as: What are the decolonial/black, feminist/queer critique towards methods and methodologies that emerged as a result of the colonial, heteronormative, patriarchal knowledge production and dissemination? How can we go beyond already existing terms, concepts, and categories, and develop, or even invent, new ones? Or, in other words, how can we map out, interpret, and work with the discursive gaps and traps embedded in a qualitative data? Primary literature of this class is going to be selected from the resources below: The Death of white sociology (1973), Joyce Ladner Situational Analysis (2005), Adele Clarke Punk Sociology (2014), David Beer Method meets Art: Art-based Research Practice (2015), Patricia Leavy Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (2016), Boaventura de Sousa Santos   FB 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften Uni Kassel WiSe 2016/17 Lehrveranstaltungspool FB 05 Tuzcu Pinar