Seminar Decolonizing qualitative research methods in Post Migration Studies

This seminar invites students and social researchers looking for dynamic, alternative, and unconventional ways to work with qualitative methods. Inspired by Punk, we will embrace the disorder and chaos that marks any research setting. We will take up the challenge to interpret data dealing with ethnic, cultural religious minorities or marginalized groups and individuals without trapping into misquoting, and re-producing certain stereotypical, reinscribing otherizing, marginalizing and racializing practices. Cautiously, we will look for qualitative methods that provide new ways of thinking, beyond the linear, and neatly ordered way of data analysis. By using deconstructive approaches like deliberately unlearning, de-linking, transcultural translation, in-vivo coding, we will discuss the limits, challenges and possibilities that qualitative methods offer to overcome the essentialist, modernist and Euro- or ethno-centric ways of interpretation. We will look at methods such as Grounded Theory, conversational interview, participatory research, biographical research, but also deal with emergent methods such as situational analysis. This means, we will discuss how we can use, re-appropriate, and re-formulate these qualitative methods to interpret our data differently. In this course, we will encounter questions such as: How can we interpret silence and noise? How can we go beyond already existing terms and concepts and develop or even invent new ones? How can we look queerly at the data? Or, how can we create a postcolonial feminist perspective on quantitative research? Note: In the course of this seminar, we will host two guest lecturers from Marmara University, Istanbul. On November 6 and 27, we will collectively join to the lectures given by sociologists from Marmara University/Istanbul. Attending these lectures is obligatory and will be considered as seminar attendance. Further details (room,time etc.) will follow! FB 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften Uni Kassel WiSe 2014/15 Soziologie HF Tuzcu Pinar