PhD Courses in Denmark

Teach participants use of experimental techniques to open new paths of doing ethnographic analysis.

A student who has met the objectives of the course will be able to:

• Use experimental ethnographic approaches to analyzing their data material.
• Pursue experimental thinking in conducting fieldwork.
• Challenge their biases, thinking habits and analytical practices.
• Identify analytical openings and possibilities and create circumstances for surprise and discovery.
• Scrutinize their own analytical frameworks and take more creative and engaging routes in their thinking.
• Switching between methods and modalities, blurring the distinctions between field work, data collection, analysis, and writing.
• Take a step back from inherited concepts, theoretical interests and preconceived categorizations.
• Collaborate in analysis.

The course introduces the concept of analysis as an experimental practice. By offering the participants the opportunity to themselves use a set of analytic protocols, the effects of which will be discussed and elaborated by peers and experienced scholars, the aim of the course is to open new paths of doing ethnographic analysis. The structure of the course is based on chapters from the anthology Experimenting with Ethnography (Ballestero, Winthereik, eds. 2021) where the writers all use their own practice to suggest ways of experimenting with ethnographic analysis. Rather than approaching analysis as an abstract and solely intellectual practice, the aim of the book and its protocols is to convey a concrete mode of action and creative practice for researchers. An important point of departure for the book is problematizing that a fixed boundary between “the field” (data collection) and “the desk” (analysis, theorizing) exists or is automatically meaningful. The concept of the analytical protocols links to the history of experimental settings as a site of interest in the social sciences and humanities (Rheinberger 1997; Latour 1999; Tilley 2011; Kowal, Radin & Reardon 2013; Davies et al. 2018; Wolfe 2018 in Ballestero & Winthereik 2021). The course will cover a broad range of topics such as multimodal approaches, multispecies ethnography, sensory modality, decolonization of methodology and modes of collaboration. The theoretical scope of the course is connected to the material turn within anthropology and STS as well as the application of “object-oriented” methods and collaborative approaches that are widespread and increasingly common methodological tools in ethnographic fieldwork (Tsing, Pollman, 2005; Maguire, Watts, Winthereik (eds), 2021; Waltorp 2020; Tsing, Deger, Saxeana, Zhou, 2020). Therefore, this course invites students to engage and reflect on both their empirical material as well as individual analytical thinking. In doing so, the course invites students to engage with questions such as: How are we confined by traditional ways of thinking about analysis in approaching our own data? How do experimental approaches to analysis inform the production of knowledge, the treatment of data, as well as the empirical sites we enter? How can we as researchers nurture a space of play opening up ways of experimental thinking? What new insights about our data and our object of study can we achieve by applying concrete protocols with method for experimentation.