Prof. Dr. Didier Fassin (Collège de France, F / Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, USA)
Where is the Truth? On the Ethnography of Disputed Facts

Öffentlicher Abendvortrag‍ (27. Juni 2024, 17:45)

Ethnography has a problem with truth. And perhaps truth has a problem with ethnography. I would like to address this two-sided question around the study of situations in which distinct and even contradictory versions of a given fact are narrated, be they the consequence of different interpretations or of false statements. This complication occurs in particular when the situation involves a legal dimension, and more specifically a potential crime. The lecture will analyze such a case based on research I conducted on police killing. I will discuss the way of presenting the alternative accounts, the conditions under which one can decide between them, the scales of reading that must be mobilized, and the possibility that truth-telling be fictionalized. 
 
Photo credit: Patrick Imbert, Collège de France


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Prof. Dr. Martin Fuchs (Universität Erfurt, D)
The Representational Imbroglio: Reassessing some Core Questions
(27. Juni 2024, 13:30)
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The representational question remains a challenge. It faces us again with new urgency and in new modalities. Representation has become a core concern in a culturally pluralist social world and confronts social and cultural theory anew, anthropology being the discipline affected first. Political constellations have evolved since the crisis of representation was proclaimed and critique and self-reflexivity became a prime demand. Attitudes towards representation have hardened with the progress of de-colonizing thinking, forms of critique have altered, and essentialization has had a come-back in reverse forms. This forces us to look at the positionalities and at the (interpretative, epistemic, political) practices involved in ethnographic knowledge production once more. Questions to be asked in new ways embrace how representations are related to traditions, lifeforms, and social arenas, and to the meanings and the reference frames – the self-interpretations – of social actors at different levels of articulation and reflection. We have to consider representation in relation to the ‘hermeneutics’ of social processes of understanding, or ‘Verstehen’, in new ways. The keynote will look at issues of interpretation, at contestations about representations, at new understandings of the problems of translation, and at the challenge of ‘thinking across’ thought traditions.


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Dr. Cornelia Schadler (Universität Wien, A)
Writing Ethnogaphies, a Matter of Life and Death
(28. Juni 2024, 11:30)
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The death of the author has been announced a few times in the last hundred years, but why is this entity still alive? The discourse is currently regaining traction in current discussions around KIs. I propose that ethnography may cannot afford dead authors and that there are many material-discursive processes in place to keep this entity in its place. Theoretically, from the perspective of new materialism, an author is merely one part of many of an scientific process, but they emerge in a center position -- as the source of thought or a past research process brought to paper. Other entities become helping resources or are excluded from the final picture. By repeating these practices, new materialist ethnographies can reproduce how in very specific processes the author gets its center place, while other entities are marginalized or "killed" in the process. Empirical data from a recent project (entangledpublications.univie.ac.at/) illustrate the reperformance of authorship and the linearization of research projects, even when the position of authorship is troubled, when e.g. ideas arrive from outside sources. Scholars then become part of practices that repeatedly save the author from becoming a mere spectator of the research process or plain member of a research project. I will close with a thought experiment of what could happen if we re-introduce a million human and non-human, material and non-material co-creators to ethnographic processes or if we abolish the notion of creation at all. Could this mean the death of ethnographies as we know them? What would become of the ethnographic text?
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Ass. Prof. Dr. Judith Laister (Universität Graz, A)
Performativ, multimodal, translational: Variationen ästhetischer Feldforschung
(28. Juni 2024, 16:30)
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„Performing culture“ betrachtete die Frankfurter Kulturanthropologin Ina-Maria Greverus als mögliche Antwort auf die Writing Culture Debatte – und als wesentliches Charakteristikum einer ästhetischen Anthropologie. Diese sorgt sich weniger um eine möglichst exakte, realitätsnahe – schriftliche oder visuelle – Repräsentation von Wissen über kulturelle Welten („Writing culture“), sondern um die Frage, wie wissenschaftliche Praxis als gesellschaftliches Handeln auch transformativ zu wirken vermag. Neben und teils mit Greverus gibt es zahlreiche Ansätze, die machtkritische Formen der Feldforschung und Wissensvermittlung konzeptualisieren und erproben: von der engagierten Wissenschaft, über das tentakuläre Denken bis hin zu multimodalen und translationalen Methodologien. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit schenkt der Vortrag dem Begriff der „Übersetzung“ – einerseits als Herstellen von Verbindungen zwischen den heterogenen Akteur:innen, denen Forscher:innen im Rahmen ihrer Feldforschungen begegnen – andererseits als Übersetzung von erforschter Welt-Wirklichkeit in einen wissenschaftlichen Text. 
Den Begriff der „Ethnografie“ gebraucht der Vortrag dabei bewusst nicht bzw. wenn, dann stets mit Anführungs- und Fragezeichen versehen. Vielmehr werden jene Spuren verfolgt, die den freiwerdenden Wort- und Bedeutungsraum „After Ethnos“ mit offeneren Begriffen und Imaginationen füllen, konzeptuell unruhig bleiben und jeglicher strategisch notwendigen Essentialisierung ein Shifting folgen lassen.

‍Photo credit: © Universität Graz


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Associate Prof. Jessica McCrory Calarco (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
Showing How You Know What You Know: Writing with Qualitative Data
(29. Juni 2024, 09:00)
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Ethnographers have a responsibility to show their readers how they know what they know. This responsibility stems from the interpretive nature of qualitative data analysis. And it requires that ethnographers learn to write effectively with qualitative data. In this session, we will discuss what effective qualitative writing looks like and how it can be achieved. That includes: 1) how to structure a qualitative argument, 2) how to select examples for inclusion in qualitative manuscripts, and 3) how to interpret qualitative data to show the reader how the researcher arrived at a particular conclusion. 

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