[Tps] ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques

[navdeep at iimahd.ernet.in]

Colleagues:

May I bring to your attention I course I am teaching this summer and ask
that you
pass the notice along to anyone you think might be interested?  There are
still a
few spaces left.

Course:  Political and Policy Ethnography

ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Monday, 23 July to Saturday, 4 August 2007

Short Description:  This advanced seminar in interpretive research methods is
intended for students who are embarking on a field research project or
finishing one
up and who are thinking about, starting to or working on writing up their
field
notes and/or research "reports."  Political and policy ethnographies include
traditional ethnographic or participant-observer studies, such as a
community or
organizational study, but also "shadowing" a political leader or
policy-maker,
formal interviewing (conversational interviewing, not administering a survey
questionnaire), and/or the use of ethnographic methods to generate data
which are
then analyzed using some other method (e.g., discourse analysis; metaphor,
category
or other language-focused analysis; space analysis; and so on).  Course
topics will
include:  writing as method; questions of reflexivity and positionality;
power and
politics in researcher roles; and the interpretive ontological and
epistemological
presuppositions and philosophies underlying these methods.  The final course
requirement is a draft of a conference-type paper or thesis/dissertation
chapter.

Prerequisites:  A basic course in interpretive (or "qualitative") methods;
some
field research experience (i.e., observational, with whatever degree of
participation, including conversational interviewing and/or document
analysis as
appropriate to the research question).
Longer description follows below; additional information on the course (a
daily
schedule plus readings) is available at the website below, on the course
page.
Registration and other details:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/summerschools/ljubljana/index.aspx

Yours,
Dvora Yanow



3. Long outline

Participant-observer ethnographic methods - central among the many methods
that fall
under the umbrella of interpretive research methods - have been "borrowed"
from
sociology and anthropology into many fields in political science, including
comparative governmental studies, area studies, international relations,
public
policy (domestic/state, regional, and local, international, EU, etc.), public
administration/local government studies, organizational studies, and public
law/legal studies.  They are not new to political science, however, having
been
employed since the 1950s, if not earlier.  They are useful in a wide range of
settings for research questions that seek to explore the meanings of
particular
political practices, concepts or processes to situational actors, often in
order to
illuminate a wider-ranging or more theoretical issue of political concern.
 These
might include studying how policy-makers or legislators actually think
about the
decisions they make and how they go about them; how workers shape their work
practices and their relationships to managers; how organizational
administrators
implement national policies; and so on.

The course is designed for students who are about to embark on a field
research
project, are in the midst of conducting one, or have just come out of the
field and
who are thinking about, starting to or working on writing up their field
notes and
drafts of dissertation chapters.  Students might have conducted a traditional
ethnographic study or a participant-observer study - a community or an
organizational study, for example; the study may have involved "shadowing" a
political leader or policy-maker; it might have included formal (expert,
elite or
other) interviews as well. (Note: This means conversational interviewing -
engaging
people in talk - not administering a survey questionnaire.)  Students may
also have
used ethnographic methods (observing, with whatever degree of
participation; talking
to situational members) along with reading topic-relevant documents to
generate data
which they are intending to analyze using other methods (e.g., discourse
analysis;
metaphor, category or other language-focused analysis; space analysis; and
so on).

We will focus on several of the concepts and issues central to current
debates about
political and policy ethnography.  These include:
* questions of reflexivity and positionality, especially as these bear on the
generation of data, and the trustworthiness of one's truth claims;
* power and politics in the conduct of field research, especially with
respect to
its relational character;
* writing as method, but also reading as method - looking at one's truth
claims and
their evidentiary base, and the ways in which these are presented from the
perspective of a prospective reader, whether situational member or colleague.
One lecture will be devoted to situating these methods in interpretive
ontological
and epistemological presuppositions and the philosophies they emerge from,
including
how these philosophies engaged questions of knowledge and truth claims
being debated
at the time of their development.  Throughout the course, we will be
addressing what
is perhaps the central question today for those doing such work:  in what
ways is
political and policy ethnography similar to and different from
participant-observer
ethnographic research as done in anthropology or sociology?

Classes will be conducted as a seminar, with the exception of the opening
meeting
and the lecture on 26 July.  Students will be expected to come to class
prepared to
discuss the readings and to draw links between them and their own research
designs
and field experiences.  The final course requirement will be a draft of a
conference-type paper discussing issues emerging from the research, a
draft of a
methods paper that might appear in a thesis/dissertation or conference
panel, or
some equivalent to be determined.

Course readings:
1.  Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, eds., Interpretation and Method:
Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (Armonk, NY:  M E
Sharpe, 2006;
YSS in the reading list).
2.  Other journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters.