300174 Practicing Ethnography in Migration Research (qualitativ) (S) (SoSe 2017)

Dr. Simone Castellani holds MA in Science of Communication; MA in Social Anthropology, PhD in Social Anthropology. During this semester, he is a DAAD guest lecturer at Bielefeld University. He was a PhD scholar at the University of Seville and Genoa and he was visiting fellow at the Wellesley College (U.S.), University of Freiburg (Germany), FLACSO Ecuador, University of Sussex (UK).

A fruitful empirical work in the social science is largely determinate by a good knowledge and practice of the research technics. The ethnographic technics, as for instance the participant observation and the in-depth interview, are one of the most used approaches in the anthropologic and sociological disciplines.
The seminar will start from a socio-anthropological theoretical reflection on technics as the participant observation and in depth interview, looking especially to the research strategies for entering the fields, for building trust bonds with the subjects and for managing the power issues in the field. This first phase will focus also on a narrative interview approach, alternative to the classical informative approach which tends to disregard the specific experience of the subject, to reproduce typifications and to fall in social acceptance bias. The second part of the seminar will promote a participative works of the students, testing in the practice the theoretical notions learned. A script of narrative/biographic interview will be prepared in groups and participant observation exercise will be promoted as well some pilot interviews in the field in selected organizations of the students’ localities of residences. This seminar pretends, on the one hand, to show to the students the potentialities and the limits of a research ethnographic approach which they will be able to choose employing in their future essay and thesis. On the other hand, it wants to give alumnus ability for entering new spaces and organizations, decode social interaction and deal with power issues.