Fieldnotes

We invite applications for participating in the 6th DiscourseNet Summer School in Tutzing (close to Munich), Bavaria, in the south of Germany, 30 June – 3 July 2020.

What can you expect?
In the three-day Summer School, you will acquire practical skills about specific ethnographic and discourse analytical methods, such as interviewing, participant observation, transcribing, coding, as well as writing fieldnotes and vignettes. We will also introduce you to several software packages that might assist you in doing your research. In addition, you will acquire theoretical skills that allow you to better situate discourse ethnographic methods within your approach or your disciplinary traditions and professional ambitions. In addition to advanced scholars sharing their theoretical insights and teaching practical competences we will reserve time for reflection sessions and open discussion fora in which you are invited to share experiences, point to potential problems and discuss possibilities for solving them. If you have already collected your own empirical material, you are most welcome to suggest samples for us to analyse or discuss together.

Confirmed teachers
• Dr Yalız Akbaba, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz
• Professor Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University
• Professor Endre Dányi, Bundeswehr University, Munich
• Dr Martina Kolanoski, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt
• Professor Teresa Koloma Beck, Bundeswehr University, Munich
• Professor Felicitas Macgilchrist, Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig
• Dr Yannik Porsché, Bundeswehr University, Munich
• Dr Jaspal Naveel Singh, The University of Hong Kong

How to apply?
The DiscourseNet Summer School “Ethnography meets Discourse Analysis” is open to PhD and post-graduate students. If you would like to apply, please send a brief summary of your research project in English (max. 250 words) and a short biography (max. 100 words) by 29 February 2020 to yannik.porsche@unibw.de and singhjn@hku.hk.

More information:
https://discourseanalysis.net/en/dns6-discoursenet-summer-school-6-ethnography-meets-discourse-analysis?language_content_entity=en

We hope to see you in Tutzing!

Yannik Porsché and Jaspal Naveel Singh

The field chronicle and its use  in the process of creating documents of oral culture. Aplication over the complex of iron processing, in the contemporary Romania, in "Anuarul IEF, serie noua, tom 22, Bucuresti, Editura Academiei Romane, 2011, p71-85, ISSN 1220 5230


The authours bring into attention a specific type of field notes, placed between the public and the private spaces - the chronicle of the journey. This sort of writtings integrate technical data in the large context of the ethnofolkloristic reality and in the visible and invisible context of fieldworking by itself. In the end, it has  metatextual relevance to the recorded documents.

Keywords: fieldwork, fieldnotes, ironsmith, documents of oral culture

Fieldnotes record the gaze of the researcher as much as the activities being observed. My doctoral dissertation examined the relationship between gender safety, gender violence, and learning processes in two primary schools in Kirinyaga County, Kenya. In this chapter, I apply Constructivist Grounded Theory to examine how my fieldnotes illuminate the power differentials within the research process. Fieldnotes provided me an essential tool for provoking and deepening reflexivity, prompting the discussion of biases as they emerged. Intersecting themes of discomfort, visibility, and critique show how fieldnotes improved the research by prioritizing reflexivity during data collection and analysis, and by initiating uncomfortable but important conversations within myself that otherwise may not have occurred.