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Lehrveranstaltungen

Queer Research Methods and Methodologies (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Sacha Kagan

Inhalt: In this “Queer Research Methods” seminar with PhD candidates, we will be exploring questions about research methods and methodologies inspired by insights from queer studies and queer approaches. The following lines are thus not exactly a “syllabus” like the ones I usually provide for other seminars. (Especially in its usage by the Catholic church’s Pius IX and X popes, this is not a syllabus, i.e. a summary of papal decisions regarding heretical doctrines or practices. Joking aside, also in its academic definition, this text is only partly a syllabus: A seminar on queer methods cannot possibly have a pre-set text at the outset that would define clear expectations, prevent confusions, and provide a fixed roadmap. However, this is a syllabus in the sense that it shall give a taste of the possibilities we may explore together, with open-ended expectations and suggested destinations, yet open to bifurcations, and in the sense of trying to make this seminar ‘palatable’ enough for us to become enough participants.) The seminar will not propone any fixed definition of ‘queer’. Diverse approaches and understandings from the participants are welcome and encouraged. Queer studies, as discourses, are often at odds with traditional criteria of scientific validation (not unlike feminist studies before them). Queer undermines the stability of identities, and stresses fluidity, contingence and becoming. Queer studies value perspectives that deconstruct binaries and other categories, and allow ambiguities, ambivalences and other expressions of qualitative complexity that are usually finding no place in social sciences. Queer approaches challenge some fundamental tenets of scientific methodologies, such as for example the supposed qualities of coherence, reliability and generalizability of research that many social scientists still uphold. But what does this mean for concrete empirical research? What does queer imply for research methodologies and for empirical methods? How may this all play out in relation to your choices to do inter- and/or transdisciplinary research for your PhD theses in the humanities and social sciences / 'Kulturwissenschaften'? Related questions we could address in the seminar: “If, as queer thinking argues, subjects and subjectivities are fluid, unstable and perpetually becoming, how can we gather ‘data’ from those tenuous and fleeting subjects using the standard methods of data collection such as interviews or questionnaires? what meanings can we draw from, and what use can we make of, such data when it is only momentarily fixed and certain? And what does this mean for our thinking about ourselves as researchers? How does this perpetual destabilising position us as researchers and what can we make of this destabilisation? [...] What impact, if any, could (or should) queer conceptualisations have on our methodological choices and in what ways? Can social science methods be ‘queered’ or even made ‘queer enough’?” (Eds. Brown and Nash 2010, pp. 1-2). We will discuss some of the relevant literature and can relate it possibly to your own PhD projects (provided the seminar participants wish to do so). We may also play and reflect (from the queer perspectives on methods that we will have explored together) on one embodied-complexity group game I designed over the past couple of years (provided our group is large enough). If you want to already start looking into the seminar’s focus before we meet, please check those three references: • Kath Brown and Catherine J. Nash (eds.) (2010). Queer Research Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Theories and Social Science Research. Routledge. This book is freely available online (open access) at https://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=fulltext&rid=26107 • Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani (Eds.) (2016). WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 44, 3-4. Special issue on "Queer Methods" (The intro is uploaded on myStudy). • Eve Sedgwick (2002). “paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you”. In: Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky; Barale, Michèle Aina; Goldberg, Jonathan; Moon, Michae (Eds.), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press. Available online at: https://www.sss.ias.edu/sites/sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf At the start of the seminar (on our first session), I will suggest further references we could look into, and we can then decide together where to put our focus, depending on the research interests of the participating PhD candidates. For example, I suggest that we remind ourselves of some precedents in epistemological and methodological discourses that seem to especially relevant to the question of queer methods (including Paul Feyerabend, Edgar Morin, Donna Haraway). I would like us to look into Eve Sedgwick’s insights on queer research as a corrective to the limitations of Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the epistemological paradigm of paranoia, and relate this to our discussion of research methods and methodologies. There is a lot of interesting material especially in the two edited volumes listed above (Eds. Brown and Nash 2010, Eds. Brim and Ghaziani 2016). I also suggest that we look into arguments about queer art (by Renate Lorenz) and seek inspiration in the whole research field of arts-based research (e.g. Patricia Leavy, a.o.), inquiring its queering potential for social sciences and humanities research methods. We can also look into the queer-inspired action research by Gibson-Graham (and later by Catherine Gibson). If you have further suggestions, please feel free to send me an email already before we start the seminar (and later on too). I may also, if time allows and if participants are interested, share about my ongoing work on an upcoming special issue of a journal that I am guest-editing, and that focuses on the theme of “queering convivialism”.