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Start > Promotionsstudium Fakultät Kulturwissenschaften / doctoral courses Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Promotion / doctorate) -> Promotionskolleg Darstellung Visualität Wissen -> Forschungsmethoden Darstellung Visualität Wissen

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 would 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).