Timing matters: How does long-term ethnographic research affect concept work and case-making in practice?

please note that during the EASST/4S conference “Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and Agency of STS in Emerging Worlds” (18.-21. August 2020, Prague / Czech Republic) , the very interesting panel "Timing matters: How does long-term ethnographic research affect concept work and case-making in practice?" is organised by Martina Klausner (Goethe Universität Frankfurt), Jörg Niewöhner, Josefine Raasch & Patrick Bieler (all Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) . The organisers very much invite you to send in proposals (max. 250 words) until 29 February 2020.

You can find out more information about the complete conference here and find some information on how to submit your proposal here.

--- Reposted from "kulturwissenschaftlich-volkskundliche [kv]-Mailingliste" ---

Detailed Call for Papers

The conference theme alerts us to ‘timing’ and thus the difficulty of conducting research on emerging phenomena without becoming a fleeting observer ourselves. We ask how long-term research commitments affect how we conceptualize and construct cases, how we attend to the temporalities of these cases and how these temporalities in turn affect our concept work. Inspired by anthropology’s emphasis on long-term ethnographic research, we ask how long-term engagements with research fields shape STS research in practice.

To turn our attention to those stated effects, we propose to focus on the following three dimensions:

1) Based on the assumption that long-term interactions with the interlocutors have an impact on the processes and outcomes of conceptualizing, we ask: What matters shape our conceptualizing? How are these concepts, developed in long-term research, generative of re-conceptualizations in STS?

2) In a similar way, long-term interactions shape the processes and outcomes of case-making. How does long-term research commitment shape what matters and how we construct our cases? How do these cases, developed in long-term research, shape our modes of generalising?

3) And last, we wonder how timing matters in the ways we think about and conceptualize continuities and ruptures: How does it help us to understand degrees of freedom and formations of (inter-)dependencies of processes we observe?

We seek contributions that address these questions based on long-term empirical research projects. The panel is meant to foster an exchange of experiences with long-term research, provide a space for reflecting current efforts and a platform for discussing ways forward.