Week 6: Assignment

a) In my opinion, you have to work hard, to be determined to finish the project regardless of the obstacles.

b) It had to finish her project and to work hard.

c) This section is largely theoretical, and stems from the notion of messiness or complexity in social science research, beginning with a discussion of methodological bricolage in qualitative research and moving into a discussion of what might constitute a mobile sociology for the 21st century. Characterised by contingency and indeterminacy, sociality is seen to involve practices that are substantially altered by stable and totalising explanations, compelling more dynamic and contingent approaches to sociological research. To this end, the next section outlines my multi-sited ethnographic approach to online and offline participant observation. Special attention is given to the selection of research participants, and how my relationships with them evolved over time. Arguing for a situated and embodied case history approach, rather than a distanced and generalisable case study, the complex relations between seeing, doing and writing are further explored. Primarily, this involves a description of my original research plan, and specifically how my trajectories shifted over time. The last two sections reposition my research project within broader experimental approaches to ethnography, focussing specifically on the guiding role that experimental writing in feminist social theory takes in my talk. I then conclude with a brief discussion of the question of interpretive validity in the approaches I present.

Although best known as actor-network theory, a “sociology of associations” may also be better understood as a methodology where the social must be explained instead of providing the explanation (Latour 2005). As Latour has long advocated “following actors” through the world, John Law focusses on how multiple methods situationally enact multiple subjects, objects and perspectives. Accordingly, to present one’s research subject as a singularity can be seen to “hide the practice that enacts it, and also conceal the possibility that different constellations of practice and their hinterlands might make it possible to enact realities in different ways” (Law 2004:66). This perspective builds on other research in social studies of science, as well as decades of work in anthropology and feminist theory. For example, in order to trace people, objects and ideas as they circulate, anthropologists like Hannerz (2003) and Marcus (1986; 1995:105) advocate a multi-site or multilocal ethnography, where research is “designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations.” While sustained engagement with a specific field has historically been the hallmark of anthropological research, Marcus (1985) points out that shifting global relations challenge the feasibility and appropriateness of studying isolated places or cases. Furthermore, he stresses the fact that fieldwork has actually always involved some combination of following people, things, metaphors, plots, stories or allegories, lives or biographies, or conflicts. In other words, it may actually be impossible to do research that is not multi-sited, or perhaps better put, situated in multiple ways.