Qualitative Methoden

82-500-SOZ19-S-VL-0915.20251.001 
Robert Schmidt

Die Vorlesung gibt zunächst einen ausführlichen Überblick über die wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlagen und Voraussetzungen einer interpretativen, kulturanalytischen empirischen Sozialforschung. Darauf aufbauend werden dann verschiedene Erkenntnisstile, Methodologien und Methoden der Qualitativen Sozialforschung vorgestellt. Dabei bildet die Darstellung des integrierten Forschungsansatzes der soziologischen Ethnografie einen Schwerpunkt. Dieser Ansatz wird mit Bezug auf aktuelle Forschungsbeispiele und klassische Fallstudien vorgestellt. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Frage, wie qualitative Sozialforschung ‚gemacht wird’, welche Verfahren eingesetzt und miteinander kombiniert, welche Erklärungsansprüche formuliert werden, wie qualitative Studien zu ihren Ergebnissen kommen und welche analytischen Einsichten sie liefern. Die begleitende Übung führt in ausgewählte qualitative Beobachtungs- und Befragungsverfahren ein.

Advanced Methods of Qualitative Analysis

88-149-SOZ105-S-SE-0914.20251.001
Robert Schmidt

Microanalytic explorations of (political) assemblies, demonstrations, and protest events
The research teaching project is assigned to the empirical research focus Placings of the Political, which is part of the ‘Process-oriented Sociology’ department. When people come together for rallies, demonstrations, strikes, blockades, encampments or occupations on streets, squares or other places of protest, this is when ‘the political’ is being enacted, performed, situated and placed. At the same time, however, the term Placings of the Political also refers to conceptual attempts to re-describe and conceptually re-locate political protest events in the discourse of the political and to place rallies, demonstrations, protest meetings and gatherings analytically at the very central point that, in a widespread and limited understanding of politics and public discourse, is occupied by other, more established and more exclusive places - e.g. the salons, the media or the parliaments. Political developments of the past two decades, which persist to the present day have launched astonishing careers of public places, streets, squares and transport hubs: Zuccotti Park, Gezi Park, Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol or Syntagma Square metonymically stand for the digitally networked protest and resistance movements as a whole and form the starting point of our research perspective. However, the increased political relevance of places is also documented in radical right-wing marches and rallies and - not least - in the wave of mass protests against the right.
In our research, protest events are primarily analyzed with reference to their auditory dimension. This allows the usual focus on external protest communication, i. e. on what is publicly presented, demanded, criticized and denounced in protests and demonstrations, to be exploratively redirected. We are particularly interested in the situational and audible communicative ‘inner life’ of gatherings and protest assemblies as it is produced and overheard by the participants. In this sense we focus on processes of political semiosis and articulation and we develop innovative ‘audio’-ethnographic research strategies to decode such phenomena. The theoretical background of the empirical explorations is formed by the debates on the public sphere, performative theories of assembly (Butler) and ‘spaces of appearance’ (Arendt) as well as radical-democratic ‘theories of the political’ (Lefort, Nancy, Rancière, Mouffe, Laclau etc.). Public meeting places, streets and squares form dense zones of political action that obey not only linguistic, deliberative and dialogical principles. These zones of density are the places in the world where the polis gathers, where participants emerge in front of an assembled general public and where political disputes and conflicts are realized performatively, bodily and affectively. We define assembly as an assemblage of co-present bodies and public objects around which a space of hearing and appearance stretches out. This space is characterized by proximity, intensity of communicative interactions, joint attention and an all-round hearing and being heard.

Cf. a first publication of research results:
Schmidt, Robert: Situationalität und Verortung des Politischen. Eine praxeologische Forschungsskizze. (Situationality and placing of the political. A praxeological research sketch). In: Corsten, Michael (ed.): Praxis. Exercise. Understanding. Weilerswist (Velbrück Wissenschaft) 2021. p. 120-136.