During the two-hour session, one of the participants will bring a 3-minute piece of spoken interaction and its detailed transcription. After 10 minutes of listening to the excerpt, and 20 minutes self-study of the transcript, the group will engage in a discussion of all the possible interpretations of whatever is happening and is meaningful in the excerpt. In the discussion, we will ground our claims in the fine detail of conversation. The data bringer will remain silent during that discussion. After the discussion, the ‘data bringer’ reflects on the groups discussion and brings in her/his research hypotheses and interpretations.
The aims of this two-hour workshop are fourfold. First, to share and develop methods of interpretation while analysing a piece of data collaboratively. Secondly, to take our time to analyse a small fragment of conversation in small detail. Thirdly, to figure out if and how we can theorise memory ‘upwards’ by looking into those fine details of human interaction. And finally, by focusing only on the text, we will be able to reflect on how much, and which, context(s) we need to make sense of what our participants find meaningful.
Thomas Van de Putte is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Trento. He works on the intersections of cultural sociology, sociolinguistics and cultural studies. Thomas earned his PhD from King’s College London in 2020, with an ethnography of the inhabitants of the contemporary town of Auschwitz/Oświęcim, in Poland. His first monograph, Contemporary Auschwitz/Oświęcim: An Interactional,Synchronic Approach to Collective Memory, is published by Routledge.
