Sullivan, Sian and Brockington, Dan (2004) Qualitative methods in globalisation studies: or, saying something about the world without counting or inventing it. Working Paper. University of Warwick. Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, Coventry.

Preview

PDF WRAP_Sullivan_wp13904.pdf - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader Download (116Kb)

Abstract

This paper originally appeared as a book chapter in a volume oriented towards social science graduate students preparing for fieldwork, primarily in ‘developing country’ contexts. It has been reworked extensively here as a contribution for a recent CSGR seminar series by core research staff regarding our methodological approaches to research. As such, the paper provides an overview of some qualitative research methods in the social sciences, and of their relevance for conducting research in a continuing context of ‘globalisation’: which here refers to increasing supraterritoriality in domains of human organisation, and the relative collapsing of temporal and spatial scales that this implies. We focus on three key methodological domains: participant observation (and/or observant participation), oral testimony and the production of ethnographic texts; discourse analysis; and considerations of the subjective implied by phenomenological and embodiment approaches. We also make some comments regarding relationships between qualitative and quantitative methods and the implications of these different tools for engagement in terms of the information they yield. We observe that it is not so much research methods that have changed under contemporary globalisation processes. Rather, we note that orientations to research and to the interpretation of ‘findings’ - particularly in relation to certainty, to the implications of notions of difference and ‘the other’, and to aspirations of objectivity - have been much affected by the intertwined theoretical fields of poststructuralism, postcolonialism and feminism. Thus by highlighting the infusion of power in research praxis as in social relations more generally, we acknowledge the always politically constitutive role(s) of academic engagement.

Item Type:	Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) J Political Science > JZ International relations
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Qualitative research, Globalization -- Research, Discourse analysis, Ethnology -- Qualitative research
Series Name:	Working papers (University of Warwick. Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation)
Publisher:	University of Warwick. Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation
Place of Publication:	Coventry
Date:	April 2004
Number:	No.139
Number of Pages:	29
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
Version or Related Resource:	Adapted from: Brockington, D. and Sullivan, S. (2003) Qualitative methods. In Scheyvens, R. and Storey, D. (eds.) Development Fieldwork: A Practical Guide, London: Sage Publications, pp. 57-74.
References:	Barker, C. and Cox, L. (2003) ‘“What have the Romans ever done for us?” Academic and activist forms of theorising’, On-line. Available HTTP: <http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/afpp/afpp8.html> (accessed 20 January 2004). Battaglia, D. (1999). Towards an ethics of the open subject: writing culture in good conscience. In Moore, H. (ed.) Anthropological theory today. Cambridge, Polity Press. Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R. and Tarule, J. M. (1986). Women's ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind. New York, Basic Books Inc. Bender, B. (1998). Stonehenge: making space. Oxford, Berg Publishers. Biko, S. (1989 (1978)). I write what I like: a selection of writings. Oxford, Heinemann International Literature and Textbooks. Bohm, D. (2002) Wholeness and implicate order. London: Routledge. Bollig, M. and Mbunguha, T. J. (1997). "When war came the cattle slept…" Himba oral traditions. Köln, Rüdigger, Köppe Verlag. Bourdieu, P. (1990 (1980)) The logic of practice, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998) Acts of resistance: against the tyranny of the market, trans. by Nice, R. New York: The New press. Bourdieu, P. (2001) Masculine domination, Oxford: Blackwells. Bourgois, P. (1995). In search of respect. Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Bourgois, P. (2001) ‘The power of violence in war and peace: post-Cold War lessons from El Salvador’, Ethnography, 2(1): 5-34. Brinkman, I. and Fleisch, A. (1999). Grandmother's footsteps: oral tradition and south-east Angolan narratives on the colonial encounter. Köln, Rüdigger, Köppe Verlag. Broch-Due, V. and Anderson, D. M. (1999). Poverty and the pastoralist: deconstructing myths, reconstructing realities. In D.M. Anderson and V. Broch-Due, (eds.) The poor are not us: poverty and pastoralism. Oxford, James Currey. Brockington, D. (1998). Land loss and livelihoods. The effects of eviction on pastoralists moved from the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University College London, London. Brockington, D. (2001). Communal property and degradation narratives. debating the Sukuma immigration into Rukwa Region, Tanzania. Cahiers d'Afrique 20: 1-22. Brockington, D (2002) Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania, James Currey, Oxford Brockington, D and Homewood, K (1996) Wildlife, pastoralists and science: debates concerning Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania’, pp91-104 in Leach, M and Mearns, R (eds) The lie of the land: challenging received wisdom on the African environment, The International African Institute, James Currey, Heinemann, London, Oxford and Portsmouth. Brockington, D and Homewood, K (2001) Degradation debates and data deficiencies. The case of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania’, Africa, vol 71, pp179-227. Bryman, A. and Burgess, R. G. (1999). Qualitative research. London, Sage Publications. Bulmer, M. (1984). The Chicago school of sociology. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture: twentieth century ethnography, literature and art. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. E. (1986). Writing Culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, University of California Press. Clifford, M. (1986). Introduction: partial truths. In M. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, (eds.) Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography, University of California Press, London. Cross, N. and Barker, R. (1992). At the desert's edge: oral histories from the Sahel. London, Panos Publications Ltd. Crouch, D. (2001). Spatialities and the feeling of doing. Social and Cultural Geography 2(1): 61-75. Csordas, T. (1999). Embodiment and cultural phenomenology. pp. 143-162 in Weiss, G. and Haber, H.F. (eds.) Perspectives on embodiment: the intersections of nature and culture. London, Routledge. Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (1988 (1980)). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (translation and foreword by Brain Massumi), The Athlone Press, London De Rivero, O. (2001). The myth of development: the non-viable economies of the 21 st century. London, Zed Books. Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak, C.G. Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press. Dery, M. (1996). Escape velocity: cyberculture at the end of the century. London, Hodder & Stoughton. De Saussure, F. (1974). Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Baskin, W. Glasgow, Fontana. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ., Princeton University Press. Escobar, A. (1996). Constructing Nature. Elements for a poststructural political ecology. In R. Peet and M. Watts, (eds.) Liberation Ecologies. Environment, Development and Social Movements, Routledge, London and New York. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1940). The Nuer: a description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. New York, Columbia University Press. Fairhead, J., and M. Leach. (1996). Misreading the African landscape: society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic. Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press. Fanon, F. (1967 (1963) The wretched of the earth. London, Penguin. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. London, Penguin. Foucault, M. (1990). Madness and civilisation: a history of insanity in the age of reason. London, Routledge. Foucault, M. (1998 (1976)) The will to knowledge: the history of sexuality, Volume 1, London: Penguin. Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news: discourse and ideology in the press. London, Routledge. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, Basic Books. Geyer, R. and Rihani, S. (2000). Complexity theory and the challenges to democracy in the 21st century. Paper presented to the Political Studies Association-UK 50th Annual Conference 10-13 April 2000, London. Gordon, R.J. (1998). Vagrancy, law & “shadow knowledge”: internal pacification 1915-1939, pp. 51- 76 in Hayes, P., Silverster, J., Wallace, M. & Hartmann, W. (eds.) Namibia under South Africa rule: mobility and containment 1915-1946. London, Windhoek, Athens: James Currey, Out of Africa, Ohio University Press. Gordon, R. J. (2000). The stat(u)s of Namibian anthropology: a review. Cimbebasia 16: 1-12. Gordon, R.J. and Sholto Douglas, S. (2000). The Bushman myth: the making of a Namibian underclass. Boulder, Colorado, Westview. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. by Hoare, Q. and Nowell-Smith, G. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hamman, R. 1997 The application of ethnographic methodology in the study of cybersex, Cybersociology 7 http://www.cybersoc.com/magazine/1/plummer.html[accessed 23 January 2002]. Hammersley, M. (1992). What's wrong with ethnography? Methodological explorations. London, Routledge. Hannerz, U. (2003). Being there...and there...and there! Reflections on multi-site ethnography. Ethnography 4 (2): 201-216. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Hart, K. (1982). The political economy of West African agriculture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Oxford, Blackwell. Herodotus (1998 (ca. 440 BCE)). The Histories. Dewald, C. (ed.) Waterfield, R. (Trans.). Oxford, Oxford University Press). Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (2002). The future of globalization. Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association 37(3): 247-266. Hobart, M. (1996). Ethnography as a practice, or the unimportance of penguins. Europæa 11: 3-36. Hodgson, D (ed.) (2000). Rethinking pastoralism in Africa: gender, culture and the myth of the patriarchal pastoralist, James Currey, Fountain Publishers, EAEP, Ohio University Press, Oxford, Kampala, Nairobi, Athens Hodgson, D. L. and Schroeder, R. A. (2002). Dilemmas of counter-mapping community resources in Tanzania. Development and Change 33: 79-100. Hutchinson, S. E. (1996). Nuer Dilemmas: coping with money, war and the state. Berkeley, University of California Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. London, Routledge. Irigaray, L. 1997 (1996) The other: wom an. pp. 308-315 in Kemp, S. and Squires, J. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Irigaray, L. (2002) The way of love. London, Continuum. Jantsch, E (1980) The self-organising universe: scientific and human implications of the emerging paradigm of evolution. Pergamon Press, Oxford Kauffman, S. (1993) The origins of order: self -organization and selection in evolution. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Kauffman, S. (1995) At home in the universe: the search for laws of self -organisation and complexity. London, Penguin Books Ltd. Kristeva, J. (1997 (1982)) Psychoanalysis and the polis. pp. 228-231 in Kemp, S. and Squires, J. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Kuhn, T.S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions, 2nd edition. London, Chicago University Press. Laing, R.D. (1967) The politics of experience and the bird of paradise, London: Penguin Books. Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: a selection. London: Tavistock. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf. Leach, M. and Mearns, R. (1996). The lie of the land. Challenging received wisdom on the African environment. Oxford, James Currey. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester, Manchester University Press. Malinowski, N. (1967). A diary in the strict sense of the term. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: women, ecology and the scientific revolution. New York, Harper and Row. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of perception. Smith, C. Trans. London, Routledge. Mruck, K. and Breuer, F. (2003). Subjectivity and reflexivity in qualitative research - the FQS issues. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, [On-line Journal] 4(2). Available at: http://www.qualitativeresearch. net/fqs -texte/2-03intro-1-e.htm [accessed 2 March 2004]. Nader, L. (1996). Naked science: anthropological inquiry into boundaries, power and knowledge. London, Routledge. Notes From Nowhere Collective (2003) We are everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. London, Verso. Ott, J. (1996). Pharmacotheon: entheogenic drugs, their plant sources and history. Kennewick, WA, Natural Products Co. Plows, A. (2002) Praxis and practice: the ‘what, how and why’ of the UK Environmental Direct Action (EDA) movement in the 1990s. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, Bangor. Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world. London, Penguin Books. Rahnema, M. and Bawtree, V. (1997) The post-development reader. London, Zed Boo ks. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, Pantheon. Sartre, J.-P. (1969). Being and nothingness. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Scholte, J A. (2000). Globalization: a critical introduction. Palgrave, Basingstoke. Scott, J.C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven, Yale University Press. Silver, D. (2000). Looking backwards, looking forward: cyberculture studies 1990-2000. http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/ccs.htm l [accessed 23 January 2002]. Slim, H. and Thompson, P. (1993). Listening for a change: oral testimony and development. London, Panos Publications Ltd. Smith, S.J. (1994). Qualitative methods. In R. J. Johnston, D. Gregory and D. M. Smith, (eds.) The Dictionary of Human Geography, Blackwells Publishers Ltd., Oxford. Spender, D. (1980). Man made language. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Stott, P. (1999). Tropical rain forest: a political ecology of hegemonic myth-making. London, IEA. Stott, P. and Sullivan, S. (2000). Political ecology: science, myth and power. London, Edward Arnold. Suler, J. (1999). The psychology of cyberspace. http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber.html [accessed 23 January 2002]. Sullivan, S. (1998). People, plants and practice in drylands: socio-political and ecological dimensions of resource-use by Damara farmers in north-west Namibia. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Univeristy College London, London. Sullivan, S. (1999a). Folk and formal, local and national: Damara cultural knowledge and communitybased conservation in southern Kunene, Namibia. Cimbebasia. 15: 1-28. Sullivan, S. (1999b). The impacts of people and livestock on topographically diverse open wood-and shrub-lands in arid north-west Namibia. Global Ecology and Biogeography (Special Issue on Degradation of Open Woodlands). 8: 257-277. Sullivan, S. (2000a). Gender, ethnographic myths and community-based conservation in a former Namibian 'homeland'. In D. Hodgson, (ed.) Rethinking pastoralism in Africa: gender, culture and the myth of the patriarchal pastoralist. Oxford, James Currey. Sullivan, S. (2000b). Getting the science right, or introducing science in the first place? Local ‘facts’, global discourse – ‘desertification’ in north-west Namibia. pp. 15-44 in Stott, P. and Sullivan, S. (eds.) Political ecology: science, myth and power. London, Edward Arnold. Sullivan, S. (2001a). Difference, identity and access to official discourses: Hai||om, ‘Bushmen’, and a recent Namibian ethnography. Anthropos 96: 179-192. Sullivan, S. (2001b). Danza e diversità: copri, movimento ed esperienza nella trance-dance dei Khoisan e nei rave occidentali. (On dance and difference: bodies, movement and experience in Khoesan trance-dancing - perceptions of 'a raver'). Africa e Mediterraneo Cultura e Societa 37: 15-22. Sullivan, S. (2002a). How sustainable is the communalising discourse of ‘new’ conservation? The masking of difference, inequality and aspiration in the fledgling ‘conservancies’ of Namibia. pp. 158-187 In Chatty, D. and Colchester, M. (eds.) Conservation and mobile indigenous people: Displacement, forced settlement and sustainable development. Oxford, Berghahn Press. http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/CSGR/Publications/Sullivan/Sep03.pdf Sullivan, S. (2002b). 'How can the rain fall in this chaos?' Myth and metaphor in representations of the north-west Namibian landscape. pp. 255-265, 315-317 in LeBeau, D. and Gordon, R.L. (eds.) Anthropology in the African renaissance. Proceedings of the Anthropological Association of Southern Africa conference, Windhoek, Gamsberg MacMillan. Sullivan, S. (2003). Protest, conflict and litigation: dissent or libel in resistance to a conservancy in north-west Namibia. In Berglund, E. and Anderson, D. (eds.) Ethnographies of conservation: environmentalism and the distribution of privilege. Oxford, Berghahn Press. http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/CSGR/Publications/Sullivan/Oct03.pdf. Sullivan, S. (2004a). ‘We are heartbroken and furious!’ Violence and the (anti-)globalisation movements. CSGR Working Paper no. 133/04 http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/CSGR/wpapers/wp13304.pdf Sullivan, S. (2004b). Barcelona 22-25 January 2004: First International Conference on Social Movements and Activist Research, CSGR Newsletter 11: 12-15. Sullivan, S. and Homewood, K. 2003 On non-equilibrium and nomadism: knowledge, diversity and global modernity in drylands (and beyond …). CSGR Working Paper 122/03. http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/CSGR/wpapers/wp12203.pdf. Thomas, R. (2000). Herodotus in context: ethnography, science and the art of persuasion. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tilley, C. (1994). A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths and monuments. Oxford, Berg. Twyman, C., Morrison, J. and Sporton, D. (1999). The final fifth: autobiography, reflexivity and interpretation in cross-cultural research. Area 31(4): 313-325. Vedder, H. (1928) The native tribes of South West Africa. Cape Town, Cape Times Ltd. Weiss, G. and Haber, H. F. (1999). Perspectives on embodiment: the intersections of nature and culture. London, Routledge. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: how working class kids get working class jobs. Farnborough, Saxon House. Willis, R. (1981). A state in the making: myth,
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/1975

Request changes to a record

Actions (login required)

View Item