Doing a transversal method: developing an ethics of care in a collaborative research project

Abstract

Beck and Sznaider call on 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to transcend methodological nationalism and account for an increasingly cosmopolitanized reality. We take up their challenge by drawing on our experiences of conducting a collaborative ethnography of methodological changes in the production of population statistics within and between European national and international statistical institutes. Drawing on debates in science and technology studies, we depart from some conceptual presuppositions of methodological cosmopolitanism to define a 'transversal method'. Referring to this method as performative and ontopolitical, we reflect on how it requires collaboration and, in our ethnography, gave rise to three practical challenges -(1) going beyond the individual project; (2) using each other's field notes; (3) and working against the national order of things. To meet these challenges, we reflect on how this method required us to practise three modes of care -thinking with others, tinkering with field notes, and dissenting within.

Imagining Citizens as More than Data Subjects

“…These techniques are core to ethnographic methods that conceive of researchers as observers and interpreters of field sites and research subjects as informants. For further elaboration see Scheel et al (2019).…”

“…Each of the narratives presents the observations, interests and lessons drawn by the individual authors, and we largely preserved the differences in style and analysis. At the same time, they are entangled because they follow ethnographic research conducted in a shared field, including several years of conversations leading up to this article (Scheel et al, 2019). Rather than collapsing the two ethnographies into one, we have chosen to present them individually to preserve the richness and integrity of our experiences of friction and the discordances underlying them.…”

Law, technology, and data‐driven security: infra‐legalities as method assemblage

“…65 Multi-sited methods also push us to analyse 'relations that connect actors (both human and technological) across sites and scales' rather than studying global governance 'as interactions between already existing entities like organizations located at mutually exclusive scales'. 66 This approach emphasizes transnational movements, deterritorialized flows, and relationality between actors and prompts different questions about how socio-technical elements are interconnected to sustain global infrastructures in practice.…”

Special theme introduction: methodological cosmopolitanism across the socio‐cultural sciences

“…Towards this aim, we bring together experts from across five different sociocultural fields of research, some of whom were, like ourselves, members of or affiliated to the Cosmo-Climate project and its associated collective learning processes (this is true of Mao (2014) and Thorsen (2014) in particular). Contributors all have extensive experience in conducting trans-local, transnational, or transboundary socio-cultural research, deploying various qualitative methods of enquiry as part of wider collaborative efforts, including the ARITHMUS project (Scheel et al 2019). Against this backdrop, the mandate posed to each contributor has been to discuss and critically interrogate the challenges and capacities of doing methodological cosmopolitanismas a practice of studying transboundary actors, issues, and processes in novel waysacross their respective fields or (inter-)disciplines.…”