400010 FK Globale Verflechtungen und Multi-sited Ethnography (2012W)

This seminar takes us right into the middle of the theoretical dilemmas and practical challenges caused by multi-sited ethnography. Is a single sited approach always inadequate in the era of globalisation? Do notions like diaspora, networks, assemblages and entanglement force us to move with our field? How then do we understand people and things that stay put and bounded? How did this approach shape our projects and how can we critically think beyond the idea of following people, metaphores and things? How do we actually produce thick description between different places, spaces or research sites and can we avoid implicit holism? Are there problems that need alternative suggestions or things that do not want to be followed? While there is a third generation of multi-sited ethnography under way, we will critically reconsider this key concept of ethnographic fieldwork.