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

Stephan Scheel,Funda Ustek‐Spilda,Francisca Grommé,Ville Takala,Evelyn Ruppert,Baki Cakici

doi:10.1111/glob.12263

Abstract

AbstractBeck 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.

Highlights

Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider (2006) pose a formidable challenge in their call for the social sciences to translate a conception of cosmopolitanism into a methodology that can empirically investigate transnational phenomena which dissolve traditional analytical dualities of ‘the local and the global, the national and the international, us and them’ (383)
From realist to performative methods In this first section we describe the ontological and ethical-political implications of an STSinspired understanding of methodological cosmopolitanism and how it differs from Beck and Sznaider’s realist ontology
Collaboration and care in a transversal method While we identified collaboration as essential to undertake our version of a transversal method, making it work is easier said than done as many research projects have documented (e.g., Centellas, Smardon and Fifield 2014; Rabinow et al 2008)

Summary

Introduction

Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider (2006) pose a formidable challenge in their call for the social sciences to translate a conception of cosmopolitanism into a methodology that can empirically investigate transnational phenomena which dissolve traditional analytical dualities of ‘the local and the global, the national and the international, us and them’ (383). We did not anticipate how our research required specific modes of attention; modes that are typically not made visible in STS and other fields that study interconnected or transnational knowledge practices.2 Drawing on the work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2012, 2017), we articulate how we came to identify these modes of attention in terms of care as an ethic that responds to and helps negotiate the multiple entanglements, interdependencies, frictions and not always harmonious relations characterizing collaborative research.

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Conclusion