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Dear list members,
You are cordially invited to attend our workshop Apples and Oranges:
Practicing Comparison, taking place at Goldsmiths, London 13th and
14th September 2012. (See more information and programme below).
The external registration is now open and the number of seats is
limited. If you are interested to attend, please send us an email
requiring registration on: [log in to unmask]
Looking forward to seeing you
Zuzana Hrdlickova
Apples and Oranges. Practicing Comparison
A two-day workshop exploring sociological and anthropological concepts
around comparative practice.
Location: Orangerie, Surrey House. 80 Lewisham Way, London SE14 6PB
(entrance from Shardeloes Road).
Cost: Free, but spaces are limited and registration is required at:
[log in to unmask]
The conference is based around pre-circulated papers/provocation
pieces. Everybody who attends is expected to have read all the papers.
Organised by: "Organizing Disaster" (Michael Guggenheim, Zuzana
Hrdlickova, Joe Deville) at the Department of Sociology/CSISP and
"Gambling in Europe" (Rebecca Cassidy, Claire Loussouarn, Andrea
Pisac) at the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of
London
Qualitative social science has become uneasy about comparing: it is
easily frightened by both accusations from within quantitative
traditions that assert the inability of its methods to control
variables precisely enough and a colonial past in which cultural
comparisons had a dubious taint of racism. However, despite being a
loaded term, comparisons are nonetheless routine within qualitative
social science, although they are often more implicit than explicit.
We perform them in conferences where we group in thematically similar
panels, in more or less strident academic debates, as well as in our
everyday practices as a way to understand and contextualise our own
research. However, we observe that this seemingly comparative practice
is rarely named as such.
Further, we also suspect -- while being acutely aware of the
problematic history of comparison as a social scientific activity,
whether in the service of forms of reductive positivism or a hierarchy
of cultures -- that this history does not explain the degree of
ongoing sensitivities about the value of naming certain research as
comparative. More directly, we suggest that abstaining from explicit
comparisons unnecessarily constrains qualitative research.
This workshop seeks responses to this problematic by relating to the
following topics:
* Accounts of Comparative Practices: What are the difficulties of
(collaborative) comparative projects? How do projects deal with cases
that refuse comparison, with fields that loose their comparative
features and with theoretical concepts that fail to help to compare?
* Comparison policing: how is (non)comparative practice enacted and
policed across academic life and in different disciplines?
* Strange comparisons: What is a 'strange' comparison? What is a
'proper' comparison?
* Incomparability/Failed comparisons:what are the limits to
comparison? How are these limits performed? According to which modes
of expertise?
* Comparison and value: Is comparison a technology of
commensuration? What is lost? What is gained?
* Comparison and temporality: what kinds of comparisons are
'restudies'? To what extent do comparisons across time equate to
comparisons across space?
* Comparison, method and theory:how should theory inform comparative
practice? At what point? Might experimental methodologies generate new
registers for comparison?
* Beyond comparison: which other terms and frameworks can be used to
describe the value of comparative practices? Which alternatives can be
proposed to the strength and authority of certain ways of doing
comparison in academic discourses and beyond?
---------------
Programme:
Thursday 13th September
9.30-10.00 Welcome & introduction
10.00-12.00 Incomparable/Strange Comparisons |
Vita Peacock (University College London)
From Melanesia to the Max Planck Society: a cross-cultural comparison
of the “big-man” category
Alice Santiago Faria (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Comparing the incomparable: architecture in colonial India(s)
Victoria Goddard and Elena Gonzalez-Polledo (Goldsmiths, University of London)
A riddle of steel: comparing trajectories in the steel industry
12.15-13.30 Failed and Strange Comparisons | Commentator:
Monika Krause (Goldsmiths, University of London)
James Dawson (University College London)
Two contexts, many understandings of politics: learning through
failure to compare
Giovanni Picker (Bristol University)
Comparing stigma? An experiment on ethnographic imagination
13.30-14.30 Lunch
14.30-15.45 Dialogue and Stumbling into Comparison |
Marc Brightman (Oxford University)
The jaguar and the bear: theoretical contributions of interregional
comparativism
Tereza Stöckelová (Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences
of the Czech Republic)
Apples and oranges are fruits: inquiry into the frames of comparing
16.00-17.15 Collaborations and Stumbling |
Priska Gisler (Bern University of the Arts), Monika Kurath (University of Basel)
Aesthetic practices and epistemic cultures in architecture, design and
the Fine Arts
Rebecca Cassidy, Claire Loussouarn, Andrea Pisac (Goldsmiths,
University of London), Julie Scott (London Metropolitan University)
Embodying comparison within a ERC funded project
Friday 14th September
9.00-10.15 Collaborations | Commentator: Jennifer Robinson
(University College London)
Joe Deville, Michael Guggenheim, Zuzana Hrdlickova (Goldsmiths,
University of London)
Practising collaboration, producing comparison
Georgina Born, Geoff Baker, Aditi Deo, Andrew Eisenberg and Patrick
Valiquet (Oxford University)
Music, digitisation, mediation: Experimenting with decentred vectors
of comparison between six singular ethnographic projects
10.15-10.45 Coffee
10.45-12.45 Comparisons for Policy-Making and the Public |
Thorgeir Kolshus (University of Oslo)
Comparison: relatively important?
Kevin Hall (Frankfurt University), Torsten Heinemann (Frankfurt
University), Ursula Naue (Vienna University)
IMMIGENE: Comparing DNA-testing for immigration cases in Austria,
Finland, and Germany
Hannah Jones (Goldsmiths, University of London), Ben Gidley (Oxford University)
Transnational soup: translating local integration policies across borders
12.45-14.00 Lunch
14.00-15.15 Comparisons and Problems of Measurement |
Commentator: Kate Nash (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Laura Camfield (University of East Anglia)
Measuring children’s social and cultural competencies in Sub-Saharan Africa
Sarah De Rijke (Leiden University), Paul Wouters (Leiden University,
Roland Bal (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Iris Wallenburg (Erasmus
University Rotterdam)
Comparing comparisons. On rankings and accounting in hospitals and academia
15.30-16.45 Comparisons with Theories as Guides |
Marsha Rosengarten (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Shifting comparative registers: can a diagram rehabilitate the outlier?
Alvise Matozzi (Free University of Bozen)
Semiotics’s Razor. Using Semiotics as a Descriptive Methodology in
Order to Compare Actor-Networks
16.45-17.15 Final commentator discussion: Janet Carsten (The
University of Edinburgh)
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