Annual Transdisciplinary Winter School: Culture Psychology and Qualitative Research

Carolin Demuth

Carolin Demuth is Associate professor of Cultural & Developmental Psychology at Aalborg University and co-directing the Centre for Cultural Psychology (https://www.ccp.aau.dk/) together with Brady Wagoner and Bo Allesøe Christensen, along with senior advisors Jaan Valsiner and Svend Brinkman. Her research interest lies in the dialogical interplay of language and subjectivity, language socialization and narrative identity as well as in qualitative methods more generally. Her work is located in Discursive, Narrative, and Cultural Psychology and draws on Multimodal Video Analysis, Positioning Analysis, and Discourse Analysis. She has previously also worked with Grounded Theory Methodology. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Identity (2021 in press, with Michael Bamberg and Meike Watzlawik) and published various papers on qualitative methods (https://vbn.aau.dk/da/persons/129621/publications/). She is Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology: Cultural Psychology and on the editorial board of Qualitative Research in Psychology and Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS). She is currently president elect of the Association for European Qualitative Researchers in Psychology (EQuiP) and co-organizer of the first international EQuiP Congress in 2021.

Meike Watzlawik

Meike Watzlawik is professor for Development, Education and Culture at the Psychological Institute of SFU Berlin, Germany. During her studies in psychology, she mainly focused on quantitative methods, and then worked with mixed-method approaches in her dissertation and habilitation. While qualitatively content-analytic methods, with which she has mainly worked here, still very much follow a "quantitative logic," she has recently been working increasingly with methods that allow the description of the complexity of human phenomena (Listening Guide/Voice Method; positioning analysis, microanalytic single case evaluations; etc.). She is, for example, the co-editor of Capturing Identity: Quantitative and Qualitative Methods (with Aristi Born, University Press of America, 2007) and the Handbook of Identity (with Carolin Demuth and Michael Bamberg, Cambridge, 2021). Examples for articles/chapters are Nature leaves no gaps. From scientifically dissected phenomena back to the whole (2017) or Debates about the scientific status of psychology: Looking at the bright side (with Lucas Mazur, 2017); she is part of the editorial board of Culture & Psychology. Examining different aspects of identity has been the focus of her research (e.g., sexual identity development of adolescence, the impact of sibling relationships/twinship on identity development, couple identity, occupational identity). More information can be found here.

The course will consist of three lectures, three parallel data sessions and individual consultations with the participants:

Key note presentations:

Will be held by international experts in the given field and provide an introduction to current state-of-the-art approaches to qualitative research such as discursive and visual analysis of online blogs and online vlogs, as well as multimodal video analysis.

Data sessions:

The participants can submit data material from their own PhD project that they would like to be analyzed in the data sessions.

1. Data session 1 with Brendan Gough: online blogs/arts-based research
2. Data session 2 with Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes: Narrative analysis of online vlogs
3. Data session 3 with Pirkko Raudaskoski: Multimodal Video-Analysis

Each data session will discuss data material from two PhD projects, so that a total of six projects will be analyzed together with the experts in the data sessions. The applicants will be asked to send in a description of their project and the data material that they want to discuss with their application. The organizers will then choose the six projects to be assigned to the data sessions. The applicants can chose which data session they would like to be part of.

Individual consultations

The participants will have the possibility to sign up for individual consultations with one of the five advisors: Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes, Brendan Gough, Pirkko Raudaskoski, Carolin Demuth, Meike Watzlawik.

Day 1:

10h00 – 10h15
Introduction (Carolin Demuth & Meike Watzlawik)

10h15 – 11h00
Presentation of participants

11h00 – 11h45
Key note 1: Brendan Gough

Coffee Break

12h00 – 12h45
Key note 2: Pirkko Raudaskoski

Lunch break

14h00 – 16h00
Three parallel data sessions

16h00 – 16h30
Summary

Day 2:

10h00 – 10h15:
Introduction to the 2nd day (Carolin Demuth & Meike Watzlawik)

10h15 – 11h00
Key note 3: Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes

Coffee Break

11h15 – 12h15
Individual consultations

Lunch break

13h00 – 14h00
Individual consultations

14h00 – 14h30
Summary and conclusion

14h30 - 15h30
Individual consultations (with A. Georgakopoulu-Nunes)

Max number of participants:  18

There will be 2 options for participating:

A) Participation including presenting own material in data sessions (max. 2 per data session = 6 in total)

Participants who would like their material to be discussed in the data session (option a) need to send an application including:

• A brief description of their project (approx. ½-1 page)
• the material they would like to present (e.g., 1 -2 pages of transcription plus 1-2 min. video clip)
• Preference of data session (1) Brendan Gough, (2) Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes, (3) Pirkko Raudaskoski) in which your material will be discussed
• Preference of with whom of the five supervisors you would like to meet up for individual consultation on the second day

Deadline for submitting your application:  January 31, 2021.

B) Participation without presentation of own material in data sessions (max 12 participants), i.e. these participants will also participate in the data sessions but not present own material.

Please indicate with your registration

• Preference of data session (1) Brendan Gough, (2) Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes, (3) Pirkko Raudaskoski) in which you would like to participate
• Preference of with whom of the five supervisors you would like to meet up for individual consultation on the second day

Registration deadline: February 05, 2021

Please register/send your applications to: hannepc@hum.aau.dk

Number of ECTS: 2

This workshop is funded by the Doctoral School of the Humanities at Aalborg University.

Beyond mainstream interviewing: Creative and digital alternatives for Qualitative Psychology

In this talk I will sketch some problems with traditional qualitative interviews before outlining some innovations in interviewing, alternatives to interview data and more creative possibilities for qualitative data collection. I will reference some recent work with students and colleagues for illustration purposes, covering blogs from men experiencing chronic illness, online body image discussions concerning young men on a newspaper website, and online support forums for men seeking infertility treatment. The trend towards arts-based qualitative research will also be touched on, signalling a turn towards greater ‘experimentation’ and eclecticism.

Bio Brendan Gough

Professor Gough is a critical social psychologist and qualitative researcher interested in men and masculinities. Now based at Leeds Beckett University, he has published many papers on gender identities and relations, mostly in the context of health, lifestyles and wellbeing. Prof. Gough is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Qualitative Research in Psychology; he is co-editor in chief of the journal Social & Personality Psychology Compass, and is associate editor for the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinities.

He has co-authored/edited books in the areas of critical social psychology (2001/2013, with McFadden, McDonald), reflexivity in qualitative research (2003, with Finlay), and men's health (2009, with Robertson). He has put together a 5-volume Major Work on Qualitative Research in Psychology (2014, Sage), has co-edited  a book on Chemically Modified Bodies (substance use for appearance purposes; 2016, with Hall, Grogan), and edited the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Social Psychology in 2017. More recently, he has published a report for the World Health Organisation on male mental health (2020, with Novikova).

In 2016 he was awarded a fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Current projects examine men’s experiences of infertility and male athlete experiences of challenging homophobia in sport.

Readings:

Prodgers, L. & Gough, B. (2019) The invisible paradox of Inflammatory Bowel Disease: An analysis of men's blogs, Journal of Health Psychology

Whittaker, C., Gough, B., Fawkner, H. & Deighton-Smith, N. (2019) Young Men’s Body Dissatisfaction: A qualitative analysis of anonymous online accounts, Journal of Health Psychology

Hanna, E. & Gough, B. (2018) Searching for help online: An analysis of peer-to-peer posts on a male-only infertility forum, Journal of Health Psychology, 23[7]: 917-28

Optional readings:

Gough, B. & Lyons, A. (2016) The future of qualitative research in psychology: Accentuating the positive, IPBS: Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, 50[2]: 243: 252

Braun, V., Clarke, V., & Gray, D. (Eds.). (2017). Collecting Qualitative Data: A Practical Guide to Textual, Media and Virtual Techniques. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Multimodal interaction analysis: Getting closer to the complexity of getting things done together

How do we make sense of what is going on when we are engaged in a practical activity with other people? Language has an important role in meaning-making, but so do the bodies of the persons involved, together with the material setting used. We are aware of not just what the other(s) are doing, but we also design our own actions to be as intelligible as possible through the symbolic and prosodic possibilities of spoken language, through our body (gaze, gestures, posture) and by orienting to and using the concrete environment. These aspects of any interactional situation Goodwin (2000) called a changing contextual configuration. Goodwin was a part of the ethnomethodological conversation analytic (EMCA) research community. However, he was also inspired by semiotics and the socio-cultural/historical school, which was increasingly visible toward the end of his career. This is why he concentrated on the co-operative nature of action not just as a turn-by-turn building of meaning, but also as a way to transfer cultural knowledge through multimodal interaction that includes the use of manmade material culture (lamination, Goodwin, 2018).

I will go through the basic ideas of Goodwin’s approach and compare that with another socio-cultural/-historical approach to multimodality, mediated discourse analysis, as both understand the material basis of action and the historicity of the elements of action. I use both approaches when I go through a multimodal analysis (Raudaskoski, 2010) of a phone call from an adoption agency to a couple about their future child. I show how the identities of both the adoptive parents and the child-in-referral start moving towards a mother, father and (Danish) son. The multimodal analysis of both ends of the phone call shows the complex entanglements of identity work and how affect can be analysed as social practice that connects to other times and places.

Bio: Pirkko Raudaskoski

Pirkko Raudaskoski is Professor of Material-discursive practices at the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark. She leads the research group Mattering: Centre for Discourse and Practice. Her research tries to tackle the material nature of language, the embodied nature of action, the use of concrete environments, and, increasingly, the need for participatory research to widen the co-operative nature of action to research practices.

Readings:

Goodwin, C. (2000) Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 1489-1522.

Goodwin, C. (2018) Why multimodality? Why co-operative action? Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 1(2).

Raudaskoski, P. (2010) “Hi father”, “Hi mother”: A multimodal analysis of a significant, identity changing phone call mediated on TV. Journal of Pragmatics 42(2), 426-442.

Optional readings:

For a discussion about multimodal analysis of affect vis-à-vis process psychology and practice theory:

Raudaskoski, P. & Klemmensen, Charlotte M.B. (2019). The entanglements of affect and participation. Frontiers in Psychology

For a multimodal analysis of situated imagination:

Raudaskoski, P. (2021). Imagining the future in a transnational adoption process. In Bastos, A.C., Tateo, L. Valerio, T. (eds.). From Dream to Action: Imagination and (Im)possible Futures. P. 167-188, Information Age Publishing.

Co-opting small stories on social media: A positioning analysis of story-directives

Small stories research has recently been extended in my work (www.ego-media.org; Georgakopoulou 2019) as a paradigm for critically interrogating the current storytelling boom on social media, which includes the designing-spree of stories as specific features on a range of platforms (Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Weibo, Twitter). The popularity of stories as features, amongst ordinary users, businesses and Influencers alike, is such that in 2019 sharing through stories overtook sharing through feeds. I have argued that the analysis of stories as designed features necessitates an adaptation of ethnography to a technography that taps into the socio-technicity of stories, by shedding light on platforms’ views, ideologies and values underpinning the design of stories (2019; Georgakopoulou, Iversen & Stage 2020). Through such an approach, I have specifically documented three directives (cf. prompts, preferential conditions) to users as storytellers and story-recipients online: sharing life-in-the-moment, audience engagement as quantified viewing, and authenticity in tellers’ self-presentation. In terms of ‘ways of telling’, these directives prompt the posting of small stories, as I have defined them, especially with regard to a breaking news economy, (trans)portability, and a focus on affective sharing of experience. In positioning terms, the three directives can be mapped neatly onto Level 1, Level 2 & Level 3 respectively (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2016) but the integration of any pre-positioning into a model that privileges tellers’ situated performances raises questions about its calibration of the relationship between agency and structuration. In this lecture, I will therefore revisit positioning for the analysis of stories as curated features. I suggest that the focus on ethnography and iterativity of positioning choices in my earlier work (e.g. see Georgakopoulou 2013) can be extended to the exploration of formatting processes (Blommaert et al 2020) of stories online, that is, to the development of recognizeability and normativity of specific ways of telling and self-presentation modes. I will illustrate this in relation to the positioning of the teller and their story as authentic and its strategic authorization by Influencers, as power-storytellers.

Bio: Alex Georgakopoulou

Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Sociolinguistics, Co-Director of the Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication, King’s College London. She has developed small stories research, a paradigm for studying identities in everyday-life stories. Latest (2020) publications include: ‘Quantified Storytelling: A narrative analysis of metrics on social media’ (With Stefan Iversen and Carsten Stage, Palgrave); & ‘The Handbook of Discourse Studies’ (ed. with Anna De Fina, CUP).

Readings:

De Fina, A. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2020). Re-thinking narrative: Tellers, Tales and Identities in Contemporary Worlds. In: Anna De Fina & Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies (2020), 91-114. Cambridge University Press

Georgakopoulou, A. (2020). Quantified storytelling: A narrative analysis of metrics on social media. In: A. Georgakopoulou-Nunes, S. Iversen & C. Stage (eds) London: Palgrave Macmillan. CHAPTER 4 (p. 95-131)

Giaxoglou, K. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2021 in press) A narrative practice approach to identities: small stories and positioning analysis in digital contexts. In: M. Bamberg, M. Watzlawik & C. Demuth (Eds). The Cambridge Handbook of Identity. Cambridge University Press.