Doing Qualitative Research

Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology

Documentation created as part of the Perceptual Form of the City, a research project investigating the individual’s perception of the urban landscape. Includes a review of techniques used, general critique and future proposals.

Notes on Methodology

Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction, 2nd edition by David Silverman. Sage, London, 2001, 325 pages, £17·99, ISBN 0 761 96865 2.

Analysing Everyday Explanation: A Casebook of Methods

Scholars of ethnomethodologically informed discourse studies are often sceptical of the use of interview data such as focus group data. Some scholars quite simply reject interview data with referen...

Doing focus group research: Studying rational ordering in focus group interaction

In this comprehensive overview we familiarise readers with Michel Foucault’spublications that are relevant both to discourse studies and to studies of governmentality.We review the narrow impact that Foucault’s ideas have had ondiscourse studies and summarise the scant literature on discourse and governmentalityacross different disciplines. We elucidate the new scholarly understandingsof Foucault’s later work, as well as engage with the debates aboutgovernmentality that have been generated after Foucault. In particular, we give athorough assessment of the reverberations of Foucault’s later work on governmentalityto clarify its contemporary relevance for discourse studies. Lastly,we introduce and contextualise the theoretical, methodological and analyticalinnovations in discourse studies to be found in the chapters in this volume,before concluding on the contributions that the book makes to both discoursestudies and studies of governmentality.

New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

Studies of Discourse and Governmentality: New Perspectives and Methods

The chapter demonstrates how empirical discourse analysis can contribute tothe study of two issues of particular significance in recent studies of governmentality.Firstly, the observation that the relationship between power andresistance is specifically contradictory, in that resistance marks both a boundaryand a constitutive moment of government, and, secondly, the realisationthat governmentality is somehow intertwined with the continuous becomingof ethical subjects, or, in other words, with continuously negotiated practices ofsubjectivation. The chapter pursues and enforces the theoretical argument thatpractices of subjectivation should be understood as an aspect of the unceasinglynegotiated interdependence of power and resistance. This suggests that thistheoretical insight can be fulfilled in empirical research if studies of governmentalityare interconnected with membership categorisation analysis and conversationanalysis. To demonstrate the benefits of this approach, the chapter providesan in-depth analysis of focus group data from sessions in a small Danish villagein which citizens accomplish the contested discursive intersection of, on the onehand, a municipal strategy aimed at ‘greening’ the citizens’ transportation conductand, on the other hand, the citizens’ attempt to conduct their own conduct.

Laura Bang Lindegaard

Papers

Doing focus group research: Studying rational ordering in focus group interaction

New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

Studies of Discourse and Governmentality: New Perspectives and Methods

The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self in the face of climate change

The mobilities paradigm: discourses and ideologies