In this lecture, I build on Jaspal Naveel Singh’s Thursday’s lecture on historical foundations of ethnographic discourse studies to explore how to operationalise some of the key ideas. To illustrate strengths and limits of ethnographic and discourse analytic methods I present field notes and transcripts from two Studies of Work research projects – one of museum work and the other of police work. I focus on social interactions in these institutional contexts and make suggestions about how to integrate ethnography and conversation analysis in a microsociological contextualisation analysis. In the case of the museum study, I analyse how producers and visitors of a French-German exhibition negotiate public representations of immigrants in both countries. In the police study, I examine the sequential development of social relations between the police and youth in community policing activities. Lastly, I discuss how ethnographic focus groups can be of use to discuss transcripts and field notes with practitioners of the workplace studied. Students are welcome to contribute and discuss their ideas on how to fruitfully combine or integrate ethnography and discourse studies.
Porsché, Yannik (2021, in press) Reluctant collaboration in community policing. How police team up with youth prior to 1st of May demonstrations in Germany. In: Discourse Studies, 23 (1).
Porsché, Yannik, Negnal, Dörte and Howe Christiane (2020) Police work under scrutiny: (self-)criticism in an ethnographic focus group. In: Grujicic-Alatriste L (ed) Language Research in Multilingual Settings: Doing Research Knowledge Dissemination at the Sites of Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 15-31.
Porsché, Yannik (2018) Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums – Exhibition and Exposure in France and Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Porsché, Yannik (2017) The ‘Bologna Process’ as a Territory of Knowledge: A contextualisation Analysis. In: Seizov O and Wildfeuer J (eds) New studies in multimodality: Conceptual and methodological elaborations. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 247-276.
Porsché, Yannik (2016) Politics of Public Representation: A Franco-German Museum Exhibition on Images of Immigrants. In: Haynes A, Power MJ, Devereux E, et al. (eds) Public and Political Discourses of Migration: International Perspectives. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 179-192.