Michelle Brady (University of Alberta)

The aim of my research project Interrogating Capacity Building is to grasp the spaces of freedom and constraint that the Australian government's capacity building programs for single mothers open up and close down. It seeks to throw new light on the contemporary problem of capacity building programs (such as welfare to work programs), to understand the current limits of thinking about these programs, and to loosen the grip of ways of thinking that have become sedimented. In doing so it aims to highlight concrete ways of thinking and acting differently. It does this through a combination of historical, textual and ethnographic methods that takes inspiration from, and extends, Foucault's later works (on governmentalities and technologies of the self) and the governmentality debate in Anglo Saxon political science and sociology (Lemke: 2003). The historical (genealogical) methods developed by Foucault and the governmentality literature provided many of the tools needed to achieve the aims of this project. Importantly, they enabled a focus on the concrete practices of governance as well as the language and forms of thought through which the problem of capacities arose and solutions to this problem were developed and implemented. They provided tools for illuminating how in the present certain forms of thought, practices, and subjectivities are seen as natural and necessary, and for opening up a critical space around these. Through historical contrasts between how problems of capacities are understood now and how they have been understood differently in the past, these genealogical tools enabled me to provide readers with a critical relation by making "those things [in] our present experience" that are given to us "as if they were timeless, natural, unquestionable" seem strange and not inevitable (Rose 1999).

But these genealogical and historical tools of analysis were insufficient on their own to enable an understanding of the current limits of thought and practice in relation to capacity building programs.  These tools have been developed to focus on 'mentalities of governance', or ways of thinking about governance laid down in official plans for governing, such as those written by Australian Government bureaucrats. But they have not been developed to enable a focus on the 'witches' brew' of actual practices of capacity building programs.  When employed by Anglo-Saxon governmentality researchers, these tools are used to identify the most recent ways in which the issue of capacities has become a problem for the state and the solutions the state has devised. These problems and solutions devised by the state are identified as the current limit of thought and practice. Such an approach ignores the point that new plans and schemes for capacity building programs come into being within a complex social fabric that includes a heterogeneous mix of pre-existing political discourses, including historically specific national discourses (Larner, 2000). New policy solutions do not completely dis-embed existing practices and forms of thought but instead they mix together with them. Thus current capacity building programs combine practices and forms of thought from many different times. Given this mixing, the spaces of freedom and constraint within actual practice may be rather different to the spaces of freedom and constraint that are apparent in plans and programs for governing. In this paper I illustrate how I used ethnographic methods together with historical and textual methods to understand the spaces of freedom and constraint that current Australian government capacity building social policies have opened up, and closed down, and to highlight concrete ways of thinking and acting differently.

Vincent Druliolle (University of Essex)

The paper is a set of critical reflections about how a period of fieldwork was crucial in (re-)shaping and (re-)defining a research project about commemorative practices and the construction of democracy in post-authoritarian Argentina. The emphasis is put on what Schatz (2009) calls 'ethnographic sensibility', and the argument is that it highlights the shortcomings of the analysis of the "politics of memory" by drawing attention to the fundamental idea that 'there is an active political struggle not only over the meaning of what took place in the past but over the meaning of memory itself' (Jelin, 2003: xviii). This interpretive insight is also a challenge for the researcher seeking to apply discourse theory as a set of ontological categories and theoretical concepts insofar as it raises the question of how the self-interpretations of the relevant actors may be combined or articulated with, rather than reduced to the former - or, what it means to apply a theoretical framework and concepts and construct an explanatory account of the phenomenon investigated in the first place. The paper outlines how discourse theory has been and may be used to analyse commemorative practices in post-dictatorship Argentina, and highlights some general limitations of discourse theory as it has been used for empirical research. It makes the case for taking the interpretive insights derived from ethnographic immersion seriously, in particular by 'seeing and understanding printed words [and discourses] as lived experiences' (Schatzberg, 2008: 23). It is what I refer to as shifting from discourse theory as political research to discourse theory and political research. I contend that rather than using discourse theory selectively or reducing it to a kind of "discourse theory light", it enriches our understanding of what is political about these commemorative practices which are too often reduced to the realm of (non-political) "symbolic reparations", as field immersion challenges the binary (and too sharp) oppositions politics/the political on the one hand, and domination/resistance on the other hand. As a conclusion, the paper outlines some implications for discourse theory and those researchers who may want to use it, or apply it, for empirical research.

Leonidas Karakatsanis (University of Essex)

This paper focuses on questions of interdisciplinary exchange on methods for collecting research material. I suggest that interdisciplinary work, a direction which is generally accepted as a safe guideline for selecting research methodologies in the broader terrain of discourse studies, can/should be something more than a mere borrowing of methods or tools between disciplinary fields. The specific focus of the paper will be directed towards ethnography or ethnographic sensibility as a potential new research tool in discourse theory. I will argue that instead of conceptualizing 'ethnography' in a soft and 'liberal way', or treating it as a module which can 'fit in' all kinds of social science research (i.e. from positivist to interpretivist accounts), it should be seen as a sensitive tool that needs to be specifically moulded to adjust to different disciplinary environments. Thus, in order to do this, one has to answer three emerging questions: What kind of ethnography, Why is it needed in discourse theory, and how one should proceed performing its 'adoption'. The concept of articulation, which holds a core role in discourse theory's theoretical presuppositions will appear as an indispensable tool in this interdisciplinary endeavour.

Christos Pallas (University of Essex)

The aim of this paper is to reflect upon the temporal and spatial dimensions of 'fieldwork' in my research project on hospitality and racism in contemporary Greece, and, more broadly, in so-called 'problem-driven' approaches in social and political inquiry. On the one hand, in an attempt to overcome the discontents of 'theory-driven' research, political scientists have turned to methods associated with ethnography, that is, interviews, participant observation etc. On the other hand, recent debates in social anthropology seem to displace 'the mythos of fieldwork' (Marcus 2009:27) by way of pluralizing the meaning of ethnography. Drawing on such ambiguity regarding the place and time of 'fieldwork', I reflect on a plurality of encounters which have made possible my own 'fieldwork' in particular sites - detention centers and asylum offices/agencies. Such encounters, however, can themselves produce knowledge to inform one's project, just as 'being there' in the field does. This opens up the possibility of   conceiving ethnographically all experience related to research in terms of what has been called 'multi-sited research imaginary' (Marcus 1998).  Further, I engage in a discussion about the kinds of theoretical constructions and preoccupations  which have oriented my research into this particular field and defined certain problematics which, unavoidably, I bring along in the 'fieldwork'. The last part of the paper attempts to render commensurable the Foucauldian strategy of problematization and that of 'multi-sited' ethnography, by emphasizing the role that their key aspects - social relevance and self-reflexivity - have played in the design of my research project.