Everything Everywhere, All at Once: The Interconnectedness of (Epistemic) Objects

Aims

In this workshop, participants will interrogate empirical objects of interest from diverse perspectives with the aim of developing appropriate narratives and research questions. You will map the ways in which your empirical object is understood and studied in different knowledge domains, discover how these knowledges intersect, and incorporate these new interpretations to your own work.

In doing so, you will be able to strengthen your research by considering new aspects of a known object, find new inspirations and research avenues in the interconnections, and make your research more meaningful and contextual.

Content

This workshop, directly inspired by “Writing the Implosion” (Joseph Dumit, UC Davis) invites participants to investigate and “unpack” their research topics with more depth, and breadth.

What story does your work tell? And what other stories can be told?

A full(er) understanding of our epistemic objects requires us to “implode” it, i.e., find and identify the different worlds they inhabit – historical, mythological, economic, symbolic (and what else?) Connecting these disparate worlds then, makes our objects no longer an isolated vessel for scholarly curiosity, but a multidimensional entity that defies easy categorization.

In discovering and confronting the deeply entangled, inter- and multi-disciplinary stories that our epistemic objects tell, we discover and confront the limits of our intellectual curiosity. In defining and challenging our boundaries, we recommit to our (imploded) objects, more able to construct richer, bigger, and better research narratives.

Methods

In this workshop, participants will “implode” an object, concept, phenomenon of interest.
We start by identify an object of interest, generate a research question around it, and create a «gap map» of its many dimensions.
We simplify, and «follow the ethnographies», delving deeper into each of these dimensions.
Then, we complicate, by connecting these dimensions together, and seeing what knowledge is created in this space of overlap.
Finally, we revisit our research question and see if anything has changed.

Thus, the same entity will be perceived and interpreted differently in different contexts, disciplines, and institutions for an immersive and expansive understanding of it. This comprehensive understanding in turn, enables participants to form research questions that are more incisive, meaningful, and interdisciplinary.

Target Group

All Doctoral candidates and Postdocs of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Theology

Requirements

This workshop does not require any prior preparation. The epistemic object in question may be directly related to your doctoral research, but this is not mandatory – “implosion” is a method that may be applied to anything you are curious about.

About the Trainer

Dr. Sahana Srinivasan [she/her/hers] is currently a lecturer in the subject area Cultural Anthropology at the University of Basel.
She holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from Ghent University, Belgium, and most recently, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame (USA). Her research and teaching interests, which started in the field of molecular neuroimmunology, have imploded to accommodate feminist STS approaches to trends in neuroscience research, and exploring biomedicine and healthcare through perspectives in sociology, medical anthropology, and popular media.

Workload

Total of 30h (course attendance 16h; pre-session reading, listending preparation 12h; post-workshop reflection 2h)

Feature

This course is reserved for doctoral candidates of the Faculy of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Theology.

Once registration is open, applications will be collected for 24 hours and course places allocated by lot. All registrations received after the initial 24h period will be put on a waiting list and assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Course places/places on the waiting list will be confirmed by e-mail. Course registrations can only be canceled before the registration period ends (send an e-mail to grace@unibas.ch). Full course attendance is mandatory. Participants who fail to attend a course without prior notification or withdraw after the registration deadline are subject to a fee of CHF 30. In addition, participants who cancel their course registration at a later point in time, are absent without an excuse or do not attend the entire course will, for reasons of fairness, not be considered for course registration in the following semester and will be removed from other courses offered in the same semester. Please find the detailed regulations on the Transferable Skills Homepage.