- working to provide critical and reflective gaze on methodological approaches, understandings and engagements in qualitative studies.
Associate professor Mareile Kaufmann has been elected from 2022 to be on the editorial board of the journal Qualitative Research. The journal ranks among the top method journals worldwide. The Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law has a longstanding tradition for qualitative and ethnographic research. Kaufmann will bring a special focus on digital methodology and Science and Technology Studies to the board.
- Digital methods are not mere extensions of analogue ones: while their history always involves analogue elements, technologies do change research situations quite concretely. They influence recruitment and access to groups, timing and flow of research and some of them render research traceable.
A leading journal in sociological method Photo: Private
- Here, a relevant field concerns data protection, privacy and other challenges related to the ethics of doing research with digital information. In the project Digital DNA, we work, for example, with classic ethnography, but also explore new paths in digital methods.
According to the journal, the aim is to publish research that critically engages “with the orthodox and the heterodox, the familiar and the innovative, the modern and the postmodern, and the experimental and the traditional.”
- To me, critical innovation means that we broaden and acknowledge the diversity of subjects that contribute to research. Research is never conducted alone, but it is at the very least enabled by many different people, texts and things that we sometimes forget to give credit to. Getting access to sites, interviewees or colleagues’ time, using specific equipment and methodologies, receiving peer review and feedback are not a given. Not only do all of them deserve acknowledgement, but we also need to identify who has access to these tools and who has not, Kaufmann says.
- As a member of the board, I would welcome research that embraces unusual foci and brings new voices to established research fields. I hope we can do a similar contribution with Digital DNA.
By Per Jørgen Ystehede