Call for papers on "Rethinking the Meaning of Class in Ethnographic Research Practice"

Questions about class affiliation of scientists and their limits to overcome these have been brought back into the public consciousness at the latest after Didier Eribon's “Retour à Reims” (2009).  Authors like Julia Reuter et al. (2020; Vom Arbeiterkind zur Professur), Riccardo Altieri and Bernd Hüttner (2020; Klassismus und Wissenschaft) or Francis Seeck and Brigitte Theißl (2020; Solidarisch gegen Klassismus) highlighted in their publications the relevance of the underexaminated class position or the individual paths of advancement across classes in specific academic areas. Recently, narratives about one’s own class position and class affiliation or the exclusions associated with them (again) have received great attention in public discourses. (Barankow & Baron 2021; Baron 2020; Ernaux 2022, 2018; Louis 2014; Olivier 2022)

Ethnographic research deals with how such class transitions and social mobility(s) are argued and implemented. In addition, it can illuminate  the social relationships and societal contexts of those who are ascribed to certain classes. (Lemberger 2019; Wellgraf 2012; Wellgraf 2018; Ege 2017) Transclasses, as Chantal Jaquet (2014) has defined individuals moving from one class to another, can be read as an important starting point for a more general theory of subjectivity (Spoerhase 2018). Some experiences that take place in the increasingly competitive process of generating scientific knowledge can be described as typical for these transclass individuals. In this way, individuals may feel – sometimes up to the professorial level – like an imposter (Reuter et al. 2020; Hurst & Nenga 2016; Muzzatti & Samarco 2006). According to this, academics are (not exclusively, but also) not sure of their ‘deserved success’ in the class transition, but rather understand it as “making it by faking it” (Granfield 1991; Wietschorke 2019). 

Bernd Jürgen Warneken (2020) assumes that  almost all researchers in the German field of European Ethnology / Cultural Studies are “middle class children” and have no personal connection “down below”. Together with his colleague Andreas Wittel (1997) he has long criticized the lack of reflection on “problems of self-assertion”, for example due to unequally distributed expertise and situations of ‘researching-up’ in companies, potentially having a massive impact on the process of research and writing, when it comes to how humiliation experiences in the field in contact with academic experts who are already well advanced in their careers influence the own report. Is then self-assertion in the field made plausible or mitigated by class questions? What does it mean to (not) be able to perform in research fields in a certain way? How are “sphere discrepancies” (El-Mafaalani 2021) enacted through doing ethnography? 

In this regard, we like to examine the role of class origin and the positionalities of ethnographic researchers in the entire research process: From topic selection, and field research, up to the evaluation and final writings. Contributions are welcome, that trace how class-structured experiences are made and what practices are developed to deal with them. How do hexis and habitus of ethnographers (Bourdieu 1979), but also the material, affect research practice? What role do possible intersectional entanglements play? We welcome (re-)readings of one’s own ethnographic research, (re-)interpretations of ethnographic work by third parties, but also fundamental methodological reflections. Contributions can be submitted both in English and German.

Please send your abstract (300 words) by January 9, 2023 to An.Klass@campus.lmu.de and felix.gaillinger@univie.ac.at. 

Feedback will be provided by January 15, 2023.

Deadline for submission of papers (4,000 and 6,000 words): June 01, 2023

Please also note the editorial information for the publication series: https://ka-notizen.de/index.php/ka-notizen/about/submissions