Class as performative process in ethnography and research practice

Abstract

Based on a shared biographical reconstruction of their journey to and within the university, the authors argue for a processual, dynamic and relational concept of class, which is open to the concatenation with intersectional social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. They consider ethnographic methodology to be a process of continuous negotiation in which positioning of the researcher relates to research-relevant and knowledge-generating questions and topics. They present ethnographic research as a survival strategy in situations of class-related uncertainty, for example in precarious living and working situations or during the transition to professional academia, possibly with a long-term contract. This proposal for an understanding of class and ethnography is exemplified by the ethnographic fields they chose for their dissertations in the port of Hamburg and on the terrain of the precarisation movement of the 2000s.