Date & Time: Monday 23 January 10:00-14:00 (CET)
Location: Seminar Room of Centre of Excellence in Social Science, BUW Building, Dobra 62, Room 2.90.
Secrecy and Methods in Empirical Research
How can researchers navigate secrecy in their fieldwork, when they encounter confidential material, closed-off quarters or bureaucratic rebuffs? This is a particular challenge for researchers in the security field, which is by nature secretive and difficult to access, but pertains to a broader range of field sites whereby confidentiality, trust and research ethics are key. During the master class we will explore a variety of physical and digital ‘field sites’ and discuss methods for gaining access, dilemmas regarding critique and research ethics.
Agenda
10:00-10:15 Walk-in and coffee
10:15-10:30 Introduction & goal of today
10:30-11:00 Part I: Theorizing secrecy and methods
Moving beyond an understanding of secrecy as the ‘revelation’ of the secret, we will regard secrecy as relational - a dynamic of power that occurs during all sorts of empirical research.
11:00-11:45 Part II: Where is the field?
We will explore a range of physical and digital ‘field sites’ such as banks, borders, bureaucracies and virtual spaces and discuss methodological dilemmas that occur in practice.
11:45-12:45 Lunch break
12:45-13:45 Part III: Workshop to address your research dilemmas in practice
In this interactive part we will take stock of the methodological toolkit and explore how it can be used to address research dilemmas in practice:
- How to gain access and conduct research at sensitive field sites?
- How to balance confidentiality, academic freedom and integrity?
13:45-14:00 Conclusion
Speaker
Esmé Bosma is a Senior Consultant at Deloitte’s Financial Crime Advisory practice in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam. As part of the research project FOLLOW, which was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), she has conducted fieldwork in the banking sector to analyse counter-terrorist financing efforts by banks in practice. Her work is situated at the intersection of Critical Security Studies, International Relations and Science & Technology Studies. She is co-editor of Secrecy and Methods in Security Research. A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork (Routledge, 2020).
