Looking for the Bigger Picture. Analyzing Governmentality in Mosaic Mode

In this article, I propose a mosaic mode of qualitative analysis that is focused on how social order and regulations are established in a society. In this way researchers can analyze society as a whole and reconstruct how people govern and are governed by mapping social worlds/arenas and situations in an iterative-cyclic mode.In diesem Artikel schlage ich einen mosaikhaften Modus qualitativer Sozialforschung vor, mit dem sich Forscher*innen darauf konzentrieren können, wie eine Gesellschaft soziale Ordnung und Regulierungen etabliert. Auf diese Weise können Forscher*innen die Gesellschaft als Ganzes analysieren und rekonstruieren, wie Menschen regieren und regiert werden, indem sie soziale Welten/Arenen und Situationen in einem iterativ-zyklischen Modus kartieren

Postkoloniale Soziologie praktisch?

Wie kann in Theorieseminaren eine praktische Komponente verfolgt werden? Welche Bedeutungen haben neokoloniale Machtverhältnisse in eigenen Biographien und was kann der Café vor dem Seminar mit subaltern agencies zu tun haben? Diesen und weiteren Fragen geht der Text entlang einer Studienreise in den Süden Mexikos nach. Exemplarisch wird so beispielhaft an einem Forschungsseminar zu postkolonialer Soziologie die Bedeutung von Erfahrungen für das Verständis von theoretischen Perspektiven verfolgt

Intimate capital illegalisierter Frauen in Deutschland

Menschen in vulnerablen Lebensbedingungen handeln in diesen. Sie interagieren eigensinnig und zu ihrem eigenen Vorteil: Sie gestalten ihre Leben in und trotz, beziehungsweise auch wegen, der illegalisierten Bedingungen, in denen sie leben

Im Treibhaus wächst der Eigensinn. Methode(n), Migration und Widerstand

Auch in der aktuellen Forschung verbleiben Studien im Kontext von Migration oftmals auf der Ebene eines viktimisierenden Sprechens über die Anderen. In diesem Artikel stelle ich dar, wie es möglich ist, mit der Verknüpfung von Multi-Sited-Ethnography, Grounded Theory sowie den in der Situationsanalyse entwickelten mappings Flüchtigkeiten und Unsichtbarkeiten im Forschungsfeld nachzugehen und auf diese Weise Bewegungen nicht bloß einseitig gerichtet zu lesen. In der Folge ist es möglich, widerständige und eigensinnige Praktiken zu rekonstruieren, ohne Zwänge und herrschaftsförmige Diskurse außer Acht zu lassen

Measuring Preferences on Environmental Damages in LCIA. Part 1: Cognitive Limits in Panel Surveys (9 pp)

-: Part 1: Cognitive Limits in Panel Surveys · Part 2: The Question Format in Panel Surveys This series of two papers discusses the elicitation of weights for damage categories in LCIA with the aid of panel surveys. The papers focus especially on methodological aspects in panel surveys. Part 1 discusses potential cognitive limits of the panel members to understand the reference that is weighted. Part 2 focuses on the influence of the question format and compares results from two different weighting tasks: discrete choice (between alternatives) and score allocation. Goal, Scope and Background: The weighting of environmental impacts and damages on the safeguard subjects Human Health, Ecosystems, and Resources is a significant step of full aggregated LCIA. Panel surveys have become a common approach in LCIA research to investigate the preferences of stakeholders on environmental impacts and damages. Despite the numerous studies, the knowledge on how to elicit reliable weights is still poor and inconsistent. We present a questionnaire study with 58 environmental science students to investigate so-called framing effects in panel surveys. Main Features: The study investigates the significance of different framings, which were provided by three references. In addition, the significance of quantitative information provided in the questionnaire is tested. The references are (a1) safeguard subjects without specified additional information, (a2) damages in Europe as they are perceived by the panelist, and (a3) quantified scenarios derived from Eco-indicator99. All participants ranked and rated the importance of the safeguard subjects three times, once within each reference system. According to a test-of-scope study, quantitative information given to the panelist was varied. One level (b1) included data from the Ecoindicator99 methodology, whereas the other group (b2) received data with significantly higher Human Health damages and lower Ecosystem damages, ceteris paribus. This design allows testing the influence of quantitative data on the rating. Results: The weighting of the safeguard subjects (a1) reveals that Human Health is considered a slightly more important safeguard subject than Ecosystems. However, both are judged to be significantly more important than Resources. This picture changes for the references (a2) and (a3) where damages were weighted. For both references, the respondents rated damages to Ecosystems as most important followed by Resources and Human Health, showing by far the lowest weights. Therefore, the framing of the reference that was weighted played a significant role. The ratings of the subgroups (b1) and (b2) did not differ with respect to the importance of damages, though substantially different quantitative information was given. Conclusion and Outlook: The participants of the study were obviously insensitive with respect to quantitative information provided. This raises three questions, which are discussed. What is the mental model upon which respondents base their beliefs and values? Can we expect that 'more sophisticated' subjects would respond differently? Which prerequisites should an empirical weighting procedure fulfill in order to incorporate numerical data? We propose different approaches for future procedures in order to accurately analyze these question

"You Know Now—Talk About It!" Decolonial Research Perspectives and Missions Assigned in the Research Field

Globale Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse werden auch durch akademische Wissensproduktionen weitergeschrieben. In diesen spiegeln sich epistemische Gewalt- wie auch geopolitische Macht-Wissen-Verhältnisse deutlich wider. Akademische Wissensproduktionen zu dekolonialisieren und nicht mehr nur über und für die Subjekte zu sprechen, ist insofern aus forschungsethischer Perspektive wichtiger Bestandteil von qualitativer Sozialwissenschaft. In diesem Artikel folge ich der Frage, wie Wissenschaftler*innen durch "Aufträge", die ihnen im Feld von bestimmten – sprich marginalisierten Akteur*innen – angetragen werden, Potenziale für ein reziprokes Forschen erarbeiten können. Hierzu werde ich meine forschungsethischen Reflexionen entlang praktischer Dialoge aus meinen ethnografisch angelegten Forschungen in Südspanien zu den Praktiken migrantischer Landarbeiter*innen darstellen.Global relationships of unequal power are perpetuated by academic knowledge production. The latter clearly reflect epistemic violence as well as geopolitical (im)balances of power and knowledge. Decolonializing forms of academic knowledge production and no longer speaking only about and on behalf of the subjects as other is thus an important component of qualitative social science from the perspective of research ethics. In this article, I look into the question of how researchers can develop the potential for reciprocal research through "missions" that are assigned to them by specific actors i.e., oppressed people in the field. To this end, I will present my reflections on research ethics using dialogues gathered in my ethnographic research in southern Spain on the practices of migrant farm workers

Food purchases: Impacts from the consumers' point of view investigated with a modular LCA

The goal of this research work was to assist consumers in considering environmental aspects of food consumption. A simplified, modular LCA approach has been used to evaluate the impacts from the consumers' point of view. Comparative LCA's have been calculated for five single aspects of decisions: type of agricultural practice, origin, packaging material, type of preservation, and consumption. The inventory for one module includes the environmental impacts related to one particular product characteristic. The modular LCA allows one to investigate the trade-offs among different decision parameters. It could be shown that most of the decision parameters might have an influence on the overall impact of a vegetable product. Greenhouse production and vegetables transported by air cause the highest surplus environmental impact. For meat products, the agricultural production determines the overall environmental impact. The total impact for vegetable or meat purchases may vary by a factor of eight or two-and-a-half. Different suggestions for consumers have been ranked according to the variation of average impacts, due to a marginal change of behaviour. Avoiding air-transported food products leads to the highest decrease of environmental impact

Uncertainty Assessment for Management of Soil Contaminants with Sparse Data

In order for soil resources to be sustainably managed, it is necessary to have reliable, valid data on the spatial distribution of their environmental impact. However, in practice, one often has to cope with spatial interpolation achieved from few data that show a skewed distribution and uncertain information about soil contamination. We present a case study with 76 soil samples taken from a site of 15 square km in order to assess the usability of information gleaned from sparse data. The soil was contaminated with cadmium predominantly as a result of airborne emissions from a metal smelter. The spatial interpolation applies lognormal anisotropic kriging and conditional simulation for log-transformed data. The uncertainty of cadmium concentration acquired through data sampling, sample preparation, analytical measurement, and interpolation is factor 2 within 68.3 % confidence. Uncertainty predominantly results from the spatial interpolation necessitated by low sampling density and spatial heterogeneity. The interpolation data are shown in maps presenting likelihoods of exceeding threshold values as a result of a lognormal probability distribution. Although the results are not deterministic, this procedure yields a quantified and transparent estimation of the contamination, which can be used to delineate areas for soil improvement, remediation, or restricted area use, based on the decision-makers' probability safety requiremen