A reflexive methodological article on HOMInG’s research, co-authored by the HOMInG research team, has just been published in Espace et Societé, 3/2019 (no. 178, pp. 103-120). The paper is part of a Special Issue on “Multi-sited approaches”, edited by Virginie Baby-Collin and Geneviève Cortes. See below the title and abstract of HOMInG’s collective piece. The paper is available both in English and in French.
Collective thinking in the field: Distributed cognition in large-scale qualitative research
By Ilka Vari-Lavoisier, Paolo Boccagni, Milena Belloni, Sara Bonfanti, Aurora Massa, Alejandro Miranda and Luis Eduardo Pérez-Murcia
Keywords: Qualitative research, Transnational methods, Collaborative projects, Migration Studies
How can we research mobility, in practice, today? Pleas in favour of multi-sited ethnographies were followed by the implementation of cross-border qualitative data collections. But the transnationalisation of ethnographic methods, developed at a local level, raises new challenges. In this paper, the team of the erc project homing reviews the obstacles encountered, and solutions developed, to implement a qualitative study across ten countries. The authors adopt a triple lens, to look at (1) the extent to which collaborative qualitative research implies to revisit the ethnographic pact, at the basis of the researcher-informant relationship; (2) the concrete strategies implemented to share qualitative data within a team of researchers; (3) how a combination of phases of individual data collection and collective data analysis favoured processes of distributed cognition. By doing so, this paper analyses why and how we can implement qualitative collective surveys to study contemporary mobility.
HOMInG: THE HOME-MIGRATION NEXUS 