Eduardo Chavez Herrera
Qualitative interviewing
Interviewing is one of the most popular methods of data collection in the social sciences. Regarded as one of the most common cross-disciplinary research instruments, they serve as fundamental research methods alone, or in combination with other techniques. This session will focus on several aspects of qualitative interviewing and will introduce various perspectives on interview design, and analytic stances on interview data. This session is open to students who wish to work with interviews from a discourse analysis viewpoint.

Sixian Hah
Applications of conversation analysis in discourse analysis
In this interactive mini-worship about applying the toolbox CA affords in discourse analysis, participants would get the chance to discuss actual transcripts and gain hands-on experience on drawing out emerging themes from the data. What fundamental principles does CA operate on? What beliefs does CA have in terms of how spoken discourse is produced? How does material analysed through the lenses of conversation analysis offer illuminating insights about social interaction and social institutions? Participants need not have prior knowledge of CA in order to take part. The aims of this workshop are to inform participants of the general principles and theoretical assumptions of CA, and to share ideas on how CA could be used as an analytic tool in discourse analysis.

Marta Natalia Wróblewska and Shafiq Hashim
Working with coding
Are you struggling to get your head around emerging topics, themes and linguistic features in your data? Or looking for a way to systematically keep track of research findings? Coding can help you work systematically and ensure no observation gets lost. This procedure consists of categorizing your data in ways which make analysis easier. The hands-on workshop “Working with coding” will cover an overview of the questions you need to be aware of when doing coding, including various types of software, understanding the difference between inductive and deductive codes as well as issues related to the ethics of coding.

Johannes Beetz
Understanding the Mechanics of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory and Analysis. Discourse as a Semiotic Practice.
This session aims at providing PhD students with a hands-on experience of poststructuralist discourse analysis. Special emphasis is put on the relation between theory and analysis, and what could be called the “analytical mechanics” of discourse approaches:
How do discourse analysts approach textual and non-textual material, and the social and political realities it looks at? What makes poststructuralist discourse analysis stand out from other interpretative or hermeneutic approaches in the Social Sciences? What makes it critical? What can discourse analysis do for you? And how does a theoretically informed discourse analysis practically look like? We will start the session with a brief input on the basic ontological and epistemological assumptions of discourse theory, with a particular focus on its conception of subjectivity.
The major part of the afternoon will be consecrated to a collective discourse analysis: In small groups, participants will explore the mechanics of discourse analysis The results of this analysis will be discussed and reflected collectively.

Ronny Scholz
Corpus approaches to discourse
Are you analysing textual data? Maybe you are interested in exploring your research material with text-statistical methods? The workshop introduces corpus linguistic methods for discourse researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities. It will enable the participants to build their own corpus according to their research question and analyse it with lexicometric methods. These methods will enable you to discover new perspectives on your data by exploring them from angles that cannot be taken by simply reading texts. In this sense, quantitative methods are understood as a heuristic approach to texts representing a useful complement of qualitative methods.

Sal Consoli
Reflexivity: a Necessary Approach for Good Qualitative Research
Reflexivity could be defined as ‘the self-critical sympathetic introspection and the self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self as researcher’ (England, 1994:82). The notion of reflexivity has gained considerable ground within the social sciences research arena especially in relation to the criteria of trustworthiness and transparency of the research processes. This session will highlight the duty of the researcher to do reflexivity and will explore various dimensions of reflexivity and how this may be pursued practically and realistically by a qualitative researcher who performs various roles and tasks at once. The session will specifically examine interviewing as a social practice which may benefit enormously by a reflexive approach, and will also offer insights into the complex relationship between the social researcher and the research participants within short-term or longitudinal research projects.