Documents are everywhere. Whether physical or digital, large or small, loud or invisible, they permeate our societies and individual lives, past and present. Some documents are outright celebrities, such as the UN Assessment Reports on Climate Change; others, such as passports, can open doors and borders - or keep them shut if yours is not accepted. Indeed, documents quickly pile up as empirical materials in our own research projects. So how to make use of this rich resource? How to analyze documents as part of your PhD project?
This PhD course brings together a varied set of methodological approaches to demonstrate and discuss how we can analyze documents as both text, artifact and social practice. Building on a recently published textbook, the course introduces the method of ‘practice-oriented document analysis’ (Asdal & Reinertsen, SAGE Publishing, 2022).
During the course, we will work on the methodological moves developed in this book for analyzing and working with documents: How documents can be approached as sites, how they can be analyzed as tools, how we can examine ‘document work’ and ‘document texts’, how documents are involved in the making of societal issues, and what we can learn from analyzing how documents move. We will draw from a rich source of document studies in STS and across the humanities and social sciences more broadly, and also introduce you to the theoretical underpinnings that have inspired our practice-orientation to documents.
For more information and application see course website.