Ethnography, discourse analysis and phenomenology

This on-going PhD-project is concerned with hospital social workers. My focus is on their day-to-day professional practices and my study has an ethnographic approach. I am shadowing hospital social workers, following their... [ view full abstract ]

This on-going PhD-project is concerned with hospital social workers. My focus is on their day-to-day professional practices and my study has an ethnographic approach. I am shadowing hospital social workers, following their movements on hospital floors while recording some meetings and conversations on audiotape.

The overall focus of my research is negotiations, between individuals as well as individuals and institutions, asking questions such as: how is the hospital social worker profession being constructed? How are patients constructed in relation to this profession? How can this be understood related to overarching perspectives of power, institutional logics/ practices and the organization of healthcare in the Swedish context?

Theoretically, an interactionist approach and Gubrium & Holsteins understanding of institutional identities inspire me. I am also interested in exploring concepts such as alienation, habitus and durable inequality, as elaborated by Tilly.

Methodically I am struggling to make good use of the observations, making them as “tangible” or “legible” as the audio taped and transcribed word. I am elaborating with the possibility of combining discourse analysis with (queer) phenomenology, as described by Ahmed. By doing so I hope to be able to relate to the bodily movements of the hospital social workers (as well as their patients and colleagues) in a similar way as the word in discourse analysis, by understanding movements as directions that can be understood as having intentions, but also an embeddedness in the context at hand.

For this conference my primary interest is therefor discussing methodical questions regarding the possibility and potential of combining phenomenology and discourse analysis in ethnography, as well as theory building relating to the concepts of alienation and durable inequality in institutional contexts.