Brilliant piece of the German cabaret artist Hagen Rether:

Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands and Deutsch.

I went to a conference of the European protest research networkClick in order to get to the site of the network
on social movements/protest in Europe two weeks ago [it was great and inspiring!] where I presented a paper on young Muslims following the salafiyyah. I was somehow the odd one since I presented on an “odd movement”: groups or movements based on religion or/and lacking the focus on civil rights, environment or other “progressive, secular” issues are usually not the core business of social movement researchers. Also, movements whose actions are not geared towards the state, capitalism or political participation of any sort stand out. The core concern of Muslims following the salafiyyah in the Netherlands or Germany is NOT a political representation in contemporary Dutch or German society, a change of government or reforming the capitalist economic system and so on. Most are rather busy with da’wacalling to Islam and trying to prefigure the ideal society as they envision it.

Of course, this should not restrain researchers from using the methods, tools and approaches of Social Movement Theory (SMT) for “odd” movements. It has been done before, also with reference to difference movements or currents within Islam, and it is not a contested issue per se. Some examples can be found in the works of Assef Bayat, Quintan Wiktorowicz, Kevin McDonald, Charles Kurzman and others.

…continue reading “Me” and “Them”

I am quite excited: I have started to do interviews for my research. I have known most people I am interviewing before. However, the main differences between interviews and normal conversations with my research partners are basically the following:

1. After they have agreed that the transcript (or the protocol) is okay, I am allowed to quote from it. That means I do not have to ask for permission everytime I want to quote from the transcript (however, interviewpartners can withdraw their permission any time.) I never quote from any other conversation or exchange (be it offline or online) without explicitly asking for consent.
2. I try to stay focused on the topic of my research (Islam, knowledge practices and new media). In informal conversations, we talk also about a host of other things (men, kids, studies, weather, latest news etc.) and joke. Although I love this, I try to stay to the point, at least as long as my interview partners do this
3. The content of the conversation in interviews is recorded, be it literally as a voice recording or as a sort of protocol.

…continue reading Impressions from interviews: knowledge

After a longer absence I wanted to start blogging today again. However, the new version of wordpress is not compatible with my plugin that enables multiple languages in my blog. Therefore, I will be blogging in English and update the other languages as soon as the plugin qtranslate and wordpress 2.8 decide to cooperate .