Dear colleagues,

We are happy to invite you to the 2026/27 Winter Semester installment of the DiMES (Digital Methods and Empirical Social Science Center) workshop series.

On Thursday, December 3, and Friday, December 4, 2026, Matthew Mahler (Yale University) will teach a two-day in-person workshop on Ethnographic Methods (see below for a short introduction). The workshop is primarily open to PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty from FB PolSoz. Additionally, please consider inviting advanced Master's students with a particular interest in the topic.

The workshop is funded by DiMES and offered free of charge to participants. Registration information will be available soon. We plan to offer up to 20 seats. If registrations exceed the limit, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from PolSoz will be given preference, and the remaining seats will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.

If you have any questions about this workshop, please reach out to Dr. Mirco Liefke (m.liefke@fu-berlin.de). We are also still interested in suggestions for workshop topics or lecturers, as we plan to organize more workshops in 2026.

Best,

Mirco, Marko and Bruno

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Overview

This two-day, in-person workshop will familiarize participants with the workings of ethnographic research methods. How is that ethnographers turn situated observations of certain persons, places, or organizations into some, more rigorous, more meticulously constructed, set of findings on or about the things they have studied? What are the challenges they are likely to encounter in the course of conducting this research, and what are the means by which they attempt to overcome these obstacles?

In an effort to answer these questions, this workshop will proceed along two paths. It will ask participants to engage in certain ethnographic activities (e.g. writing fieldnotes, coding fieldnotes, etc), but it will also introduce participants, through mini-lectures and abbreviated readings to ongoing debates within the ethnographic literature on how ethnographic research might best be conducted. How do the latter help us make sense of the challenges of doing the former? And how does the former help us make sense of the relevance of the latter?

More generally, this workshop will ask participants to reflect on the criteria by which to judge ethnographic research. Are these the same criteria by which to judge other forms of social scientific research? And if not, then why not? Or are there perhaps better ways of judging what makes for better and worse research than some kind of set standards or protocols? And if so, then what might that be?

Therefore, while this workshop is targeted to researchers and practitioners (whether graduate students, or faculty members) interested in ethnographic research, it will also be of interest to scholars who are concerned with questions related to the nature of social scientific methods and even scientific research more broadly.

The aim of this workshop is therefore for participants to learn both about ethnographic methods and from ethnographic methods.

Matthew Mahler is a Senior Fellow with the Urban Ethnography Project and a Research Affiliate with the Department of Sociology at Yale University. He has written extensively about the subject of ethnographic methods, and is in the process of completing a series of articles on the possibility of post-foundational (ethnographic) methods. He and collaborator from Freie Universität (Mirco Liefke-Biegel) are currently conducting a “dialogical ethnography” that examines how journalists at a German public broadcaster make judgments about better and worse forms of news. His work has been published in such journals as Social Science History, Ethnography, Qualitative Sociology, Publizistik (forthcoming),and the American Behavioral Scientist. He is also the co-editor of a volume on political ethnography.