Research, methods, and the Zen art of questioning what you know

Abstract

What do you understand by “method development”? Undated, 2018, my diary—Listening to walls My job title says that I should be professionally interested in political communication. Traditionally this has meant scrutinizing media coverage of elections, how politicians communicate with journalists, how journalists report about politics, public opinion. But I am interested in the politics contained in the small gestures of everyday life—what colleagues might, in fact, call “irrelevant.” I am also increasingly irritated by the preoccupation, in my field of research, with the messages, attempts at influence and the propaganda contained in texts and images in the media: news stories, movies, social media, what people openly tell each other. What about all the rest? The other “communication” that is embedded in the material world? A smile, a waving hand, changing your seat on a bus because you do not want to sit next to a person with skin of a different color than yours—they do send a message, too. So do luxurious embassy palaces or compounds fortified to their teeth that represent a country and what that country stands for in a foreign land, and division walls. And what about the messages between the lines? What about the stories that are missing and never told? I want to dig into the filter drain of the collective washing machine. Being a communication researcher means training myself to hearing the “voices” of objects, practices and unwritten rules that regulate everyday life. Does this make me a sociologist? Or an ethnographer, instead of a communication researcher? When it comes to [researching] a taboo subject, like [involuntary] childlessness, it means becoming sensitive to the whispers in the background, the uncertain steps of the individuals walking at the margins, what never gets noticed, whose presence does not even register. I am an investigator of the “social wallpaper.” Or, going back to the sound metaphor of the voices, I am a connoisseur of ambient noise, the unstoppable communication, chatter, all around me, full of incessant, subtle reminders of what is “normal.” Once you start noticing it, it is difficult to tune it out, like suffering a form of social tinnitus.