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Dr. Ashley Mears (Visiting Faculty Fellow, Fall 2013)
The UvA and ARC-GS makes for an ideal place for sabbatical. By the time I left the UvA, I had made significant headway on my next project, made many a new friend and even a few collaborators, within and beyond my discipline.
Having just completed a round of data collection on a new project, by Fall
2013, with a junior sabbatical from my home department of sociology at Boston
University, I looked forward to a semester of deep immersion in my data analysis
and writing up results while being away from teaching. My work investigates
gender, culture and stratification processes, so the University of Amsterdam —
and the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality in particular —
offered a perfect intellectual foster home that made a lasting impact on my work
and how I think about qualitative research.
With data in hand, I arrived in Amsterdam hoping for exposure to fresh ideas
and the chance to engage with a different set of colleagues outside of my
regular interlocutors. Amsterdam proved to be the right place for this. The
UvA’s Center for Gender and Sexuality provides a wealth of opportunities from
talks and symposia to meet and work with interdisciplinary scholars, both based
in Amsterdam and around the world, as well as their many postdoc and PhD
students. Early on, I was invited to present my work on cultures of consumption
among the global elite in a public lecture at ARC-GS. Here I tried out new
lines of arguments from my data in a well-advertised and well-attended lecture,
and I got tremendous feedback from sociologists, anthropologists, an East Asian
Studies scholar, and a historian. We continued our conversations afterwards in
a lively dinner—and even afterwards in a walking tour of the Red Light District
hosted by an anthropologist expert.
While ARC-GS brings together global scholars from across the disciplines, I
spent much of my daily work routines in the sociology department at UvA, which
is home to a group of high-caliber cultural sociologists whose work has the rare
balance of being both theoretically cutting edge and methodologically innovative
and rigorous. I was immediately welcomed into several workshops across groups
in the social sciences, some for rough drafts and works-in-progress, and others
for more formal presentations. The feedback I received from these groups was
invaluable, as was the structure of regular meetings in my otherwise fairly
unstructured time in Amsterdam. The social sciences regularly host lectures,
conferences, and events, and one such conference on the global art market
brought in prominent scholars even from my home base of Boston. I attended
roughly two events per week, and had to be pretty discerning to focus on my own
writing.
Small things about my time at the University made quite an impression. For
instance, colleagues at the university generally share a sense of work-life
balance which they protect; I was surprised that the offices actually close at 6
p.m. on Fridays, a mindset I very much appreciate coming from a country with
ever expanding (though not necessarily more productive) work hours. The
efficiency with which I was immediately integrated into university was also
impressive—I was checking out books and accessing the Wi-Fi network on my first
day. In short, the university works well, and it’s a good place to work.
Finally, true to associations of the Dutch with art and design, I found the
posters advertising talks and lectures to be surprisingly sophisticated as
design objects, apparently due to a reserve of talented undergrad students. I
brought several of these posters home to hang in my office.
A broader impact from being at the UvA has been a shift in how I think about
what’s possible for qualitative research projects. As an ethnographer and an
in-depth interviewer, I have tended to work independently, immersing myself into
particular social worlds in order to document nuanced social processes up-close
and in-person. At the UvA, however, an expectation and norm of career
achievement is in securing large, often government-sponsored grants to conduct
research. For a qualitative social scientist it was novel and inspiring to see
fellow ethnographers and interviewers striving for and then managing huge sums
of money in multi-pronged research streams, often necessitating collaboration
with scholars and postdoc students from around the world, for instance on the
global art market, changing beauty ideals in European states, and the
globalization of sport. Within these diverse topics in anthropology and
sociology, faculty assemble and manage a team of postdocs to slice a research
problem into multiple comparative parts. The university is organized in ways
that support faculty in the pursuit of grants, such as workshopping new grant
applications among faculty before submission, even inviting experts from other
universities to help improve prospective grant applications. This all makes the
UvA one of the most impressive universities to secure large-scale government
grants in Europe, and is something that has opened up my sense of the
possibilities in terms of scope and breadth for qualitative methods.
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