Sociology of Sociological Practices on a Transnational Field: Elite School Ethnographies From a Double Perspective

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  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 9. Global Norm Formation

Abstract

This co-authored paper is the result of a coincidence: we didn’t know each other before starting our fieldwork and yet we found ourselves in the peculiar situation of sharing the same PhD topic. Moreover, we share a significant amount of social dispositions which would impact, as any ethnographical work, our fieldwork. We look at how our own social trajectories impacted our research object, from the moment we chose it as a topic and during our respective fieldwork. In this sense, we show that the choice of a research topic and research strategy are strongly oriented by researchers’ own dispositions. We claim that this methodological retracing of our trajectories is a compulsory and heuristic way to study our common research object, thanks to a mirror effect. Our research object is the College of Europe, an elitist postgraduate boarding school located in the Belgian medieval small town of Bruges, one hour away from the power epicenter of the European Union (EU) in Brussels. This school has historically been portrayed as the feeder school for the EU institutions and remains a prestigious school for those students who are looking to have a career within EU-Affairs.

By a difficult but necessary objectivation of the ethnographer position, we propose to subject ourselves to the same process of sociological deconstruction that we impose on our research subjects. The aim of this paper is two-folded. First, we wish to contribute to the reflexive epistemology by shedding light on how social dispositions of a researcher may be invoked during research when studying up. Second, we show how our previously acquired social dispositions, specifically our international and social capital, are valued on the field and how this in itself can be used as a scientific and methodological entrance to study our research object.

Authors

• Sara Lindberg

• Maxime Behar