“Plea for Slow Science”
In this symposium I would like to share my experiences with deploying both one to one interviews and memory work in the same project. In particular, during my doctoral research I experimented with those two different methodological approaches in order to explore the experiences of international students in the UK. Among other things, this methodological experiment helped me better understand the importance of pace in doing social research. Some of the benefits of offering more time to research can be obvious to most social researchers, such as, the strict demarcation between researchers and researched remains strong when the time is limited, building trust with participants requires time etc. Other benefits are more specifically related to those interested in memory and experience. For instance, in order to challenge our initial resistance to delve into the forgotten/messy/normalised parts of our experiences and try to rework them, we definitely need to dedicate time and patience. But alongside and on top of these methodological benefits, doing slow research in today’s universities is a political claim. Memory work was initiated and developed in a different academic milieu in which academics were encouraged to engage in long and in-depth research projects, ethnographies used to take years in order to be considered sufficient, most academic contracts were permanent and so on. Whereas contemporary universities favour “fast, competitive and benchmarked research” (Stengers, 2011). Academics are demanded to multitask and be efficient in order to secure few years of contract stability before they move to the next institution or to the next stage of academic hierarchy. The neoliberalist ideals of contemporary universities leave little space for meaningful research. Given that, memory work, I think, could be considered as another “plea for slow science” (Stengers, 2011) and the most relevant response to the current academic situation.