Secrecy and Fieldwork

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

The third session of QUALIFIE features a presentation by Natalie Welfens (Hertie School).

How does one tackle issues of limited access during field research? In this session, QUALIFIE invites Natalie Welfens from the Hertie School to give a talk on secrecy and fieldwork, outlining some of the methodological tools available to researchers before, during, and after fieldwork. Rather than seeing secrecy as a limitation, and access as a one-off hurdle to get through, Natalie develops a relational understanding of secrecy and the process of negotiating access as providing data in their own right.  

Natalie Welfens (PhD University of Amsterdam, 2021) is a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC project 'Refugees are Migrants (RefMig)' at the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School. In her research, Natalie focuses on migration governance in Europe and the Middle East and the inequalities resulting from categorisation practices within refugee recognition processes. Her work draws on feminist scholarship, critical security studies and interdisciplinary migration studies and has been published in Political Studies Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Political Sociology, Journal of Common Market Studies, and European Security.  

The Zoom link will be shared upon registration.