This session of the Qualifie working group features a presentation by Sandro Mezzadra, adjunct Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society of Western Sydney University and at the Centre for Cultural Research and Development, Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
How does theoretical insight emerge from empirical research? In this session, Sandro Mezzadra will reflect on the relationship between fieldwork and conceptual work: how we read qualitative material, what we look for in empirical encounters, and how theoretical questions and concepts take shape through the research process. The session will explore a recurring tension for qualitative researchers: if, on one side, the richness and specificity of a particular field site can make it difficult to develop concepts that travel beyond it, on the other, abstraction risks losing the particularities that enabled the emergence of theoretical insight in the first place. Drawing on his own approach to research and theorising, Mezzadra will discuss how empirical material can generate, challenge and transform theoretical ideas.
Speaker:
Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna. He is adjunct Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society of Western Sydney University and at the Centre for Cultural Research and Development, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. In recent years, his research has focused on themes such as migration, borders, postcolonial critique, logistics, and contemporary capitalism, from a transdisciplinary perspective and within a dense network of international collaborations. With Michael Hardt he is the editor of Portolan, the blog of South Atlantic Quarterly (https://portolan-journal.org/). With Brett Neilson, he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (2013), The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (2019) and The Rest and the West. Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (2024).
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