DeZIM Migration Methods Lab | Unwriting Methods

How can research be conducted with communities whose embodied knowledge the researcher can never fully share? And what methodological perspectives emerge from reciprocity, sensory ethnography, and performative approaches?

When: Thursday, 4 June 2026, 1:30–2:30 p.m.
Where: Hybrid event / DeZIM.Saal, Mauerstraße 76, 10117 Berlin

Please register here by 6:00 p.m. on June 3: REGISTRATION
 

In this lecture, Dr. Gili Hammer presents her research on disability art, sensory ethnography, and multimodal methods. Drawing on her work with professional disabled dancers and blind communities, she explores how qualitative research relationships are negotiated across asymmetries of embodiment, profession, and power.

At the center of the talk is reciprocity—not merely as an ethical add-on, but as an epistemological approach. Hammer discusses kinesthetic reciprocity, intellectual reciprocity, and shared dialogue as methodological tools that reshape how knowledge is produced. Rather than presenting polished results, she focuses on dilemmas, suspicion toward academia, gaps between theory and practice, and moments of methodological failure that transformed her approach.

With:

Dr. Gili Hammer, anthropologist and disability studies scholar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Oded Y. Steinberg, Assistant Professor of International Relations and European Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
 

Moderation: 

Prof. Dr. Magdalena Nowicka (DeZIM)

The event invites participants to reconsider qualitative research as an embodied, relational, and performative practice. It offers insights into methodological approaches at the intersection of disability studies, anthropology, and sensory research, and opens space for discussion on how research can “know otherwise.”

The DeZIM Migration Methods Lab is a lecture and workshop series at the DeZIM Institute dedicated to qualitative, multimodal, arts-based, visual, and sensory methods in social research, with a particular focus on migration. The series brings together scholars who work experimentally and reflexively with such approaches and share both methodological insights and practical experiences from their research.