Applying to the Summer School GRAINES I haven’t been very clear about how to make network analysis useful for my PhD-thesis. The idea of including, on a small scale, a transnational perspective even came shortly before my journey to St. Andrews.

My PhD-subject surveys the social movement of unemployed persons in Switzerland since the 1970s. The aim is to reconstruct the building of a social group during welfare state and labour society transformations.

I think I profited in a very indirect, but nevertheless helpful, way from the summer school for my thesis. First of all, it was a very good English exercise. Then, it was interesting to see which methods other PhD-Students and researchers apply, and how they present it to a public. It widened my sight, as the empiric subject differed a lot from my research focus. At the same time this caused a problem in the sense, that I couldn’t directly link the presentations and workshops with my project. So I would have hoped for more theoretical approaches to network analysis, rather than empiric presentations on transnational history.

Still, I think with more distance, and I feel that this process is starting already, the inputs help me to ask myself other important questions regarding my thesis. For instance the very interesting presentation on neoliberal networks and the discussion afterwards brought to my mind, that in general in the period “after the boom” (Manteuffel, Lutz) the political alternatives to neoliberalism are seen as nationalist. So maybe it is important to show with my example the trial of movements to “internationalise” (Bourdieu) political claims and alternatives. Of course they were marginal, punctual and still lack of organisation comparing with a neoliberal economic regime. Through the attendance of GRAINES Summer School maybe I will even include a stronger transnational emphasis, in order to show, that movements actually did cross political borders. So there was a third way between neoliberal internationalisms and “left” or “right” nationalism.

Also the more technical workshop about creating data on Tuesday and the discussions on the unconference day clarified for me how I want to apply a network analysis. So I decided, to use network analysis as a simplifying tool to show interconnections between organisations, which in turn formed a movement. So for me, it’s a descriptive manner to reduce complexity and at the same time show complexity.

 

To conclude, the GRAINES Summer School is like a Scotch whisky: Sometimes you enjoy it, sometimes it gives you a headache, sometimes you don’t want to take another sip, sometimes you can’t stop with it.