Hearing Silence: Teaching and Studying the Politics of Qualitative Interviewing

The IPU Berlin is honoured to welcome renowned researcher Ping-Chun Hsiung for a lecture on "hearing silence". The event is held in cooperation with the KKC and the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, and in cooperation with the Cornelia Goethe Center for Women's Studies and Gender Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. 

When conducting qualitative interviews, researchers are ready to hear informants' narratives that align with common assumptions, idiosyncratic concepts, or their own theoretical frameworks. Accounts falling outside these pre-existing boundaries become inaudible and overlooked. This presentation posits that spoken and unspoken silences are hidden treasures. "I will illustrate the strategies I've developed to help students recognize the mechanisms of silencing and hear these silenced accounts", says Ping-Chung Hsiung. "I will also use the empirical case of China’s Great Leap Forward and Great Famine (1958-1962) to show the silences that arise from the challenges of accessing archival data and engaging with survivors of traumatic historical events. I will demonstrate how, despite these obstacles, it is possible to uncover a locally grounded lexicon of discontent through a secondary analysis of survivor interviews." Ultimately, this talk argues that the ability to hear silence is not only indispensable in academic pursuits but also essential in everyday life.

Ping-Chun Hsiung is a researcher whose ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival studies have advanced gender studies and qualitative research both locally and internationally. Her work challenges dominant social science paradigms by uncovering and critically examining research traditions outside Western norms.

Her early research on gender, the state, and Taiwan’s economic development is regarded as a classic in the field. In the 1990s, she joined other diaspora feminist scholars in collaborating with activists and academics in China to establish feminist NGOs and women/gender studies curricula at universities in China—a pioneering effort that helped sustain feminist activism and nurture new generations of feminist scholars.

With decades of experience publishing and teaching qualitative interviewing, Ping-Chun is a recognized leader in the field. She created Lives & Legacies: A Guide to Qualitative Interviewing, an open-access tool designed to support qualitative interviewing globally.