Calls to the Ministry of State Security: Relationship organization in the conduct of mutual observation

• Applicant: Dr. Olga Galanova
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 427723908

The calls received by the public network of the former Ministry of State Security are still unexplored data. An interdisciplinary investigation of these telephone contacts with the secret service helps to close the existing research gaps - both in historical analysis of technical communication and in sociological descriptions of surveillance practice. The aim of the project is therefore to open up the unknown data material and to sharpen the historical perspective on the relations between GDR citizens and the state for questions of media, interaction and relationship forms, and at the same time to expand research on the effects of power-centered state surveillance with a new thematic focus on the basis of secret service sources. This focus developed after a pilot work on a small part of the data material and focuses on the interactive accomplishment of practices of mutual observation. Methodically, these goals will be achieved through appropriate data preparation and detailed conversational-analytical descriptions of recipient design, which will be described as mechanisms of communication and as "methods" for the formation of different types of relationships between an officer of the service and the callers from inside and outside the GDR. Although the analysis of recipient-specific design of utterances represents a core ethnomethodological assumption and has a long empirical tradition, it has never been applied in this combination. The result will be a provocation compared to previous theories of state power in that it will not only focus on a (oppressive) surveillance dimension, but will also describe the constitution of mutual Observation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants