From Methods and Methodology in Composition Research

Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan

Chapter 7 : Ethnography and Composition:  Studying Language at Home

This chapter provides a great how-to for ethnography.  Highlights:

1. Ethnography works in situations where the researcher has epistemic privilege
2. Ethnographers tend to focus on the daily routines in the everyday lives of the communities being studied.
3. 3 modes of ethnography:
   1. Comprehensive-oriented:  this is almost impossible because it asks you to look at EVERY aspect of the researched.
   2. Topic oriented – focus on one or more aspects of life known to exist in a community.
   3. Hypothesis-oriented – when you already know a great deal about a community – usually the result of an amalgam of the other two.
4. All ethnographies need a theoretical dimension (Marxist, materialist, cognitive, ecological, etc.)  The theoretical lens informs the method.
5. Ethnography requires open-mindedness and immersion.
6. The question of how to gain access or enter the community must be addressed
7. Triangulation as a protective measure is necessary.  Triangulation is a comparison between what you think you recorded and what the informants explanations of what were recorded (and vice-versa) are.  Ensures reliability in data.
8. Data analysis and coding schemes are part of sifting and shaping data collected.
9. Last step is to write the ethnography.
10. Some cautions/questions to be considered:
    1. Don’t assume your epistemic privilege will always be useful.  Your “knowledge” about a community may really skew your observations
    2. What role does an ethnographer’s degree of membership in a community play in successfully carrying out the study?
    3. How does the role of the researcher affect the preexisting established relationships in the community
    4. Will the ethnographer make assumptions about what certain behaviors signify or how meaning is established in this community based on previous knowledge or on the actual data collected?
    5. Would an outsider attach more significance to observed patterns than the insider, based on the degrees of distance?
    6. What issues might an insider face when writing up the ethnography?

From Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research:  The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication

By Gesa E. Kirsch

Chapter Two:  What Do You Know About My Life Anyway?  Ethical Dilemmas in Researcher-Participant Relations

Chapter Three:  Whose Words, Whose Reality? : The Politics of Representation and Interpretation

Again, for the sake of time, a bulleted format:  Chapter Two:

1. Make it easy to establish a rapport with subjects to validate their concerns.
2. Allow subjects interviewing other subjects to form close bonds on their common cultural experiences.
3. Dismantle the traditional hierarchy between researcher and researched. . . possibly forming a friendship/relationship.
4. There are pitfalls to having a relationship with participants.  By using interview methodology as a lens, Kirsch demonstrates how some researchers who strive for close relationships with participants risk that such relationships might end with the participant being disappointed because of broken trust and possibly exploitation
5. Be aware that there is a difference between friendship and friendliness
6. Interviews are constructed occasions – hence, there is a power dynamic and the folks being interviewed tend to put on their “best face” for the rhetorical situation.
7. There are difficulties in remaining objective in the face of blatant ism’s (sex, race, etc.).
8. Newkirk (UNH) has some provisions for how to conduct ethnography responsibly:
   1. Participants should be willing to receive critical feedback and hear bad news from researchers and vice-versa.
   2. Participants have a right to co interpretations.  In other words, the interpretations of those being researched should be included in research narratives, even if the two parties (researcher/researched) don’t agree on the interpretations
   3. Researchers should bear the ‘responsibility of intervention’ – in other words, researchers should be willing to intervene if unethical things happen in the course of the study.
9. Renegotiation of consent may need to occur as a project goes on in case of ethical dilemmas on the part of the researcher or the researched.
10. IRBs aren’t adequate for this sort of research because the protect the researched in medical/physical ways and cannot address the qualitative concerns of close research.

Chapter Three:

1. This chapter is about creating the written ethnography or the ways that we work and write the data we’ve collected.
2. To answer the question of taking responsibility for our representations in ethnographic studies, we must consider:
   1. i.      Examine who benefits from the study
   2. ii.      Examine whose interests are at stake
   3. iii.      Examine the potential consequences for the participants researched in our studies.
   4. This is difficult for feminist researchers because they want, through their research, to empower folks to act; however, in the process of empowerment, you don’t want to silence potentialities.
   5. Dilemmas Involving Individuals
      1. i.      Dealing with interpretive conflict:  What happens when your interpretations and the researched interpretations are at odds?  Do you include them both in the hope of striking a balance of representation?
      2. ii.      Dealing with confidential information:  What happens when the information you find threatens someone’s welfare, safety, etc., if it gets out?  Do you publish it?  What if it’s really useful for your ethnographic study?  How about:
         1. If you omit, explain the omission – or at least why you omitted it.
         2. Negotiations with the researched is also an answer to this question.
   6. Dilemmas Involving Institutions
      1. i.      The institution sponsoring the researcher often wants to influence the negotiations between the researcher and the participants.  What to do?
      2. ii.      The reputation of the institution is at stake when you conduct research, so you must consider this. . . you can always go rogue!
   7. Responding to Dilemmas of Representation and Interpretation
      1. i.      Studying Up instead of Down – i.e., studying folks in power – can make ontological/epistemological inscription an easy thing to avoid.  This will avoid us spending all the time “studying down”; however, those folks in power don’t often want to be studied!
   8. To avoid “paralysis” or fear of everything we could do wrong in an ethnography, we should be prepared to engage in “dialogue” with those we study.  In other words, a ‘co’ approach to ethnography might be the best solution in a feminist research paradigm.

From The Struggle and the Tools:  Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community

Ellen Cushman
Preface:

1. Cushman uses what she refers to as an “activist methodology” that allows both herself and her participants to make knowledge together and engage in mutually rewarding reciprocal relations.
2. Struggles: their perceptions of the common ways institutional representatives hindered community members’ efforts to act for themselves
3. Tools:  the numerous ways individuals linguistically strategized in their everyday strivings for resources and respect.
4. The book is about how folks use language to form oppositional ideologies in lower income or “oppressed” areas.
5. The focus is really on the area residents enacted specific rhetorical practices to challenge the hegemony of the public servants they dealt with on a day-to-day basis.
6. Cushman’s study advocates a more holistic interpretation of literacy and orality.  Instead of separating the two, we should think of them as mutually informing – quit enforcing the binary that presupposes that the literacy aspect is more cognitive while the oral is relational/context bound.
7. The takeaway from the study is that language doesn’t wholly subvert or reproduce the dominant ideology; rather, language cyclically develops in “nuanced everyday politics” (xviii).  So, instead of simply ascribing an ideological domination to a population (wherein we lose the ability to look critically at the oppositional ideologies at work counterhegemonically) we need to attend to the nuance of daily expression to see how resistance is actually at work and how crucial consciousness of the ‘oppressed’ may not be sleeping, but just working itself out in other ways.  To do this, we need to move away from a definition of critical consciousness as not a pathway to collective action, but individual action – then we can see how resistance really happens on the micro level (which may eventually lead to a macro analysis).
8. Instead of “false consciousness” Cushman wants to employ the term “strategic consciousness”
9. Centrally, Cushman wants to dispute the idea that “under the banner of false consciousness, theorists sell out their dialogic notions of power to the notion of socially determined actions by uncritical actors.  But I’ve found agency is more than mere blind obedience to the inevitable (ideological domination)” (8).  In this sense, Cushman’s project is something like Latour’s in that she is letting the actors define themselves a bit more than Bourdieu and other social theorists.
10. Cushman, in chapter two, enacts some of the feminist research methods that Kirsch mentions.  Specifically she notes that she is working to demonstrate a “piece that community residents authorized through our dialogue and reciprocity.  If the subaltern cannot speak, it is only because the scholar cannot listen or hear” (21-2).
11. Cushman notes that researchers and participants empower each other when they enable each other to achieve goals and facilitate each other’s actions.  Also, when they lend to each other their respective social statuses (Does this become a skewer for the research project?)
12. Cushman notes that she used critical discourse analysis.  She also investigates the social context in which the language use unfolds and looks at the larger political and ideological assumptions informing language use.
13. Reciprocity and dialogue are essential to Cushman’s study because through it the “research relationship” became mutually beneficial.  This leads to something called “researcher-as-participant” and “participant-as-researcher” wherein – through triangulation – the making of knowledge occurs TOGETHER.
14. Critical Discourse Analysis in this Work:
    1. Looked for salient features of language used in the exchange or text in order to describe the social functions that a particular linguistic choice represented.
       1. i.      What are the rhetorical features of the text?
       2. ii.      What social function do these features perform?
15. Explain the “situational context” that depicts the “reciprocal relations of actors in an exchange”
16. Consider the text or exchange in terms of ideological assumptions underpinning the participants language use (Latour says “NO!)  Does this to locate the text in larger institutional and social struggles.