auto ethnographies

I really enjoyed these articles, and appreciate the analytical approach to validate their findings. I think this kind of work can make reasearch much more accessible to people outside of academia, which I also see as beneficial. I think it will be a long time though, before the empiricists and funders will give credibility to these methods.

A Visual Ethnogrphy Class/Technique Workshop

I must say that I really enjoyed this week’s readings on auto-ethnography and visual ethnography, especially the article by Pink. I can't wait to read the rest of the book. Having another really good reference about the benefits of using multimedia ethnography methods in our research is wonderful. I wish I had read this before I wrote my most recent paper, in which I ended up citing Harper (1998) and Collier and Collier (1986)’ although they are good references, they are also explained in the Pink chapter.

I, too, agree with Eric that we should have a workshop or some day set aside in the college where everyone (regardless of discipline, background, and research interests) can learn about how to use some of the multimedia equipment, editing programs, etc. I am working with the Teacher Education Program (TEP) right now to help better implement the arts into the TEP program. My specific domain is to better teach the teachers some of the fundamentals of visual documentation and technology, and how to teach elements of visual ethnography in their classes.

Perhaps a larger program could and should be designed for everyone in the college to attend. Perhaps faculty and others with backgrounds in these fields or current PhD and master's students who are working and using these methods could share some tips or tricks of the trade. I really feel something like this would be very beneficial to all graduate students because, unless you already have learned it or are learning it through your research position, there seems to be little place where actual techniques are demonstrated, programs explored, and equipment explained to anyone. While courses explain methods and the theory behind this work, such as this ethnography course or even the Qualitative Methods course, no single course explains how to use a video camera, what is the best format to film in, how to use lights, audio, tripods, video editing software such as iMovie, Quick Time, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, etc.

I believe we all could learn a lot from one another. Is there any way we could try to set something like this up for College of Ed students?

Therese

Visual Analyses/Ethnography Info

Did we ever decide whether our class would have a "how to" day to learn to use audio & video equipment for ethnographic work? I would love to see that happen.

Pink's introduction makes the use of visual media sources for social science research seem so powerful. Pink (2001) points to McQuire's notion that "the ambiguity of the meaning of images not only questions the modern notion of truth, but destabilizes the basic premises of modernity", and McQuire's assersion that there is power in the camera "as an agent of change that overturns the realist paradigm" (p. 13). Whao! I like this argument. I think that I agree with it, because one can write words about any social interaction, and try to be as objective in description as possible, but the words will always be reflections of the information processed through that researchers' subjectivity. A visual representation, whether pictures or video, presents data that are removed, to some degree, from that researcher-originated filtering process, and can therefore be something closer to the subjectivity, or at least the social reality, of the observed participants. Here follow wise warnings to use a disciplined, systematic approach (Becker, in Pink, p. 7) when engaging visual media as ethnographic materials for analysis.

Multi-media seems to be a methodological direction in which much social science research is heading, or that various research methodologies will increasingly adopt. A link to Van Leeuwen's Visual Analysis book. I'd love to see more links to information about the whys and how-tos for involving and adapting multiple media formats for educational research.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8Bdb-L3D1I0C&oi=fnd&pg=PP17&dq=video+analysis+education&ots=mhn7LnunOU&sig=vic0SmzkTODrNpCcBk9YHOldxxs#PPT1,M1

Ellis/Bochner Literature Review

Summary of Main Points and Key Concepts:

• We must open our eyes and ears to the necessity of exposing how the complex contingencies of race, class, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity are woven into the fabric of concrete, personal lived experiences, championing the cause of reflexive, experimental, autobiographical, and vulnerable texts.
• One of the goals of autoethnography is to enter and document the moment-to-moment, concrete details of a life, as well as to use that life experience to generalize back to a larger group or culture.
• There are several things that hinder good autoethnographies, especially from social scientists:
• They don’t write well enough to carry it off
• They’re not sufficiently introspective about their feelings or motives
• They don’t understand the contradictions they experience
• They have a difficult time with self-questioning
• They have a difficult time confronting things about themselves that are less than flattering
• They can’t be vulnerable
• The original use of the term autoethnography was limited to referring to cultural-level studies by anthropologists of their “own people,” in which the researcher is a full insider by virtue of being “native,” acquiring an intimate familiarity with the group, or achieving full membership in the group being studied.  The term has now evolved in a manner that makes precise definition and application difficult.
• Autoethnographers vary in their emphasis on the research process (graphy), on culture (ethnos), and on self (auto).  Different exemplars of autoethnography fall at different places along the continuum or each of these three axes.
• Narrative truth seeks to keep the past alive in the present.  Stories show us that the meanings and significance of the past are incomplete, tentative, and revisable according to contingencies of our present life circumstances, the present from which we narrate.
• Stories run the risk of distorting the past.  They rearrange, redescribe, invent, omit, and revise.  But that’s okay because a story is not a neutral attempt to mirror the facts of one’s life; it does not seek to recover already constituted meanings.  We should be more concerned with what consequences the story produces rather than historical accuracy

Ideas and Terminology Used:

• Autoethnography: an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural.  Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through An ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations.

•  “Crisis of Confidence” in Social Science:  work in the 1970’s and 1980’s that changed the modernist conception of “author.”  The interpretive space available to the reader was broadened, encouraging multiple perspectives, unsettled meanings, plural voices, and local and illegitimate knowledges that transgress against the claims of a unitary body of theory.
• Systematic Sociological Introspection:  paying attention to ones personal life, physical feelings, thoughts, and emotions.  Using emotional recall to try to understand an experience.  Exploring a particular life to understand a way of life.
• Reflexive Ethnographies:  the researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study.  Reflexive ethnographies primarily focus on a culture or subculture, and authors use their own experiences in the culture reflexively to bend back on self and look more deeply at self-other interactions.
• Native Ethnographies:  researchers who are natives of cultures that have been marginalized or exoticized by others write about and interpret their own cultures for others.
• Complete-Member Researchers:  researchers who explore groups of which they already are members or in which, during the research process, became full members with complete identification and acceptance.
• Radical Empiricism:  the process that includes the ethnographer’s experiences and interaction with other participants as vital parts of what is being studied.
• Narrative Truth:  narrative truth seeks to keep the past alive in the present through stories.

 

Linkages to other class readings:

The Vulnerable Observer touches on a lot of the same points that this article does.  The main point, and most poignant in my opinion, is that the intellectual mission of ethnography is deeply paradoxical: get the “native point of view,” without actually “going native.” The term we like to use is “participant observation” which is an oxymoron in itself.

 

The other point that I find especially intriguing is the idea of getting involved in the observation in an emotional and/or physical way.  When the subject of the research is autoethnography the researcher is naturally involved, but must figure out how to limit or increase his or her involvement in the story.  As The Vulnerable Observer points out, even a researcher who is not doing his or her own story still can become emotionally and/or physically involved if the safety or emotional well-being of the subjects comes into question.

 

Possible class discussion questions or topics:

• Do you have a particular experience in your life that you think would lend itself to autoethnography?  What is this experience, and how would you look at it from both a personal view and an ethnographic view?
• How do you protect against your own biases if you are doing an autoethnography?  Or is it even necessary to worry about such biases?

 

Response

I enjoyed reading this article because I felt like it addressed questions that had come up to me throughout this quarter.  One of my major questions all along was whether an ethnographer needs to be somewhat involved in the culture he or she is researching, or if a member of a culture can give a true view of what is being researched.  The answer is yes, and it may in fact be more profound and more useful to the community (not necessarily the academic community, but to the researcher’s cultural community) as a whole.

I am glad there is a branch of ethnography that acknowledges personal experience and personal insights into a culture as a legitimate resource.  This is the direction I want to go for my final paper.

Quotes to Ponder:

• “Well, that’s clever.  Although you started with the ‘I,’ you quickly fell into using the handbook genre to argue against writing in the handbook genre….Reminds me of how so many of our texts argue in postmodern abstract jargon for greater accessibility and experimental forms.”
• “What good would my research be if it doesn’t help others who are going through this experience, especially my subjects?”

disability discussion from 2 weeks ago

Hey, a short discussion we had 2 weeks ago is still churning around in my mind. The chapter in Jessor that used the example of the deaf community to make an argument for demonstrating that disability can be seen as socially defined didn't seem, in my mind, to preclude application to more severe disabilities. The three models summarized to one word are deficit, difference, and culture. It was suggested in class essentially that the culture model would break down in the cases of severe disability. My personal take is that any disability can still be seen as culturally defined. It seems like the culture model must also recognize “difference.” If there is no “difference” then it seems that disability is an illusion.

The value of the cultural model is that differences understood in cultural terms (through ethnographic research, of course) can more clearly define the lived experience of individuals with disabilities.

If I were to make my own models based on some of these ideas, there would be two, not three. The first would be difference as deficit; the second would be difference as defined by culture. It seems to me that difference is a given, otherwise it reminds me of the old “colorblind” push which tried to pretend that race is an illusion.

I’d love comments on this, but I know the end of the quarter is on us!!!

Cheers,

-Kyle

Creating Educational Field Stations: A Remedy And A Model For Diversity And Access In Higher Education

Hi everyone: Here's the paper / project I was referring to in class yesterday: Creating Educational Field Stations: A Remedy And A Model For Diversity And Access In Higher Education. It is work that is part of the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence (CREATE) at UCSD directed by Bud Mehan.

The Wire

Hey everyone... as I was talking in class today about The Wire. I thought I would send a link of an overview about the show. The show is in it's fifth season right now but season four especially examines the life and times of several boys attending an inner city Baltimore middle school.

Its a fascinating and very creative and character driven show... check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(TV_series)

According to the The Wire website on HBO:
"The first season of 'The Wire' (2002) concentrated on the often-futile efforts of police to infiltrate a West Baltimore drug ring headed by Avon Barksdale and his lieutenant, Stringer Bell. In Seasons Two and Three, as the Barksdale investigation escalated, new storylines involving pressures on the working class and the city's political leadership were introduced. Season Four focused on the stories of several young boys in the public school system, struggling with problems at home and the lure of the corner - set against the rise of a new drug empire in West Baltimore and a new Mayor in City Hall...the fifth and final season of 'The Wire' centers on the media's role in addressing - or failing to address - the fundamental political, economic and social realities depicted over the course of the series, while also resolving storylines of the numerous characters woven throughout the narrative arc of the show."

http://www.hbo.com/thewire/

Seasons 1-4 are available on DVD at most any video store!