Richardson, Laurel. 2000. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” In Handbook of
Qualitative Research, by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, 923–48.
Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
"Writing as a method of inquiry... provides a research practice through which we can investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices of social science unnecessarily limit us and social science." p.924
"Unlike quantitative work, which can be interpreted through its tables and summaries, qualitative work carries its meaning in its entire text. Just as a piece of literature is not equivalent to its "plot summary," qualitative research is not contained in its abstracts." p.924
"It seems foolish at best, and narcissistic and wholly self-absorbed at worst, to spend months or years doing research that ends up not being read and not making a difference to anything but the author's career." p.924
"I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it. I was taught, however, as perhaps you were, too, not to write until I knew what I wanted to say, until my points were organized and outlined." p.924
"adherence to the model requires writers to silence their own voices and to view themselves as contaminants." p.925
"Students are taught to be open, to observe, listen, question, and participate. Yet they are taught to conceptualize writing as "writing-up" the research, rather than as an open place, a method of discovery." p.925
Historical Context: Writing Conventions
"Styles of writing are neither fixed nor neutral but reflect the historically shifting domination of particular schools or paradigms." p.925
Writing has been divided into literary and scientific since the 17th century, where truth, fact and objectivity were associated with science, and fiction was labeled as "false" because it invented reality. Poets suffered being labeled as professional liars in the 18th century. And then social science was introduced, promising to expose the knowledge of truth if precise language about moral and social issues were adopted. Late 19th century: realism dominated both science and fiction writing. Emile Zola's essay "The Novel as Social Science" then argued for "naturalism" in literature, arguing that the "return to nature, the naturalistic evolution which marks the century, drives little by little all the manifestation of human intelligence into the same scientific path." (Zola, 1880/1965, p.271).
During the 20th century, the line between true and imagined became blurred, particularly in the case of journalists. They began reporting on social and cultural life as social analysts, and the interest in "ethnographic novels" began.
Richardson asserts that there is one thing separating fact from fiction: "the claim the author makes for the text." p.926
Metaphor
"the of metaphor is experiencing aunderstanding one thing in terms of another" using comparison or analogy. p.926
Feminist scholars of the 70's began using the metaphor of a story for theory, which changed the way they wrote and researched: "women talking about their experience, narrativizing their lives, telling individual and collective stories became understood as women theorizing their lives." p.927
"facts are interpretable... only in terms of their place within a metaphoric structure. The "sense making" is always value constituting - making sense in a particular way, privileging one ordering of the "facts" over others." p.927
Writing format
"How we are expected to write affects what we can write about." p.927
"The conventions [of writing format] hold tremendous material and symbolic power over social scientists." p.927
"Needful of distinguishing their work from travelers' and missionaries' reports as well as from imaginative writing, ethnographers adopted an impersonal, third-person voice to explain "observed phenomena" and to trumpet the authenticity of their representations" p.928
There are four conventions used in traditional ethnographies: experiential authority (I was there), documentary style, the culture member's point of view, interpretive omnipotence of the ethnographer.
Postmodernist context
"The core of postmodernism is the doubt that any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the "right" or the privlleged form of authoritative knowledge." p.928
Postmodernist context of doubt treats all methods as equally untrustworthy.
The postmodernist position allows the qualitative writer to have a partial knowledge without having to "try to play God" p.928
"Poststructuralism links language, subjectivity, social nization, and power. The centerpiece is language. Language does not "reflect" social reality, but produces meaning, creates social reality." p.928
"Language is how social organization and power are defined and contested and the place where our sense of selves, our subjectivity, is constructed." p.929
"Experience and memory are thus open to contradictory interpretations governed by social interests and prevailing dis- courses. The individual is both site and subject of these discursive struggles for identity and for remaking memory." p.929
Poststructuralism directs writes to reflect on their position at specific times, and frees them from trying to write a text that speaks to everyone at once. p.929
Creative Analytic Practices: CAP Ethnography
"This label can include new work, future work, and older work, wherever the author has moved outside conventional social scientific writing." p.929
"CAP ethnography displays the writing process and the writing product as deeply inter-twined; both are privileged." p.930
"Postmodernism claims that writing is always partial, local, and situational, and that our Self is always present, no matter how much we try to suppress it-but only partially present, for in our writing we repress parts of ourselves, too." p.930
Evocative representations - "deploy literary devices to re-create lived experience and evoke emotional responses." p.931
Autoethnographies are when authors tell stories about their own lived experiences, using fiction-writing techniques like "dramatic recall, strong imagery, fleshed-out characters, unusual phrasings, puns, subtexts, allusions, flashbacks and flashforwards, tone shifts, synecdoche, dialogue, and interior monologue." p.931
"autoethnographers are somewhat relieved of the problem of speaking for the "Other," because they are the "Other" in their texts." p.931
Writing-stories: emotional responses to reading a piece of written work, and then writing from that point.
"Writing-stories sensitize us to the potential consequences of all of our writing by bringing home-inside our homes and workplaces- the ethics of representation." p.932
"When we read or hear poetry, we are continually nudged into recognizing that the text has been constructed. But all texts are constructed-prose ones, too; therefore, poetry helps problematize reliability, validity, transparency, and "truth."" p.933
"Writing up interviews as poems, honoring the speaker's pauses, repetitions, alliterations, narrative strategies, rhythms, and so on, may actually better represent the speaker than the practice of quoting in prose snippets." p.933
Ethnographic drama allows realist, fictional and poetic techniques to be merged.
Mixed genres: "The scholar draws freely in his or her productions from literary, artistic, and scientific genres, often breaking the boundaries of each of those as well." p.934
"the central imaginary for "validity" for postmodernist texts is not the triangle - a rigid, fixed, object. Rather, the central imaginary is the crystal, which combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, trans- mutations, multidimensionalities, and angles of approach. Crystals grow, change, alter, but are not amorphous. Crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves" p.934
Whiter and whence?
"whether writing CAP ethnography for publication is a luxury open only to those who have academic sinecure." p.936
Learning to write using CAP ethnography helps students in two ways: "It gains them entry into a new culture and literature, and it leads them to a deepened understanding of their first language, not just grammatically, but as a language that constructs how they view the world." p.936
"Deconstructing traditional writing practices makes writers more conscious of writing conventions and, therefore, more competently able to make choices." p.937
Ethnography is constructed through research practices, which "are concerned with enlarged understanding." p.937
The five criteria Richardson uses when reviewing papers submitted for social scientific publication:
"1. Substantive contribution - does this piece contribute to our understanding of social live?" p.937
"2. Aesthetic merit: Does this piece succeed aesthetically? Does the use of creative analytic practices open up the text, invite interpretive responses?" p.937
"3. Reflexivity: Is the author cognizant of the epistemology of postmodernism?... How was the information gathered? Are there ethical issues?" p.937
"4. Impact: Does this affect me? Emotionally? Intellectually?" p.937
"5. Expression of a reality: Does this text embody a fleshed out, embodied sense of lived experience? Does it seem "true"" p.937
"race and gender are axes through which symbolic and actual worlds have been constructed." p.938
"In part, science studies and gender studies thrived because they identified normative assumptions of social science that falsely limited knowledge. They spoke "truly" to the everyday experiences of social scientists. The new areas hit us where we lived-in our work and in our bodies. They offered alternative perspectives for understanding the experienced world." p.939
And thence
"Our task is to find con- crete practices through which we can construct ourselves as ethical subjects engaged in ethical ethnography-inspiring to read and to write." p.939
Writing Practices
Metaphor: theory is traditionally likened to a building (structure, foundation, construction, deconstruction, framework). p.940
Writing formats: Where is the author? Where are you in this paper? Who are the subjects and who are the objects of research? p.940
"Writing as a method of inquiry... provides a research practice through which we can investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices of social science unnecessarily limit us and social science." p.924
"Unlike quantitative work, which can be interpreted through its tables and summaries, qualitative work carries its meaning in its entire text. Just as a piece of literature is not equivalent to its "plot summary," qualitative research is not contained in its abstracts." p.924
"It seems foolish at best, and narcissistic and wholly self-absorbed at worst, to spend months or years doing research that ends up not being read and not making a difference to anything but the author's career." p.924
"I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it. I was taught, however, as perhaps you were, too, not to write until I knew what I wanted to say, until my points were organized and outlined." p.924
"adherence to the model requires writers to silence their own voices and to view themselves as contaminants." p.925
"Students are taught to be open, to observe, listen, question, and participate. Yet they are taught to conceptualize writing as "writing-up" the research, rather than as an open place, a method of discovery." p.925
Historical Context: Writing Conventions
"Styles of writing are neither fixed nor neutral but reflect the historically shifting domination of particular schools or paradigms." p.925
Writing has been divided into literary and scientific since the 17th century, where truth, fact and objectivity were associated with science, and fiction was labeled as "false" because it invented reality. Poets suffered being labeled as professional liars in the 18th century. And then social science was introduced, promising to expose the knowledge of truth if precise language about moral and social issues were adopted. Late 19th century: realism dominated both science and fiction writing. Emile Zola's essay "The Novel as Social Science" then argued for "naturalism" in literature, arguing that the "return to nature, the naturalistic evolution which marks the century, drives little by little all the manifestation of human intelligence into the same scientific path." (Zola, 1880/1965, p.271).
During the 20th century, the line between true and imagined became blurred, particularly in the case of journalists. They began reporting on social and cultural life as social analysts, and the interest in "ethnographic novels" began.
Richardson asserts that there is one thing separating fact from fiction: "the claim the author makes for the text." p.926
Metaphor
"the of metaphor is experiencing aunderstanding one thing in terms of another" using comparison or analogy. p.926
Feminist scholars of the 70's began using the metaphor of a story for theory, which changed the way they wrote and researched: "women talking about their experience, narrativizing their lives, telling individual and collective stories became understood as women theorizing their lives." p.927
"facts are interpretable... only in terms of their place within a metaphoric structure. The "sense making" is always value constituting - making sense in a particular way, privileging one ordering of the "facts" over others." p.927
Writing format
"How we are expected to write affects what we can write about." p.927
"The conventions [of writing format] hold tremendous material and symbolic power over social scientists." p.927
"Needful of distinguishing their work from travelers' and missionaries' reports as well as from imaginative writing, ethnographers adopted an impersonal, third-person voice to explain "observed phenomena" and to trumpet the authenticity of their representations" p.928
There are four conventions used in traditional ethnographies: experiential authority (I was there), documentary style, the culture member's point of view, interpretive omnipotence of the ethnographer.
Postmodernist context
"The core of postmodernism is the doubt that any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the "right" or the privlleged form of authoritative knowledge." p.928
Postmodernist context of doubt treats all methods as equally untrustworthy.
The postmodernist position allows the qualitative writer to have a partial knowledge without having to "try to play God" p.928
"Poststructuralism links language, subjectivity, social nization, and power. The centerpiece is language. Language does not "reflect" social reality, but produces meaning, creates social reality." p.928
"Language is how social organization and power are defined and contested and the place where our sense of selves, our subjectivity, is constructed." p.929
"Experience and memory are thus open to contradictory interpretations governed by social interests and prevailing dis- courses. The individual is both site and subject of these discursive struggles for identity and for remaking memory." p.929
Poststructuralism directs writes to reflect on their position at specific times, and frees them from trying to write a text that speaks to everyone at once. p.929
Creative Analytic Practices: CAP Ethnography
"This label can include new work, future work, and older work, wherever the author has moved outside conventional social scientific writing." p.929
"CAP ethnography displays the writing process and the writing product as deeply inter-twined; both are privileged." p.930
"Postmodernism claims that writing is always partial, local, and situational, and that our Self is always present, no matter how much we try to suppress it-but only partially present, for in our writing we repress parts of ourselves, too." p.930
Evocative representations - "deploy literary devices to re-create lived experience and evoke emotional responses." p.931
Autoethnographies are when authors tell stories about their own lived experiences, using fiction-writing techniques like "dramatic recall, strong imagery, fleshed-out characters, unusual phrasings, puns, subtexts, allusions, flashbacks and flashforwards, tone shifts, synecdoche, dialogue, and interior monologue." p.931
"autoethnographers are somewhat relieved of the problem of speaking for the "Other," because they are the "Other" in their texts." p.931
Writing-stories: emotional responses to reading a piece of written work, and then writing from that point.
"Writing-stories sensitize us to the potential consequences of all of our writing by bringing home-inside our homes and workplaces- the ethics of representation." p.932
"When we read or hear poetry, we are continually nudged into recognizing that the text has been constructed. But all texts are constructed-prose ones, too; therefore, poetry helps problematize reliability, validity, transparency, and "truth."" p.933
"Writing up interviews as poems, honoring the speaker's pauses, repetitions, alliterations, narrative strategies, rhythms, and so on, may actually better represent the speaker than the practice of quoting in prose snippets." p.933
Ethnographic drama allows realist, fictional and poetic techniques to be merged.
Mixed genres: "The scholar draws freely in his or her productions from literary, artistic, and scientific genres, often breaking the boundaries of each of those as well." p.934
"the central imaginary for "validity" for postmodernist texts is not the triangle - a rigid, fixed, object. Rather, the central imaginary is the crystal, which combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, trans- mutations, multidimensionalities, and angles of approach. Crystals grow, change, alter, but are not amorphous. Crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves" p.934
Whiter and whence?
"whether writing CAP ethnography for publication is a luxury open only to those who have academic sinecure." p.936
Learning to write using CAP ethnography helps students in two ways: "It gains them entry into a new culture and literature, and it leads them to a deepened understanding of their first language, not just grammatically, but as a language that constructs how they view the world." p.936
"Deconstructing traditional writing practices makes writers more conscious of writing conventions and, therefore, more competently able to make choices." p.937
Ethnography is constructed through research practices, which "are concerned with enlarged understanding." p.937
The five criteria Richardson uses when reviewing papers submitted for social scientific publication:
"1. Substantive contribution - does this piece contribute to our understanding of social live?" p.937
"2. Aesthetic merit: Does this piece succeed aesthetically? Does the use of creative analytic practices open up the text, invite interpretive responses?" p.937
"3. Reflexivity: Is the author cognizant of the epistemology of postmodernism?... How was the information gathered? Are there ethical issues?" p.937
"4. Impact: Does this affect me? Emotionally? Intellectually?" p.937
"5. Expression of a reality: Does this text embody a fleshed out, embodied sense of lived experience? Does it seem "true"" p.937
"race and gender are axes through which symbolic and actual worlds have been constructed." p.938
"In part, science studies and gender studies thrived because they identified normative assumptions of social science that falsely limited knowledge. They spoke "truly" to the everyday experiences of social scientists. The new areas hit us where we lived-in our work and in our bodies. They offered alternative perspectives for understanding the experienced world." p.939
And thence
"Our task is to find con- crete practices through which we can construct ourselves as ethical subjects engaged in ethical ethnography-inspiring to read and to write." p.939
Writing Practices
Metaphor: theory is traditionally likened to a building (structure, foundation, construction, deconstruction, framework). p.940
Writing formats: Where is the author? Where are you in this paper? Who are the subjects and who are the objects of research? p.940
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