Arthur P. Bochner

Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing

chapter 1 About the Authors chapter 2 Preface and Acknowledgments chapter 3 Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, Introduction: Talking Over Ethnography chapter 4 Part 1: Autoethnography chapter 5 1. David Payne, Autobiology chapter 6 2. Lisa Tillmann-Healy, A Secret Life in a Culture of Thinness: Reflections on Body, Food and Bulimia chapter 7 3. Carol Rambo Ronai, My Mother is Mentally Retarded chapter 8 4. Aliza Kolker, Thrown Overboard: The Human Costs of Health Care Rationing chapter 9 (R. Ruth Linden, The Life Boat is Fraught: Reflection on Thrown Overboard) chapter 10 5. Mark Neumann, Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century chapter 11 Part 2: Sociopoetics chapter 12 6. Judith Hamera, Reconstructing Apsaras from Memory: Six Thoughts chapter 13 7. Deborah Austin, Kaleidoscope: The Same and Different chapter 14 8. Laurel Richardson, Speech Lessons chapter 15 9. Carolyn Ellis, Maternal Connections chapter 16 10. Jim Mienczakowski, An Ethnographics Act: The Construction of Consensual Theatre chapter 17 Part 3: Reflexive Ethnography chapter 18 11. Marc Edelman, Devil, Not-Quite-White, Rootless Cosmopolitan: Tsuris in Latin America, the Bronx, and the USSR chapter 19 12. Tanice G. Foltz and Wendy Griffin, She Changes Everything She Touches: Ethnographic Journeys of Self-Discovery chapter 20 13. Karen Fox, Silent Voices: A Subversive Reading of Child Sexual Abuse chapter 21 14. Richard Quinney, Once My Father Traveled West to California chapter 22 Open-Ending, Readers Talk Back chapter 23 Name Index chapter 24 Subject Index

Narrative's Virtues

Reacting to the charge that personal narratives, especially illness narratives, constitute a “blind alley” that misconstrues the essential nature of narrative by substituting a therapeutic for a sociological view of the person, this article speaks back to critics who regard narratives of suffering as privileged, romantic, and/or hyperauthentic. The author argues that this critique of personal narrative rests on an idealized and discredited theory of inquiry, a monolithic conception of ethnographic inquiry, a distinctly masculine characterization of sociology, and a veiled resistance to the moral, political, existential, and therapeutic goals of this work. Layering his responses to the critique with brief personal stories regarding the suppressed emotionality that motivates academics to oppose innovations, the author examines his own motives as well as those of the critics, concluding that multiplicity is easier to pronounce than to live and urging a commitment to a social science that can accommodate diverse desires.

Criteria Against Ourselves

In the social sciences, we usually think of criteria as culture-free standards that stand apart from human subjectivity and value. The author argues in this article, however, that conflicts over which criteria to apply usually boil down to differences in values that are contingent on humanchoices.Thedemandforcriteriareflectsthedesiretocontainfreedom, limit possibilities, and resist change. Ultimately, all standards of evaluation rest on a research community’s agreement to comply with their own humanly developed conventions. The author ends by considering the personal standards that he applies to works that fall under the new rubric of poetic social science.

It's About Time: Narrative and the Divided Self

When I learned that my father had died while I was attending a national communication conference, two worlds within me—the academic and the personal—collided, and I was forced to confront the large gulf that divided them. In this article, I weave the story of that experience into the wider fabric of disconnections that promotes isolation and inhibits risk taking and change within universities and academic disciplines. In the process, I question whether the structures of power constitutive of academic socialization are not as difficult to resist as those of ones family, and the consequences as constraining. I use personal narrative to show how storytelling works to build a continuous life of experience, linking the past to the future from the standpoint of the present; to proble matize the process of assigning meanings to memories via language; to draw attention to the significance of institutional depression m universities; and to blur the line between theory and story.

Interpersonal competence: Rationale, philosophy, and implementation of a conceptual framework

The authors argue that learners who have achieved excellence in interpersonal communication should be able to set and achieve learning goals, collaborate with others, and adapt to situational changes. Five skills derived from the interpersonal competence paradigm are offered as potential focal points for instruction: empathic communication, descriptiveness, owning, self‐disclosure, and behavioral flexibility. Several teaching‐learning strategies are proposed, and methods of evaluating directly observable communication behaviors are presented.

An Introduction to the Arts and Narrative Research: Art as Inquiry

On September 29, 2000, we received an e-mail message from Marjatta Saarnivaara inviting us to speak at a research seminar organized by the Graduate School of Multicultural Art Education at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki. The seminar was to be held in Helsinki, January 25-27, 2001, on the topic “The Arts and Narrative Inquiries.” The goal of the seminar would be to position the arts as media for personal and collective narratives in diverse professional and cultural settings. Participants would foreground art as a mode of narrative inquiry, as a way of transgressing conventions, and as a method for understanding one’s own life, producing multicultural knowledge, evoking self-understanding, and representing research findings. Tempted by the promise of a unique adventure and curious about how Finnish artists and art educators were applying narrative in their work, we agreed to travel to Finland in the middle of winter. Frankly, we were more than a little anxious about how we would adjust to the darkness and cold of winter in Finland as well as how our stories and ideas about narrative and autoethnography would be received by painters, musicians, dancers, performance artists, and art educators. In the months leading up to the conference, we corresponded frequently with Marjatta Saarnivaara and with Inkeri Sava, the conference organizer in Helsinki. They informed us that art universities in Finland were struggling with the question of how to show the appropriateness of alternative forms of representation for doctoral dissertations and the development of suitable criteria by which to judge them. The artists in these graduate programs had the burden of demonstrating the legitimacy of art as a basis for inquiry—a means of producing knowledge and contributing to human understanding. The traditional standards of inquiry that emphasized facts, control, distance, and neutrality had little appeal to these art educators and graduate students. They understood art as an embodied inquiry—sensuous, emotional, intimate. They also believed that imagination was as important as rigor, meanings as important as facts, and the heart as important as the mind.

The Dialectic of Marital and Parental Relationships within the Stepfamily.

Building on the theoretical and research traditions of Jules Henry, Salvador Minuchin, Jay Haley, and Gregory Bateson, this study presents an analysis of metacommunicational statements taken from interviews with nine stepfamily couples regarding their experiences in building a stepfamily. Interviews were conducted with each spouse individually and with each couple jointly regarding the issues related to reorganizing their stepfamily. Analysis of the metacommunicational statements from the transcribed interviews revealed a “relationship dialectic” between the freely chosen marital relationship and the not‐so‐freely chosen stepparent relationship. The interview data revealed two relational tasks that the stepfamily couples attempted to accomplish in an effort to manage that dialectic. The first task was to establish the solidarity of the marriage in the minds of the children. This was attempted through clear statements to the children regarding the priority of the marriage and through efforts at maintaining...

Talking and thinking about qualitative research

This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled “Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research,” which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their personal history with qualitative methods, epiphanies that attracted them to qualitative work or changed their perspectives within the qualitative tradition, ethical crises, exemplary qualitative studies, the current state of qualitative methods, and challenges and goals for the next decade. Panelists included Arthur Bochner (communication), Norman Denzin (sociology/communication/critical studies), Yvonna Lincoln (education), Janice Morse (nursing/anthropology), Ronald Pelias (performance studies/ communication), and Laurel Richardson (sociology/gender studies). Carolyn Ellis (communication/sociology) served as organizer and moderator.

Bringing Emotion and Personal Narrative into Medical Social Science

In ‘Watching Brian die: the rhetoric and reality of informed consent,’ Rose Weitz takes readers backstage into a complex medical crisis fraught with ethical dilemmas of family communication, informed consent, and end-oflife decision-making. Here we see an author who is not a detached, unemotional, objective social science researcher. After all, the patient lying critically burned in the hospital is not any patient, but rather her brotherin-law, Brian. Nor is Weitz restricted to the singular identity of a family member participating in a medical crisis. She brings to the occasion of this personal crisis her academic identity as a medical sociologist interested professionally and conceptually in medical decision-making. These multiple identities place Rose Weitz in the advantageous position of viewing family response to informed consent from inside out and outside in. Participating as a close family member, she has her own thoughts, feelings and conversations to examine; she has access to other participants and places in which she can view and be part of the action, engaging in the details, private conversations, disagreements, entanglements and complications that unfold. From the inside, she can compose an intimate view of a family coping with personal and institutional aspects of informed consent that are not accessible when the researcher is an outsider. And, Weitz also participates with the eyes and ears of a sociologist who has inquired and written extensively about medical topics. From the outside, she can consult medical literature on burns and sociological literature on medical decisionmaking and informed consent. Drawing on her training and experience, she applies a sociological perspective to frame her tragic personal experience conceptually, philosophically and theoretically. In ‘Watching Brian die,’ Weitz brings these two positions together in a valiant effort ‘to make something useful from this tragedy’ (p. 211). She

Task and instrumentation variables as factors jeopardizing the validity of published group communication research, 1970–1971

This paper evaluates published small group research in speech communication during 1970 and 1971. Special attention was given to the way tasks were defined, controlled, and manipulated as well as the way instrument reliability was computed and reported in eight small group studies published during this period. Examples of failure to report instrument reliability and independent support of validity suggest a lack of emphasis on measurement. It is argued that (a) investigators can decrease the possibility of unwanted error by taking greater care in selecting and using tasks, (b) more accurate and complete reports of reliability should be made, and (c) greater recognition of the interdependent nature of theory and measurement should be achieved.