Cecilie Basberg Neumann

Uses of the Self: Two Ways of Thinking about Scholarly Situatedness and Method

If the scholarly self is irretrievably tied to the world, then self-situating is a fruitful source of data production. The researcher becomes a producer, as opposed to a collector, of data. This how-to paper identifies three analytical stages where such self-situating takes place. Pre-field; there is autobiographical situating; in-field, there is field situating, and post-field, there is textual situating. Each of these stages are presented in terms of the three literatures that have done the most work on them – feminism, Gestalt, and poststructuralism. A number of how-to examples are used to illustrate. In conclusion, we discuss how two different methodological commitments to situatedness, which Jackson (2010) dubbed reflexivist and analyticist, give rise to two analytically distinct ways of using the scholarly self for data production. Reflexivists and analyticists approach data production from opposite ends of the researcher/informant relationship. Where a reflexivist researcher tends to handle the relation between interlocutor and researcher by asking how interlocutors affect the researcher, an analyticist researcher tends to ask how the researcher affects them.

Philosophy of Science: Two Ways of Going About Situatedness

This chapter ventures into the philosophy of science, and so is harder going than the rest of the book. We want to demonstrate that there are two basic ways of thinking scientifically about situatedness. The dominant one is the one that Jackson (2011) calls reflexivist. We will proceed to discuss this position and juxtapose it with another one that Jackson calls analyticist. The analyticist position relates to situated research not primarily through awareness of changes in the researcher self, like in the reflexivist position, but through awareness of the changes the researcher produces in his relations within fields. We start with a brief summary of reflexivism and engage with two basic criticisms of it, go on to present the analyticist position and end by comparing them.

Conclusion: Culture, Power, Ethics

Knowledge production is always local and contextual, even where it aims beyond the specific towards the general. In order to produce the best data possible, the researcher must know as much as possible about context. Part of that context she brings to the field herself. In order to produce the best possible data, the researcher should know this context as well as possible, and reflect on her pre-field autobiographical situatedness, her in-field situatedness and her post-field textual situatedness. We will conclude this book by focusing on two of the more general contextual issues that have arisen en route, namely the significance of culture and power for the relation between researcher and informant.

Pre-field Autobiographic Situatedness and Post-field Textual Situatedness

In this chapter, we return to the two types of situatedness that come in addition to in-field situating; pre-field, autobiographic situating, which enter prior to and bleeds into in-field situating and post-field text situating, that follows after in-field situating. We start by problematizing autobiographic situatedness with regard to memory and biography, and situate our understanding of the self in relations. We discuss the importance of thinking though how the researcher came to pick and pitch the research the way she did, and move on to problematize textual situatedness in relation to the various contexts in which the text may be supposed to do a job.

Pre-field Autobiographic Situatedness, In-field Situatedness, Post-field Text Situatedness

In this chapter, we move closer to our subject and give examples from pre-field, in-field and post-field situatedness in research. We begin to demonstrate how we can do situatedness in practical research, and to open the text to some of the ethical challenges and power/knowledge issues that research is always engaged. In the chosen examples, we apply some of the Gestalt concepts and understandings of relations, which we see as complementary to books and manuals on contemporary methods. Further explanation of the Gestalt concepts will follow in Chaps. 3– 5.

A Century of Thinking About Situatedness: The Gestalt Tradition

If we want to master a conceptual apparatus, we need a certain overview of its history. This is important because terms and concepts mean different things within different traditions. Unless we situate the term field, a social scientist could be led to believe that we mean field in the Bourdieuian sense, i.e. a bit of a social reality tied together by a common focus. We do not; we mean the immediate relations within which the researcher does her work. The development of a conceptual terminology often reveals interesting connections with other disciplines and knowledge traditions. By having knowledge of this, one may better understand ambiguities and tensions embedded in concepts that one would otherwise have overlooked.

Conceptual Inspiration from the Gestalt Tradition

For students and researchers who are making an effort to situate themselves, an understanding of the basic concepts defining the Gestalt tradition may prove useful. In this chapter, we present and discuss the concepts of Field and Gestalt, figure and ground. In addition to clarifying the concepts, we hope to demonstrate how these Gestalt concepts may fit with a constructivist understanding of research practice.