A colleague just stopped me in the hallway to let me know that her husband had evidently been present at meeting I had attended earlier this week.
Archive for 'Fieldwork'
Too Sexy for My Field
In April, I’ll be leading an “intensive” weekend session on ethnographic research. The session already has a reading pack designed by a previous instructor, which I was just reviewing to decide whether I would make some quick modifications. Intensive methodology sessions are fairly rough-and-ready: they are designed to give students who are largely not very familiar with a particular methodology, with a quick overview of the strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons, of individual methods. The students who attend these sessions are not yet ready to workshop their actual research designs, and the sessions are too brief to provide more than the most cursory glimpse of a method. There is really no time to cover higher level concepts, and students are expected to pursue more advanced training from here, based on their final research proposals.
I was therefore curious to note that the very first reading, in a reading pack intended to be streamlined for use in this emphatically introductory course, deals with the pros and cons of having sex with the people you’re studying. Not in a “the ethics committee really, really won’t like it if you do” sense, but in a fairly open-ended way, including substantial discussion of the position that you really can’t know a culture unless you’ve… er… immersed yourself… Now, all of this is, I’m sure, quite interesting and useful to think about in a higher-level course but, in context, is this really the best entry point into explaining what ethnographic methods entail - or even for reflecting on ethical challenges in ethnographic research - for students who largely have no background in the field at all? At the very least, it seems a somewhat over-literal and blunt way into the complex emotional dynamics and relationships that make intensive field research so charged and ethically fraught…
One Way
I spent some time today with a group of people working - loosely - on issues relating to heritage, neighbourhood character, and “place making” in a community facing massive demographic change. One of the persons present had been involved in the creation of the ACT Cultural Map, and presented some highlights from that project as grist for discussion. The presentation highlighted a number of features from the Gungahlin town centre design - a greenfield development that, according to the presentation, recruited a local artist to create designs based on stories collected during community consultations. Developers have begun to incorporate these designs into new structures in a variety of ways - from patterns on manhole covers, to distinctive bus shelter designs, to etchings on glass doorways in the town centre - to create a distinctive sense of place while commemorating elements of the area’s history. Much of the presentation centred on visual images of the design elements created through this process.
This kind of commemoration always has a strange, haunted character for me, as it effectively celebrates what has been destroyed by the development process, and tries to build a sense of the distinctiveness of the new community by pointing to what is no longer there - as though the new community is expected to coalesce around what it has displaced. The discussion today centred on images of various design elements - themselves generally quite attractive, and spoken about, initially, just in terms of their visual appeal and distinctiveness. The mood in the room was playful, excited about the possibility of creating similarly unique visual elements in new communities locally, and the discussion revolved around the aesthetic merit of the designs, viewed as communal art.
At one point, however, the content of the artwork suddenly broke through what had, until that point, been essentially a discussion of form, and there was an almost tactile wrenching and reorientation of the mood in the room. The shift took place as the presenter displayed an image of the grates used around the base of new street trees, and the group puzzled over what the grates - which at first glance just looked attractively functional - were meant to represent. The presenter, excited and enthusiatic, explained:
They’re tree roots! Do you see? Because beautiful old trees were cut down - and their roots were everywhere, knotted together - and they’re gone now…
The presenter suddenly paused, thrown out of the presentation by registering - as the rest of us also were - the fundamental strangeness of surrounding these spindly new trees, all planted in their isolated and orderly formation, with artwork representing the mesh of mature root systems from trees that had grown old together, intertwined, and had then been destroyed to make way for the development process. No one voiced or telegraphed any criticism - the mood in the room was poignant, not critical. The presenter paused for some time, not really knowing what to say. Then quietly, almost reverent:
Well… at least we’ve got the memory of them…
I’ve committed to writing a conference paper loosely organised around the issue of how we understand the concept of “community” in a dynamic social context. Tentatively, the paper will discuss the “problem” of post-traditional communities as a foundational issue for classical sociology, make a few gestures at contemporary planning theory discussions on “community”, and then explore the ways in which some of these concepts play out in a couple of case studies from my field research. I may periodically toss up fieldnotes of this sort, as I try to work my way into what, exactly, I plan to write - the draft paper will eventually make its way onto the site. Happy as always to receive feedback on the theoretical or empirical dimensions of the piece.
[Note: image of the Gungahlin town centre clock modified from the one Cfitzart posted to Wikipedia. The original image - and therefore this one - is posted under the terms of a GNU Free Documentation License.]
So Am I Allowed to Fall Over in a Heap Now?
If anyone is reading who attended the talk this afternoon: thank you all so much - you asked fantastic questions and the discussion was very, very good. Your comments were incredibly helpful to me. It was initially a bit unnerving to realise how much some of you knew about this area (it says something about my relation to my research, I suppose, that I perceive my field site as really distant and obscure…) - it was also incredibly reassuring that no one felt the need to wield their local experience to massively contradict my fledgling analysis: whether this is because my analysis might be okay, or because you’re all too polite, I’m not sure - I’m grateful, nevertheless (but please don’t all be so polite that you refrain from telling me, until after I publish something, if you think I’m making an utter ass of myself… ;-P).
For those who might have been following my rather last-minute presentation preparations on this blog over the past couple of days: I’ll confess that I spent about half an hour this morning fending off a quite evil impulse to walk into the talk today with nothing prepared… ;-P
Ultimately, I selected two field stories - one of which was previously posted here in preparation for this talk, and the other of which I wrote specifically for the occasion, and which provided a bit of life history-style material on two key figures involved in the dispute - as materials to read more-or-less as written. I then sketched a more ad lib talk to give around these formally written field note bits - giving a bit of general background on the dispute and on my research process. I also went all out on the audio-visual dimensions of the presentation - if, that is, you regard it as really state-of-the-art to draw a hand-sketched map on a whiteboard of three roads and two buildings, as your sole audio-visual tool… I occasionally stood up and pointed at it, even.
Because of the nature of the life history material, I won’t post this talk directly on the blog. If anyone wants a copy, feel free to email (with the caveat that I don’t have a written version of the entire talk, since sections were written in sketch form only, so the two principal fieldwork sections are stitched together by schematic notes).
I suspect that, in reality, I feel completely exhausted at the moment - except that I’m a bit too giddy for this feeling to sink in… What must have been the longest academic term in the history of humankind is now over and, once I get out of my system some of the caffeine I consumed in order to get through today, I am planning to have something approximating my first complete night’s sleep in around nineteen weeks…
Dubious Text
So my talk for the “Dubious Ethnography” panel is out of the way - one down, one to go. I went through a particularly intense crisis of confidence about the whole thing yesterday, when the talk remained unwritten at 6 p.m., after an entire day filled with nothing but endless interruptions. It also didn’t seem promising that I have an intense sore throat and the beginnings of what feels like an ear infection - and, as I explained to the audience this morning, not being able to speak or hear seemed an unpromising beginning for a discussion…
In the end, though, I did enjoy giving the talk - and received some very good questions. Interestingly, the most positive and the most negative reactions related to my discussion of epistemology and critical judgment - which is somewhat amusing, as people generally just fall asleep when I discuss epistemology. Maybe I’m onto something with this narrative thing… ;-P
Some members of the audience really liked the notion of trying to understand the reasonableness of various positions in a local political conflict, while also trying to examine all of those positions critically for what they don’t quite grasp with reference to a more overarching and comprehensive vision of that context. One questioner in particular, though, was very unhappy with this proposal, really pressed me to declare a side - and then was unconvinced when I tried to explain that my main quarrel was not really with anything that was unfolding in the community where I research, but rather with certain frameworks with in the academic literature: that my main “side” was a critique of those academic positions.
I was challenged further to explain how this was an ethical position - don’t we ultimately all have to take sides with reference to what we are studying? Is it ethical to analyse the weaknesses in all competing positions without choosing a particular position we most strongly prefer? I suspect this is really, at base, not the universal and theoretical issue the questioner takes it to be, but more like an empirical and contingent question: depending on the conflict, it might be possible or impossible, ethical or unethical, to choose a side. My main purpose at the moment (not in this brief talk, which would be completely inadequate, but in the thesis) is to make plausible the notion that we can ground judgments in a recognition that some kinds of mistakes can be made by otherwise quite reasonable and moral people, who have seized upon a piece of their social context, confused that piece for the whole - and act as though everyone else has done the same… The context will then determine whether these judgments drive in favour of a form of political movement actually playing itself out on the ground in a particular dispute. I don’t think my answer was adequate - I’ll have to work on explaining what I mean.
Anyone who’d like a copy of the talk can email, with the caveat that, as always, the written version is not quite what I actually said - I tend to watch audiences, dwell on things that seem to get people nodding in agreement, and skip lightly over things that seem to get people nodding off… I’ll leave readers to guess which sections of the text fell into which categories…
Now I have to collect my thoughts for tomorrow’s talk - which, for local readers, will be delivered as part of the Environment & Planning Lunchtime Seminar series, in 8.7.6, at 12:30 (attendance is free; BYO food…).
Sign and Signifier
Below the fold, I’ve pasted a bit of a fairly drafty material that might or might not find its way into the talk I’ll be giving on the 23rd on the dispute over the demolition of the Doreen Hall. What I’m ultimately trying to do is work toward some kind of writing style that will allow me to move into some fairly abstract concepts via some fairly narrative material - reversing my more typical style of thinking and writing very abstractly, but still trying to use the narrative material to drive toward some fairly abstract concepts.
The fragment posted below the fold doesn’t do this (and, in fact, doesn’t even finish the narrative), but is an effort to experiment with narrative style. The result is rather close to a fieldnote, which, given that my narrative writing style is not all that flash, makes me a bit uncomfortable… I’m unresolved what relationship a story like this can or should have to anything that actually lands in a piece of formal writing
I should also warn that, since my goal at the moment is to get a rather large amount of written narrative in place, and since tracking down details and double-checking verbal reports is a sometimes appealing mode of procrastination for me, I’ve forced myself to restrain my impulse to achieve greater certainty - this means that a few specifics are flagged with brackets and question marks because I think I have a specific reason to be unsure of them. I also know from experience that even claims that seem fairly certain at the present time, may also change substantially as I continue the fact-checking process. Caveat lector! Really. I mean it.
This particular piece of writing focusses on miscommunication around one specific community consultation that was intended to choose what Council documents call a “historic signifier”: a marker or commemorative facility intended to be erected on the site of an historic community hall slated for demolition. Since the present fragment discusses only the very beginning of the dispute, and I don’t want anyone to draw the wrong conclusions, I should note that the Whittlesea City Council has decided to postpone a final decision on the demolition, in order to allow time for the newly-formed Doreen Residents Association to develop its own proposal for the Doreen Hall.
Seeking Safe Haven
Fieldwork routinely leads to these priceless stories, many of which are nevertheless too tangential to make it into the dissertation. One of my favourites relates to one family’s story of their experience of the panic caused by the Japanese attacks on Australia during WWII. My informant reports that a hysteria swept through the local community, who feared that their small rural holdings would soon be overrun by invading forces. My informant’s father, convinced that Doreen was soon to fall, ordered his family to pack all of their belongings and flee to the safe haven of… Strathewen. Nonlocal readers probably won’t understand why this story is so priceless: Strathewen is just down the road - some 18 km away from Doreen: it’s unclear why relocating there would have provided any greater safety…
One odd side effect of collecting these sorts of stories from older community members is the palpable afterglow of gratitude toward the US for its timely entry into the war - an afterglow that extends to encompass one somewhat awkward American researcher, trundling around with a digital recorder to capture this kind of oral history… There is a strong, sustained sense that the US cares deeply about Australian security - a belief that overrides even some often intensely critical opinions about the current US administration.
[Note: Image from Australia Under Attack, 1942-1943 - this site posts some fantastic artwork and documentary material from this period, and is well worth a browse.]