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Authoring Social Responsibility
Abstract
To better understand how researchers author social responsibility, the authors closely examined the “privileged” language in Mitchell Duneier’s and Carol Stack’s ethnographic texts and the ways that they transformed their positions without decentering the voices of those living in poor communities. The authors then describe how these texts consider a new ethnographic sensibility for economic injustice that forces ethnographers to assume responsibilities for intersecting social class with all other oppressive structures. This ethnographic sensibility involves ethnographers writing texts that broaden and transform standpoints of economically privileged persons living and working in our local communities. That is, when ethnographers position their texts from a social class standpoint, they automatically change the dimensions of how individuals interrupt and explain race, gender, and other social injustices. The authors propose that to better understand hierarchical structures that dominate society in today’s world, ethnographers must responsibly position their texts from this standpoint. Specifically, the language of the text visibly indicates the ethnographers understood (a) that they entered a field to work with their participants to transform public consciousness, (b) how to participate in an environment where people live on the social sidelines, and (c) their responsibility in writing a reflexive text from an antihegemonic standpoint that identifies the strengths and struggles of the participants.
... Feminist, critical and postmodern discourses of social science suggest that research should expose or problematise iniquitous social structures and asymmetric power relations (cf. Fine et al., 2000;Pilcher and Juneau, 2002;Denzin and Lincoln, 2005b). At the very least, ethnographers and other social scientists should avoid exploiting people and undermining their positions in society. ...
This paper examines the professional and moral positions of ethnographers located in institutions specialising in hospitality management. The paper considers the notion of ethnographic subjectivity and argues that ethnographers working in various paradigmatic contexts have differing relationships with the principles and practices of social science, organisation studies and commercial activity. It is suggested that they are simultaneously members of disparate communities with conflicting norms and values. The paper identifies the cultural and institutional forces that shape the absence, presence and the potential future of ethnography in hospitality management research.
Denzin & Lincoln (1994) define five historical moments in qualitative research and present ideas for future moments that focus on dialogue and storytelling of lived experiences in locally situated communities. Our learning community (teacher and students) in an introductory graduate qualitative research course listened to each others' talk on black feminist writings. I used students' reflections to begin to define a powerful moment for the future of qualitative research, the "crisis of de-communitization." This crisis reveals that globalization, environmental degradation, and economic exploitation are eroding the framework for care and nurture in our local communities. Therefore, it invites qualitative researchers to become engaged pedagogues within our communities to create spaces for "honest talk" that opens our hearts and minds to the pains and joys of social diversity. In this moment, qualitative researchers are challenged to write through the lens of difference by committing to four major components that define ways to move out of the crisis: eros, morality, empowerment, and transformation.
examine the hyphen at which Self-Other join in the politics of everyday life, that is, the hyphen that both separates and merges personal identities with our inventions of Others / take up how qualitative researchers work this hyphen / gather a growing set of works on "inscribing the Other," viewing arguments that critical, feminist, and/or Third World scholars have posed about social science as a tool of domination / collects a . . . series of questions about methods, ethics, and epistemologies as we rethink how researchers have spoken "of" and "for" Others / present discussion of qualitative research projects designed for social change [i.e., against Othering] (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Many feminist scholars have identified ethnographic methods as ideally suited to feminist research because its contextual, experiential approach to knowledge eschews the false dualisms of positivism and, drawing upon such traditionally female strengths as empathy and human concern, allows for an egalitarian, reciprocal relationship between knower and known. This paper discusses the irony that ethnographic methods also subject research subjects to greater risk of exploitation, betrayal, and abandonment by the researcher than does much positivist research. Fieldwork and its textual products represent an intervention into a system of relationships that the researcher is far freer than the researched to leave. The paper calls for greater dialogue between feminism and the new ethnography which addresses similar methodological concerns and suggests certain constraints on that dialogue.