Johnson, R., Chambers, D., Raghuram P., Tincknell, E. (Eds) (2006). The practice of cultural studies (pp. 153-186). London: Sage.
Valverde, M. (1991). As if subjects existed: Analysing social discourses. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 28, 173-187.
Smith, D. (1990) The active text: A textual analysis of the social relations of public discourse. In Texts, facts, femininity (p. 120-158). London: Routledge.
Denzin, N. (1996). The art and politics of interpretation. In N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 500-515). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Frank, A. (2001). Can we research suffering? Qualitative Health Research, 11, 353-362.
This week’s readings involve the writing and interpretation of texts, the possibilities, the problems, and the power of knowledge and implications of claiming reality.
Johnson et al outline the strengths and drawbacks of applying a structuralist approach to textual analysis. A structural analysis involves, as the name would suggest, identifying the underlying meanings imbued within the structure of the writing. Using detective novels as an example, Johnson outlines how the organization of a sequential plot and characters in binary can reveal discourses of male hegemony, heroism, the evils of criminality along with ‘othering’ resulting from binaries of good vs. evil, civilised vs. uncivilised etc. Johnson stresses the importance of considering intertextuality, the organization of meanings in relation to other texts as well as other cultural forms that contextualize narratives in larger social frameworks. This is where structuralism ends and post structuralism begins. Structuralism limits the possibility of analysis because, “complex cultural practices are reduced to their formal elements” (165). It also fails to consider the historical development of meaning within text. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, “allows for multiple meanings, fluidity, and contradiction” (167). A combination of approaches allows the reader to both identify the structures and codes of the initial text while also implicating it in the multiple meanings produced through larger social and cultural contexts. By doing so, one can begin to identify the power relations underlying the cultural, as is evident in Chapter 10 as Johnson analyses the post 9-11 speeches of both Bush and Blair.
Valverde is also concerned with how to utilize textual analysis for sociocultural study. She argues that sociocultural textual analysis should identify and analyse social subjectivity, the meaning of signs, discourses, and identities of a particular social group. Socio-historical analysis involves identifying, “the relations between discursive practices and practical subjectivities of those who produce and/or consume discourses” (177). Valverde acknowledges the usefulness of poststructuralism because it offers a framework to analyse the organization of multiple social subjectivities in relation to social and cultural systems and discourses. It is this form of postructural analysis that begins to account for individuals’ agency within these frameworks, identifying that the individual can take up varying positions and create meaning within a network of discourses and social structures. It is this form of analysis that might begin to break down the structure/agency binary.
Smith explains how texts are an element of social relations, “how individuals’ actual practices are articulated to and coordinated in social courses of action” (124). Textual analysis then can be used to explain the social and historical contexts in which those relations are created. She uses the contents of a citizen’s letter about a police incident at Berkeley and the mayor’s response to the situation to elucidate how both texts operate to explain local understandings or schemas as well as the larger political contexts that both the citizen professor and the mayor operate within. As an example, how police brutality is constructed differently in each letter suggests that not only different intentions but different social relations (power relations) are at work to organize meaning. It is the reader, as an active interpreter of the texts, who must rely on his or her own social relations to critically construct meaning from the texts provided.
This leads us to Denzin who premises the chapter by stating that, “in the social sciences, there is only interpretation” (500). Traditional forms of interpretation within the social sciences based on scientific and domain specific criteria as well as authoritative knowledge seem to be outdated. Interpretation also takes a poststructural turn as the reader as interpreter can rely on their experience and knowledge to make meaning of text. Denzin outlines the writing process in four stages: sense making (what to write), representation (presence of the writer and the Other), legitimation (authority claims), and desire (what writing practices the author uses). Interpretation involves understanding the subjectivity (in both senses of the word) in the writing process as well as their own subjectivity in deconstructing a text. Denzin outlines the approaches to interpretation (ie grounded theory, constructivism, critical theory, poststucturalist theory) but ultimately advocates a form of poststructural, postmodern method of interpretation that pulls from all interpretive communities. He suggests that in the future, we might see an interpretive paradigm that involves, “less foundational postpositivism and a more expansive critical theory framework built of modified grounded theory” (512). Can you conceptualize what that might look like? Ultimately, Denzin advocates that writing and interpretation should adhere to three tenets: human experience should be studied from the social and cultural perspective of the individual, researchers will work from themselves to understand the world around them, and finally that scholars should write accurately and powerfully.
In Frank’s account of his experience with illness and suffering, he explains that sociological interpretations and descriptions interpret events that consequently construct new meanings that validate the social scientist’s position and specific ruling relations in society. He references Smith (1999) who states that, “ruling relations appear as abstracted systems, hooking up local events with extra-local organizational forms” (357). In other words, social scientists take personal or local experience and generalize it to larger social discourse that no longer represents the individual experience like illness or police brutality. If an experience like suffering cannot be essentialized into an extra-local category, it is marginalized and forgotten (sounds a lot like subjugated knowledge!) Frank states that, “a claim to know the other’s suffering takes away part of that other’s integrity” (359). Researchers should not try to explain people’s behaviours because it is both harmful to the individual and to the meanings placed on the phenomenon being studied. Instead, researchers should seek to explain the social structures and power systems that affect how we embody, experience, and understand suffering.
Questions:
According to Denzin, “authentic understanding is created when readers are able to live their way into an experience that has been described and interpreted” (506). What is authentic understanding? Could such an understanding exist after a researcher has constructed and interpreted that experience the reader is reading?
Smith (1990) states that texts, “are social in origin and built into social relations. Analysis therefore depends upon the analyst-as-member’s knowledge of the interpretive practices and schemata relevant to the reading of a particular text” (121). How can we determine the knowledge-base or understanding of an ‘analyst-as-member? Can we determine by interpreting a text ourselves, if the researcher has adequately interpreted the experience that they are trying to explain?
Valverde states that, “the challenge is… to develop ways of theorizing social subjectivity that break through the structure/agency dichotomy by highlighting the dynamic process of struggles over meaning including the meanings of categories of resistance (184). How does Frank’s explanation (or lack thereof) of his suffering begin to complicate this dichotomy, the notion of resistance, and social subjectivity itself? Can autoethnography even effectively interpret the meaning of one’s experiences?
According to Denzin, new schools of social sciences rely solely on community recognition and peer validation to determine the credibility of a research paper. Are these standards too soft? What can be lost or overlooked when you base the quality of a paper on the opinions of a likeminded and theoretically homogenous academic community?
Jess, you did a lovely job explaining the readings, and your questions are thought-provoking. The things that I have been thinking about while doing this week’s readings probably relate most to your second question about interpretive practices.
ReplyDeleteTwo related themes this week concern the limits of authorial authority and the possibilities of reader responses. Johnson et al. mention Barthes as one who made it possible for critics to understand meaning as produced beyond the “deliberate intent of an individual author” (p. 154). For Barthes, writing is the destruction of voice; origin is only in language; and the scriptor is produced simultaneously with the text as a guest, rather than being a preceding authority. Under these conditions, it’s just out of the question to look to authorial intention for the definitive meaning of a text. In the accessible example of Dubya’s slip of the tongue (p. 184), it’s clear how deferring to the speaker’s stated intention would forestall the most interesting interpretations. As the authors note, “the public rhetoric of key politicians can be extraordinarily revealing, for it often says more than is intended” (p. 173). What about the rhetoric of this week’s writers—what does it reveal beyond stated intentions?
Note, for instance, this passage in Smith: “This chapter investigates texts as active constituents of the social relations of public textual discourse. It is concerned with the *active* ways in which texts organize relations within textual discourse, both with respect to how local happenings are entered into its interpretive practices and to how its social relations are organized” (p. 123). For all of the insistence on generativity, the second part of the second sentence is strangely passive. This is precisely where Smith is discussing the details of the italics-emphasized activity of texts—how they subsume local phenomenon and organize social relations. Yet the local happenings “are entered” and social relations “are organized”; granted, this passivity is that of the objects affected by the texts, but shouldn’t the agent of all of this ideological work be grammatically visible? Is there some unacknowledged hesitation that Smith never mentions intending?
Overall, it was Smith’s chapter that really tripped me up this week. I read the first few pages and had to stop, coming back to it only after a day had elapsed. My marginalia are thick in the opening pages, as I wondered about how textual intention might differ from authorial intention. According to Smith, the text has intentions that “can be recovered through [an] analysis” (p. 121) that conforms to the text’s own intended “interpretive schema” (p. 121); it is hardly surprising that this circular activity confirms “the text’s coherence” (p. 121). It sounds a lot like the formalism of New Criticism, in which the text is viewed as closed, complete, and entirely resolvable. Or like the documentary method of interpretation that Smith describes later in the essay. If texts are “constituents of social relations” (p. 121), I had to wonder if they weren’t nonetheless essentialized agents. There seems to be no room for the mutual constitution of reader and text.
Don’t get me wrong—I quite enjoyed Smith’s analysis of the two letters. However, it seemed to me that this work would have been better presented much earlier in the essay. This format would have worked rhetorically to support the argument that relations are generated by text, since the (rather confusing) direction of the argument was instead to attempt to explain and theorize the social relations at play before elucidating the very texts that constituted them. Call me a fan of rhetoric, but I certainly appreciate when form and content work together.
Oops...I didn't make my citations in the first paragraph very clear. They are all from Johnson et al.
ReplyDeleteI for one don’t think we can “determine the knowledge-base or understanding of an ‘analyst-as-member.’” Not everyone has the (same) skill-set or motivation to critically engage with scholarly articles and we can only read texts as we know how to read them, something which Smith alludes to at the beginning of her article (1990, p.121). If the ‘analyst-as-member’ is a graduate student, I think we can presume this individual has the necessary skills, or can develop those skills necessary, so long as they have the time (and don’t waste that time they do have) and the motivation to look up terms they don’t understand and “read around” the article (for instance: check out references, contextualize the topic they are reading about more, especially if it has just been introduced to them). I don’t think we can presume everyone knows how to read academically. On the contrary, I think we are trained to soak up information, from high-school biology textbooks, from newspapers sports sections, as examples, which is a type of reading that can potentially lead to much frustration in grappling with poststructural, postmodern, etc. material. I actually found the Johnson, et al., Valverde and Smith articles quite helpful in this regard. Perhaps these articles were easier to read because there have been similar themes in past weeks.
ReplyDeleteI also found Valverde’s (1991) “green shopper,” a “new social subjectivity” (182), quite interesting, especially after reading about Blair and Bush in Johnson, et al.(2006). “Maintain your faith in the economy” and continue on as usual, your normal “way-of-life,” were consistent themes in their speeches following the Sept 11/01 attacks. With respect to green shopping, though, are we really producing any less waste? Are green products that much healthier for the environment (light-bulbs, as just one example)? Similarly, what about cleaner fuel-burning engines? We’ve had this technology for decades, but there would have been billions of corporate and government dollars lost had such engines been installed. Why else has such technologyies been ignored. Do most people just not care? On p. 178-179, Valverde notes that the goal of homosexuals, in equal rights movements, “is not so much to affirm the rights of homosexuals as a distinct social group as to question the whole dichotomy and to eventually create a social world in which sexuality is not fragmented into ‘opposite identities.’ What then would be the goal(s) of poststructuralists more generally, are they similar?
Also, Jess, not sure if I am interpreting your question correctly, but I think Frank is problematizing the doctor/patient relationship. On p. 355, for example, he calls “the medical model ... impotent against suffering” (355). He makes a call for qualitative researchers to practice a certain type of research, one that focuses on holistic health (that is, not only physical but also social, psychological, spiritual). This reading reminded me of David Sowell’s “The Tale of Healer Miguel Perdomo Neira,” a book I read for my history class. In short, because I’ve already run out of room, in the midst of Latin American health reform (the professionalization and bureaucratization of medicine), Neira, a spiritual healer, continued to practice “traditional” medicine because the masses found it/him relevant. Despite curing tens of thousands of patients, and having a lower patient death-rate than the average doctor in Europe, he was consistently demonized by medical professionals, newspapers, etc. To sum up, I’m left to wonder about the appropriateness of modern medicine: the “we know what is right for you” attitude. Have we thrown all our eggs into one (type of healing) basket? How does this relate to Frank's suffering?
Jess, I must apologize first. I had part of a post written in response to your question about resistance, but as usual my tangential musings have turned into too many characters for me to include all.
ReplyDeleteTwo of the articles, specifically, functioned in a problematic local/extralocal or observational/institutional dichotomous fashion. For instance, Smith argues that local observations are often placed (or “slotted”) into relatively powerful institutional discourse to make schematic sense (in her example, through a belief in mandated courses of action). There is an implicitly constructed hierarchy between two opposing (that is, observational versus institutional) discourses. Frank draws on the ideas of (who I’m assuming to be the same) Smith. Frank utilizes her notion of “discourse” as “extralocal texts – texts created elsewhere – that organize action and relationships in local settings” (p. 356), which connects the ruling relations (extralocal) to the everyday (local). Frank’s suffering due to feared illness is an example of a local suffering that is silenced through “discourse.” Here, the extralocal and local are assumed to operate at different levels of another implicit hierarchy.
In Smith’s example of the professor’s letter being strategically and discursively subsumed by the Mayor’s ‘explanation’ (note my own rhetorical use of the apostrophe!) that appeals to mandated courses of police action, she leaves relatively unproblematized how these taken-for-granted courses of action become accepted by both the Mayor and the professor. It would seem to me that the discursive implication of such silence is that the professor would have accepted the use of force had he known all the ‘facts’ that the Mayor uncovered. It can be argued, then, that this institutional discourse of ‘justified’ police action permeates even the professor’s observational discourse, and thus the strict dichotomy between observational and institutional knowledge is false.
Similarly, Frank’s sense of suffering as “loss” (which he attributes to the local) can also be understood as a function of the (extralocal) social relations of the world he inhabits. In a Foucauldian sense, if I interpret Foucault correctly, Frank was mourning a loss of control over his body that resulted from the power of the doctor to inform him he may be sick, despite any (bioscopic) evidence to substantiate this claim. Thus, his suffering is in part a function of this unequal doctor-patient power relationship. Granted, Frank admits much of his suffering was the idea of a return to the sick role he previously inhabited (or “going back into it,” p. 361), but this position was still one of, albeit compounded, suffering due to his insertion into a biomedical category as something that needed to be accomplished/done. In effect, then, part of his suffering is the embodiment of the disciplinary biomedical discourse. My intention is not to discredit Frank’s suffering; indeed, we have all suffered in our own way, some without a specific “biomedical” illness. What I am trying to do, instead, is problematize this notion of scale. Silenced and subjugated knowledges (of the form promoted by subaltern studies and Foucault) must be heard; this is self-evident to most of us. But to understand this knowledge as ‘local’ or ‘observational’ in relation to ‘extralocal’ or ‘institutional’ does little to help us understand how they mutually constitute each other and how the latter may be embodied in the former.
How might some of the perspectives offered by Denzin help us redefine this dichotomy? How may Frank’s call to “keep…the specificity of that encounter [with suffering] at the center of the project, refusing to assimilate that encounter to extralocal organization” be understood as a form of resistance or conversely, a form of agency? Is this just a counter-discourse, or a more fundamental level of resistance in the sense elaborated – or not very well elaborated – by Velverde?
Max, I'm sorry, I posted before I read yours, which I'm now regretting! I think Frank is not explicitly calling for a reworking of biomedical discourse to be more "holistic." In many ways, biomedicine is antithetical to holistic medicine. He is calling, I think, for a change in the way suffering is written and understood, which will perhaps have an impact on how we understand biomedicine (this position is implied, I think). With my point about the embodiment of biomedicine I am in a way problematizing the ability of writing about suffering to 'emancipate' these knowledges if we don't understand the mutual constitution of biomedicine and suffering.
ReplyDeleteOriginally I had planned on blogging about something else, but Andrea, your highlighting of the limits of “authorial authority” has got me thinking; I too was intrigued by the discussion of the limits of “authorial authority” in this week’s readings. Johnson et al (2006) argue that good cultural studies should find other ways to incorporate and critique textual organization of culture and its centrality in social relations and practices. They argue textual analysis can certainly be a potent tool for social critique and analysis. However, they warn of the pitfalls of such a method as it “has helped to inculcate a print culture that is hegemonic throughout most Western societies, a culture in which the printed text has been linked to national identity and the power of the state - dominant power - and as assumed a degree of reified authority” (p. 153). Johnson et al go on to argue that knowing how to read is a skills that embodies particular kinds of power and privileges certain forms of official knowledge. Max, you identified similar themes in Smith’s (1990) work and argue that it is a critical textual analysis is a skill that can be taught but requires a particular position in society (i.e. Grad student) that is not available to everyone. I agree that much of the education system, even at University, is focused on memorization, but I really don’t know what to make of Johnson et al arguments of the hegemony of printed text, and Smith’s point that the operation of the text “is dependent upon the reader’s interpretive practices (p.121). While I agree that critical analysis is something that requires development, I’m not sure that Universities and privileged social status are the only bastions to do so. To me this seems too feed into the privilege of the written work and is paternalistic and patronizing. I think that marginalized, oppressed, and subaltern groups can critical engage in this field (as well as others) as their expertise is derived through other (e.g. ground level) experience. If this were not the case, it paints a pretty bleak picture for the usefulness of our work.
ReplyDeleteI was also intrigued by Valverde’s discussion of binary oppositions. Valverde (1991) argues that binary oppositions are a key component of social discourse (black/white, man/woman, objective/subjective for example) and as such, the constant undermining of these dichotomies is a useful technique for social theory. As we have spent a great deal of time in this course deconstructing the idea of universalized and essentialized truths/identities, it is interesting that these problematic binary oppositions may in fact be useful in that they simultaneously open to spaces of political mobilization and dialogue, but also discrimination. I think this gets at some of concerns on this blog with Franks and Smiths works respectively when considering the binary between patient and doctor and the privileging of certain view over others.
Denzin talks about authentic understanding and how readers are “...able to live their way into an experience that has been described and interpreted” (506). Jess as us if we believe that this type of understanding exists. In my opinion, much of our understandings about life are shaped by stories that we read. Has anyone ever felt like a scene from an old television show is a distant memory of their own? Both texts and visual representations attach emotion and meaning to experiences and circumstances. These emotions and meanings are carried on into our lives.
ReplyDeleteFrank talks about suffering. He believes that suffering is what makes illness worth studying (353). I think that most of us are drawn to health-related research because of our personal attachments to the subject (being human and having to deal with health on a constant basis). While I have never been stigmatized for being obese and have never suffered from a chronic illness, I have experienced suffering in my own personal way and through representations in stories, articles and in the media. I used to think that in order to have an “authentic understanding” of an experience, we must have some pre-existing connection to the experience first-hand. But now as I reflect, I don’t think it is necessary to have a direct attachment to the experience being studied, but rather a desire to understand the experience and an accumulation of tools necessary to identify with it. I suppose it would help to have a similar experience to contribute to an understanding of a phenomenon, but if we all lived by that rule I think we’d find ourselves close-minded and oblivious to what occurs in our world. It’s impossible to experience it all, but possible to understand it.
On another note, I’d like to talk a bit about textual analysis because it is the research methodology I plan on using for my thesis. Denzin uses the example of Rosaldo and his account of a family breakfast to explain how analysis reinterprets situations and makes them seem different than they initially appear. He tells us that Rosaldo’s “...potential in-laws laughed and laughed as they listened to the microethnography... about their family breakfast” (506) This story reminded me of how my roommate laughed at me when I let her read an analysis I had written of an interview I conducted with her for my qualitative methods course. She was shocked at how I attached meaning to the words she spoke, and was able to make sense of her experiences and create a comprehensible understanding of what she had gone through. Although I had shared the same experience that she had, my own knowledge and personal experiences helped with my interpretation of the data. I expect that almost anyone can reach an “authentic understanding” from my analysis because the characteristics of the experience I describe, in my opinion, is applicable to many other types of experience. For my thesis, I will be analysing text specifically about the experience of overweight adolescent males. I expect that any person, of any gender or age can relate to the experiences I intend on describing without having specifically been an overweight adolescent male :)
In some ways, I felt a pressure this week that should have been invigorating, but that was instead debilitating. I felt that, as a student of literature, I should have plenty to say about textual analysis. I mean, it’s all I did for a good many years. Sure, I can trace the various authors’ arguments back to the oft-mentioned Stanley Fish and the literary criticism traditions to which he was responding; and when I read Bakhtin’s formulation of language (“the word in language is half someone else’s,” qtd. in Johnson, p. 179) my heart jumps not only because of the eloquence, but also because of the familiarity; yet, in a perhaps truly poststructuralist way, I did not come away from this week’s readings with a nugget of knowledge, something solid and reassuring that I can stick on my mantel and feel good about. Not surprising. What is surprising is that I think I had expected (in some not quite fully formed or conscious way) to do just that. Shame. In the end, of course, I have more questions, prompted by all of your excellent comments. The following is a compilation of some of the main points that I think could form the bases of good seminar discussion.
ReplyDeleteWhat/how should researchers write?
Researchers should not try to explain people’s behaviours because it is both harmful to the individual and to the meanings placed on the phenomenon being studied. Instead, researchers should seek to explain the social structures and power systems that affect how we embody, experience, and understand suffering.
She was shocked at how I attached meaning to the words she spoke, and was able to make sense of her experiences and create a comprehensible understanding of what she had gone through.
Can autoethnography even effectively interpret the meaning of one’s experiences?
I think we are trained to soak up information, from high-school biology textbooks, from newspapers sports sections, as examples, which is a type of reading that can potentially lead to much frustration in grappling with poststructural, postmodern, etc. material.
Denzin: “There are many ways to move from the field to the text, many ways to inscribe and describe experience” (p. 511)
Johnson: “mainstream narrative texts work by foregrounding and resolving a relationship between order and disorder that is itself culturally produced” (p. 159).
Interpretive communities:
Not everyone has the (same) skill-set or motivation to critically engage with scholarly articles and we can only read texts as we know how to read them, something which Smith alludes to at the beginning of her article (1990, p.121).
While I agree that critical analysis is something that requires development, I’m not sure that Universities and privileged social status are the only bastions to do so.
It is the reader, as an active interpreter of the texts, who must rely on his or her own social relations to critically construct meaning from the texts provided.
According to Denzin, new schools of social sciences rely solely on community recognition and peer validation to determine the credibility of a research paper. Are these standards too soft? What can be lost or overlooked when you base the quality of a paper on the opinions of a likeminded and theoretically homogenous academic community?
Binaries:
[I]t is interesting that these problematic binary oppositions may in fact be useful in that they simultaneously open to spaces of political mobilization and dialogue, but also discrimination.
But to understand this knowledge as ‘local’ or ‘observational’ in relation to ‘extralocal’ or ‘institutional’ does little to help us understand how they mutually constitute each other and how the latter may be embodied in the former.
Valverde: “Through its recognition of the multiplicity and ambiguity of social discourse, [poststructuralism] can begin to understand how social subjects can start to exercise some agency if only by using one discourse against another” (p. 183)
Agency and resistance:
ReplyDeleteHow may Frank’s call to “keep…the specificity of that encounter [with suffering] at the center of the project, refusing to assimilate that encounter to extralocal organization” be understood as a form of resistance or conversely, a form of agency?
Valverde: the distinction between agency and resistance is made evident through her example of the anti-green shopper who makes a choice to use chemical products. “[T]his act is hardly an instance of resistance” (p. 183).
Our roles as readers:
Can we determine by interpreting a text ourselves, if the researcher has adequately interpreted the experience that they are trying to explain?
I expect that almost anyone can reach an “authentic understanding” from my analysis because the characteristics of the experience I describe, in my opinion, is applicable to many other types of experience.
Carolyn, Max and Jess all provide great insight into the Frank article, yet I still feel a bit confused. Perhaps it is because Frank appears to be trying to address the issue of researching suffering, as two separate issues with some sporadic overlap throughout the article. As such, I am going to start by discussing the topic of research and then address that of suffering. With regards to research, I have been grappling with the premise that the local must fit within the extralocal; having discussed subjugated knowledge last week, I thought a postmodernist approach to research enabled the local (or subjugated knowledge) to be represented. Yet it is clear from this article and Frank’s (2001) inclusion of Smith’s quote: “sociological texts…perpetuate the stylistics of universality and rewrite local observations into extralocal texts” (p. 357), that sociologists play a role in the generalization and, therefore, marginalization of experience. Although I realize that interpretation and some generalization must occur in research, is it not possible to represent data that does not adhere to previous findings or categories? Perhaps the issue is more with the reader, whom Frank describes as thinking within the extralocal context and dismissing the local. Frank’s (2001) final piece of advice for researchers to “oppose the censoring of all the things that do not fit” (p.361) makes me think that perhaps the reason for my confusion is that I have already adopted a postmodernist view to qualitative research and this article is written for those “extralocalites” (my term positivists/postpositivists) who, for example, may “have a preoccupation with prior theory [which] can stand in the way” of representing new phenomenon or the local (Denzin, 1996; p.508).
ReplyDeleteMuch of what Frank (2001) said on suffering really resonated with me. I was thankful for his definition of suffering as being what cannot be said, as well as his attention to the fact that there is an expectation that all can be spoken. However, as a future researcher, I was disappointed with his suggestions for new ways of doing qualitative health research. His use of Smith’s example of going to the participant and explaining to them the social systems “so they can understand the powers in which their lives are embedded” (p.360), really affected me. I do see the value of giving back to research participants but is not rather egocentric to assume that the participant is unaware of the powers that surround them? I can see this approach being effective if it is done appropriately and at a certain time in the illness process, but I think this statement could be rephrased in order to give the participant more agency. I find it rather paradoxical that he suggests using publications to “amplify the voices of the ill themselves”, yet his entire premise is that much of suffering cannot be described and that even if the texts present the local the reader often interprets the information from the place of the extralocal. And what about non-textual techniques such as photovoice? And why is there no mention of reflexivity?
In my last few remaining words (in fact I have no remaining words, hence the second post), I am going to seek clarification on an assumption I have made since the beginning of term (which I will now use as my excuse for my lack of recognition of the value of textual analysis in past discussions). Until this week’s readings, I equated textual analysis with a literature review. However, I now interpret them to be different things. My understanding is that not only can textual analysis pertain to more than just texts in the academic sense (as we saw in both the Johnson et al. and Smith articles), but it incorporates underlying structures, context, history, power and social subjectivity. Whereas a literature review is specific to academic texts and is focusing more on content, yet I assume it is still important to take into consideration the aforementioned elements just as you would in a textual analysis. Is this on the right track?
ReplyDelete