Abstract
This critical autoethnography takes place during the opening lecture of an interdisciplinary graduate-level qualitative research methodology seminar. As the professor compares and contrasts the orientation, goals, and design of positivist, interpretive, critical, and post-structural methodologies, the narrative shifts between the class dialogue and a new MA student’s stream of consciousness as she struggles to identify the methodological lens that will provide answers to her research questions. She weighs the risks, possibilities, and limitations of personal standpoint, reflexivity, the institutional review board, and researcher/participant relationships related to open-ended narrative interviews focused on the embodied and social experience of bulimia or physical disabilities. The story ends with a call for staged performance interpretations of qualitative data to resist cultural stigma and marginalization.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Scott (2013) explains my journey to performance.
- 2.
This chapter retells the story of the opening lecture of a qualitative research methodology seminar I took at the University of Maine. I referred to my notes but it is possible that I forgot some details of the lecture and/or combined concepts from other classes during my degree.
- 3.
The names of the professor and my classmates in this section have been changed to keep the classroom a safe place where students can struggle through concepts confidentially with one another and the professor.
- 4.
Michel Foucault (1975) applied “discourse” to the penal system, which he positions as a mechanism for controlling the population through making spectacles of deemed criminals to compel others to follow the orders of dominant society. From Foucault’s perspective, power surfaces and moves through institutions such as prisons and schools, which fosters a sense of ongoing surveillance that creates docile bodies or good citizens who reiterate the social discourses that organize identity, reality, and meaning by perpetuating dominant rules and expectations even when no one is watching. In this discussion, discourses create systems of processing and understanding the world that are pervasive and seemingly “natural” orders of the world, but remain open to resistance and dismantlement.
- 5.
The phenomenological frame I reference to explain the visceral nature of storytelling as performance Chapter 1 is often categorized under the theoretical umbrella of interpretivism. The collaborative and susceptible nature of storytelling maintains these roots in the critical and post-structural frames.
- 6.
See Ellis (2009) for her journey from ethnography in sociology to being an autoethnographer in communication.
- 7.
See Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner’s (2006) response to critiques of “evocative ethnography.”
- 8.
Johnson’s 2001 edition was a required text on Katherine’s course. The latest edition, 2006, incorporates able-bodiedness into the systems of privilege. Disability was not in the first edition. At the time of this lecture I did not have the disability theory vocabulary to discuss the stigma of physical disability and mental illness as marginalized identities. For more information on stigma and passing in relation to mental ilness, bulimia and physical disability see Brune & Wilson 2013; See Scheyett, 2005; Scott, 2008a; Scott, 2012 for discussions of illness/disability and passing. Chapter 3 maps my applications of theory cultural responses to disability.
- 9.
See Scott (2015) for my story of casting in college through a disabled body.
- 10.
The medicalized connotation of “vulnerable” influenced my choice to use “susceptible” in Chapter 1. Susceptibility references an openness to change that is not necessarily a weakness.
- 11.
I later published an article in an open access journal that explored the surfacing of binging and purging across culture. See Scott (2008b).
- 12.
The Tuskegee experiment involving Black prisoners lasted from 1932–1972 and involved 600 Black men (Tuskegee.edu, 2016).
References
Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic Autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 373–395.
Brune, J. A., & Wilson, D. J. (2013). Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
DesCartes, R., & Heffernan, G. (1990). Meditaticiones De Prima Philosophia – Meditations on First Philosophy. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.
Ellis, C. (2009). Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. (2006). Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 1–21.
Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books: A Division of Random House.
Hooks, B. (1981). Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Brooklyn, NY: Routledge.
Johnson, A. (2006). Privilege, Power, and Difference. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Mumby, D. K. (1997). Modernism, Postmodernism, and Communication Studies: A Rereading of an Ongoing Debate. Communication Theory, 7(1), 1–28.
Scheyett, A. (2005). The Mark of Madness. Social Work in Mental Health, 3(4), 79–97.
Scott, J. A. (2008a). Performing Unfeminine Femininity: A Performance Analysis of Bulimic Women’s Personal Narratives. Text and Performance Quarterly, 28(1–2), 116–138.
Scott, J. A. (2008b). Stories of Bulimia: Describing Normal Abnormality. Communication Currents, 3(1).
Scott, J. A. (2012). Performing Post-Accident Professional Identity in Personal Narrative: Grappling with Embodied Vulnerability. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 8(3), 1–20. [Online].
Scott, J. A. (2013). Because I Needed a Better Way to See and Be in this World. Text and Performance Quarterly, 33(4), 425–430.
Scott, J. A. (2015). Narrative Performance Research: Co-storying Almost-Passing. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 4(3), 70–91.
Seidman, I. (2006). Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Teaching College Columbia University.
Spitzack, C. (1993). The Spectacle of Anorexia Nervosa. Text and Performance Quarterly, 13(1), 1–20.
Tillman-Healey, L. (1996). A Secret Life in a Culture of Thinness. In C. Ellis & A. Bochner (Eds.), Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing (pp. 76–108). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Tuskegee. (2016). Annual Commemoration of the Presidential Apology for the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study and the Annual Public Health Ethics Intensive Course. Retrieved from www.tuskegeee.edu/about_us/centers_of_excellence/bioethics_center/about_the_usphs_syphilis_study.aspx
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Scott, JA. (2018). Chapter 2: Connecting to the Bodies We Research. In: Embodied Performance as Applied Research, Art and Pedagogy. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63661-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63661-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63660-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63661-0
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)