the researcher

Simon at South America Bidsta has an interesting post on the relationship between the positioned individual and the ethnographic research they produce, noting drily that in “any other science, you might just call this ‘being transparent about one’s methods’”.

The post contains the challenge to reproduce the researcher’s exercise: to “write down ten things about ourselves–personal, political, demographic, academic or philosophical, that give an idea of who we are and where we come from, and that could influence how we carry out our research”. This challenge catches my attention for a number of reasons at present.  The main one of these is that I am involved in a group research project at work to which I am not contributing in the way I anticipated I would be able to contribute.  Tasks which I complete with ease in literary and cultural studies I find myself almost paralysed by in educational research.  Furthermore, a misconceived sense of responsibility towards my research partners also seems to retard the pace of my work.  (This is not to say that a sense of responsibility is in itself a bad idea, but rather that there’s something about the way in which I’m experiencing it that’s askew.)

So I’m up for completing Simon’s exercise with the slant that it’s a good time to reflect a little on how my own positioning as a researcher is affecting my contribution to this research project: I’m completing tasks quite different from those I thought I would when the project began.

[click to continue…]

{ 3 comments }