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.
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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).
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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
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