Re: december reading

From: Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad@ped.gu.se)
Date: Sat Dec 11 1999 - 01:12:41 PST


At 12.15 -0500 99-12-10, Stanton Wortham wrote:
>First, let's be clear that I did not do this interview myself.

Yes. That was perfectly clear. It was also perfectly clear that the
interview took place in the mid-80s, and that the transcripts were
"generously made available to me" by another researcher.

My choice of words in asking for compassion was probably not the most
effective, if you read it as meaning you should have formed a compassionate
relationship with the IRL Margaret, which is evidently out of question
under the circumstances. What I tried to mean was that it should be
acknowledged somewhere in the text that, in the first place, the interview
subject is not a liar who just makes up her story of institutionalisation:
I assume there is some truth in it, that she DID go to a Catholic boarding
school between age five and age ten. Etc. And in the second place that a
child of that age will hardly have much of a say against the adults in a
case like this. Again, she is telling the truth, and this could be
acknowledged.

Your emphasis on the interactional positioning puts the referential aspect
of the narrative in question more than is necessary.

>But the
>point does nonetheless raise an interesting question about the position
>of the researcher

It does. Again compassion may not have been the best word for the job, but
I was struck by the parallel between the interactional positioning of the
reading, analyzing, arguing authorial "I" of the text -- which is a very
distanced persona -- and the interactional positioning of the interviewer
which is explicitly described as distanced, even when "the interviewer
could have appropriately responded in the storytelling event with
sympathy". This similarity, too, I would like to see acknowledged in the
name of fairness.

>and as someone interested in exploring positioning
>I can't very well sidestep this.

I agree.

>But I'm not willing to give up the
>analytic rigor that the paper begins to provide for this sort of
>analysis.

I understand that.

>Too much narrative analysis is sympathetic and unconvincing.

I am listening.

>So the question is whether we can do systematic and empirically
>plausible research that also shows compassion for and perhaps even forms
>relationships with subjects (though in this case of course I couldn't
>form a relationship because I do not even know this woman's real name).

OK, as I said, this forming of a relationship with the IRL Margaret was not
what I asked for.

>I guess I would like to know more about whether people are asking me to
>change the tone a bit by inserting sympathetic sentences here and there,
>or whether they think that a fundamentally different sort of approach to
>the problem is necessary.

Well, that choice is for you to make.

regards
Eva



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