Stuff I Marked
p.xii- passage about “pasisonate attachments” (like Joan’s “passionate utterances”) and wondering where “research end(s) and memoir begin(s)”
p.17 - extended quote about narrative and epistemology in the sciences. talks about ideographic vs. nomothetic. How historical sciences (paleontology, astronomy, evolutionary biology) are about telling stories about the past (based on data)
p.17 “While the value of personal stories is now widely accepted in composition, it is important to articulate what qualities of observation, analysis, or representation we require if we are to accept any particular narrative account as a persuasive instance of research”
p.20 “I also believe that it is important to recognize that we have invested a great deal of intellectual capital in rhetorical conventions that primarily use ethos (rather than method) to provide evidence that the researcher has produced an authentic account of her experiences or observations. That is, a great part of our ‘index of reality’ rests on textual conventions to suggest that the researcher has ‘been there.’”
p.26- role of emotion in research design
p.30- “passionate attachments” (Royster) and beginning with your own experience/feelings and using that as a guide in historical research
p.38- thing about the value of “eliciting autobiographical narratives in interview-type settings” and how telling a self-story is also a form of self-formation and co-research
p.39- on how the researchers adapted their methods to be more unstructured/semi-structured.
p.41- Framing of questions— “Can you tell us some stories about….?”
p.80- Extended passage on “Doing ethnography” vs. “Adopting an ethnographic perspective” vs. “Using ethnographic tools” and how each of these can/cannot be applied in writing studies
p.115-116- Autoethnography as a “literate art of the contact zone.” Quote from Mary Louise Pratt- autoethnography as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.
p.199- draws a distinction between “textual-qualitiative researchers” (people who study published texts) and “empirical-qualitative researchers” (people who study day-to-day interactions between people, some of which may be written)
p.201- on “bias” and phenomenology and how our investments in research ALWAYS shape our perceptions
p.210- “Rhetorical studies does concern itself with how writing works in public domains, but its history and strong historiographic traditions make situated studies of mundane literacies, technologies, and work difficult to value.”
p.211- concept of a research stance- “a position or a set of beliefs and obligations that shape how one acts as a researcher” (I think this relates to how you decide you want to situate yourself politically to the topic/people)
Sources To Look Up
Wendy Bishop, Ethnographic Writing Research: Writing It Up and Reading It
Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
Lankshear and Knobel, Handbook for Teacher Research: From Design to Implementation
Johanek, Composing Research
Glaser and Strauss, Discovery of Grounded Theory