Introduction to critical ethnography

Abstract

How do we reflect upon and evaluate our own purpose, intentions, and frames of analysis as researchers? 2. How do we predict consequences or evaluate our own potential to do harm? 3. How do we create and maintain a dialogue of collaboration in our research projects between ourselves and Others? 4. How is the specificity of the local story relevant to the broader meanings and operations of the human condition? 5. How—in what location or through what intervention—will our work make the greatest contribution to equity, freedom, and justice? Summary • Positionality. Positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our own power, privilege, and biases just as we denounce the power struc- tures that surround our subjects. A concern for positionality is a reflexive ethnography; it is a turning back on ourselves. When we turn back on our- selves, we examine our intentions, our methods, and our possible effects. We are accountable for our research paradigms, our authority, and our moral responsibility relative to representation and interpretation. • Dialogue/Otherness. Dialogue emphasizes the living communion of a felt-sensing, embodied interplay and engagement between human beings. Dialogue keeps the meanings between and the conversations with the researcher and the Other open and ongoing. The conversation with the Other that is brought forth through dialogue reveals itself as a lively, chang- ing being through time and no longer an artifact captured in the ethnogra- pher’s monologue or written transcript—fixed in time and forever stagnant. 01-Madison.qxd 12/14/2004 3:55 PM Page 15 Introduction——15 • Theory/Method. Critical ethnography becomes the “doing” or the “performance” of critical theory. It is critical theory in action. Theory, when used as a mode of interpretation, is a method, yet it can be distin- guished from method (and indeed take a back seat to method) when a set of concrete actions grounded by a specific scene is required to complete a task. We rely on theory—whether it is Marxist theory, critical race theory, or phenomenology—to interpret or illuminate a social action. However, in composing a lay summary, designing interview questions, or coding data, theory may inspire and guide, but it is a methodological process that directs and completes the task. 1. How do we reflect upon and evaluate our own purpose, intentions, and frames of analysis as researchers? 2. How do we predict consequences or evaluate our own potential to do harm? 3. How do we create and maintain a dialogue of collaboration in our research projects between ourselves and Others? 4. How is the specificity of the local story relevant to the broader meanings and operations of the human condition? 5. How—in what location or through what intervention—will our work make the greatest contribution to equity, freedom, and justice? Critical ethnography begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain. By “ethical responsibility,” I mean a compelling sense of duty and commitment based on moral principles of human freedom and well –being, and hence a compassion for the suffering of living beings. The critical ethnogra- pher also takes us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control. Therefore, the critical ethnographer resists domestication and moves from “what is” to “what could be” In fact, it is this concern for the Other that demands we attend seriously to our position as researchers.