Experiential ethnographies of text-reader dialogue
Experiential ethnographies of text-reader dialogue
By Dorothy E. Smith
A major innovation has enabled institutional ethnography to expand ethnography into the complexes of organizations and institutions that overpower our lives. We have discovered how to recognize texts (of all kinds) as coordinating people’s doings ‘at a distance.’ This means exploring texts as they enter into the ordering of sequences of action among individuals who may or may not be directly connecting with one another. We have wanted to preserve this understanding of texts as participating in active ongoing sequences of action and to avoid treating them analytically as separable from the local settings in which they come into play.
Recognizing how texts enter into sand coordinate sequences of people’s actions, means viewing them as ‘happening’ or ‘occurring’ at particular times and with particular people activating them. In my own work in this area I’ve introduced the notion of a text-reader conversation based on an interpretation of how language operates in coordinating subjectivities based on the thinking of George Herbert Mead, V. I. Vygotskiy and A. I. Luria in particular. Face-to-face conversations have been subject to intensive sociological investigation. Not so text-reader conversations.
Clearly there are difficulties in investigating this. Reading is silent. Some institutional ethnographers have used small groups to discuss a text and thus to produce data that can be recorded, analyzed and so on. The approach I’ve been using is an alternative; it involves the deployment of experiential ethnography, that is, ethnographic accounts and analysis based on the ethnographer’s own experience of being active in a sequence of a text-reader conversing.
In this presentation, I draw on two or three (depending on space) experiential ethnographies of text-reader conversations in which I have been active. In exploring these and in this presentation, I focus on a distinctive dialogic practice in which the concepts of a discourse ‘take control’ of the reader (myself) and organize how reading proceeds.
I attend also to how responses to the text may dislodge the power of the regulatory concepts and, in a sense, are the moment of becoming conscious of the text-reader dialogue and hence of making the conversation available to the experiential ethnography.
CV
Dorothy Smith is currently retired from the University of Toronto and now does some graduate teaching in sociology at the University of Victoria.. She has been preoccupied for the past thirty or so years with developing institutional ethnography as a sociology for people that started out as a sociology for women.
She has published numerous papers and several books starting in 1975 with a volume edited with Sarah David called Women and Psychiatry: I’m not mad, I’m angry, followed by what is probably her best known work, The Everyday World as Problematic: a feminist sociology (1987). The latter was followed by a series of books developing Institutional Ethnography as a new and alternative sociology based on feminist principles.
Most recently, Smith has published the following books: Institutional ethnography: a sociology for people (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), an edited collection of studies by institutional ethnographers, Institutional Ethnography in Practice (Rowman and Littlefield 2006), with Alison Griffith, Mothering for Schooling (Routledge 2005), and with David Livingstone and Warren Smith, Manufacturing Meltdown: reshaping steelwork (Fernwood 2010).
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