No abstract

In the social sciences, we usually think of criteria as culture-free standards that stand apart from human subjectivity and value. The author argues in this article, however, that conflicts over which criteria to apply usually boil down to differences in values that are contingent on humanchoices.Thedemandforcriteriareflectsthedesiretocontainfreedom, limit possibilities, and resist change. Ultimately, all standards of evaluation rest on a research community’s agreement to comply with their own humanly developed conventions. The author ends by considering the personal standards that he applies to works that fall under the new rubric of poetic social science.

Reacting to the charge that personal narratives, especially illness narratives, constitute a “blind alley” that misconstrues the essential nature of narrative by substituting a therapeutic for a sociological view of the person, this article speaks back to critics who regard narratives of suffering as privileged, romantic, and/or hyperauthentic. The author argues that this critique of personal narrative rests on an idealized and discredited theory of inquiry, a monolithic conception of ethnographic inquiry, a distinctly masculine characterization of sociology, and a veiled resistance to the moral, political, existential, and therapeutic goals of this work. Layering his responses to the critique with brief personal stories regarding the suppressed emotionality that motivates academics to oppose innovations, the author examines his own motives as well as those of the critics, concluding that multiplicity is easier to pronounce than to live and urging a commitment to a social science that can accommodate diverse desires.

When I learned that my father had died while I was attending a national communication conference, two worlds within me—the academic and the personal—collided, and I was forced to confront the large gulf that divided them. In this article, I weave the story of that experience into the wider fabric of disconnections that promotes isolation and inhibits risk taking and change within universities and academic disciplines. In the process, I question whether the structures of power constitutive of academic socialization are not as difficult to resist as those of one's family, and the consequences as constraining. I use personal narrative to show how storytelling works to build a continuous life of experience, linking the past to the future from the standpoint of the present; to proble matize the process of assigning meanings to memories via language; to draw attention to the significance of institutional depression m universities; and to blur the line between theory and story.

This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled “Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research,” which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their personal history with qualitative methods, epiphanies that attracted them to qualitative work or changed their perspectives within the qualitative tradition, ethical crises, exemplary qualitative studies, the current state of qualitative methods, and challenges and goals for the next decade. Panelists included Arthur Bochner (communication), Norman Denzin (sociology/communication/critical studies), Yvonna Lincoln (education), Janice Morse (nursing/anthropology), Ronald Pelias (performance studies/ communication), and Laurel Richardson (sociology/gender studies). Carolyn Ellis (communication/sociology) served as organizer and moderator.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract