No abstract

The author seeks to develop an ethnography that includes researchers’ vulnerable selves, emotions, bodies, and spirits; produces evocative stories that create the effect of reality; celebrates concrete experience and intimate detail; examines how human experience is endowed with meaning; is concerned with moral, ethical, and political consequences; encourages compassion and empathy; helps us know how to live and cope; features multiple voices and repositions readers and “subjects” as coparticipants in dialogue; seeks a fusion between social science and literature in which, as Gregory Bateson says, “you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events”; and connects the practices of social science with the living of life. In short, her goal is to extend ethnography to include the heart, the autobiographical, and the artistic text. This article provides a conversation with a student researching breast cancer that introduces issues in heartful autoethnography.

This article focuses on relational ethics in research with intimate others. Relational ethics requires researchers to act from our hearts and minds, acknowledge our interpersonal bonds to others, and take responsibility for actions and their consequences. Calling on her own research studies, the author examines relational ethics in ethnographies in which researchers are friends with or become friends with participants over the course of their projects. Then she examines autoethnographic narratives in which researchers include intimate others in stories focusing on their own experience. Considering ethical responsibilities to identifiable others, she discusses writing about those who are alive and those who have died. She then reflects on the ways co-constructed autoethnographies circumvent some of the ethical issues in traditional qualitative studies on unfamiliar others, yet avoid some of the ethical concerns in writing about intimate others. The last section presents advice for those who long to write about intimate others.

Although social constructionists now study emotions, they neglect what emotion feels like and how it is experienced. This paper argues that social constructionists can and should study how private and social experience are fused in felt emotions. Resurrecting introspection (conscious awareness of awareness or self‐examination) as a systematic sociological technique will allow social constructionists to examine emotion as a product of the individual processing of meaning as well as socially shared cognitions. Examining introspection as a sociological process, this paper argues that introspection can generate interpretive materials from self and others useful for understanding the lived experience of emotions. Findings from four studies–one, self‐introspective, and the other three, interactive introspective examinations with co‐investigators–provide information about the subjective part of emotion. They demonstrate the advantages of introspection in dealing with the complex, ambiguous, and processual nature of emotional experience.

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

When returning to the site of prior research, ethnographers may find themselves embroiled in emotional and ethical quandaries with the people about whom they have written. This article details the conversations and emotional conflicts that erupted suddenly when I returned to a community about which I had published a previous ethnographic account. Writing the story gave me an opportunity to examine orthodox ethnographic research practices, such as omitting the autobiographical self and emotional responses from ethnographic texts. The return visit helped clarify connections between my personal life and the way I conducted fieldwork in this community, and it led me to recommend that ethnographic practices include an examination of how our experiences connect us with those we study rather than emphasize only how they set us apart.

This article is a personal narrative of a family drama enacted in the aftermath of my brother's death in an airplane crash. “True” stories such as this fit in the space between fiction and social science, joining ethnographic and literary writing, and autobiographical and sociological understanding. My goal is to reposition readers vis a vis authors of texts of social science by acknowledging potential for optional readings and encouraging readers to “experience an experience” that can reveal not only how it was for me, but how it could be or once was for them. This experimental form permits researchers and readers to acknowledge and give voice to their own emotional experiences and encourages ethnographic subjects (co‐authors) to reclaim and write their own lives.