Joyful Digressions: Going Gonzo

Abstract

Within this article, we attempt to counter the seriousness that sometimes tends to weigh down academic pursuits. Although we acknowledge the necessary anchors that tether us to various obligations in our work, we enact a form of play that emerged over the course of our dissertations and extended into our budding careers. We call this form “going Gonzo.” By recounting the emergence of trickster figure within our work—who we simply call “Phillip”—we demonstrate how this form of play enabled us to strategically pull back and stretch forward in moments and spaces of intense tension. Ultimately, we describe this trickster in relation to a ludic logic of embracing the profane, foolish, and tenuously important as a way to garner levity and buoyancy amid the necessary anchors of seriousness of research.

Prolonged Grief Disorder: An Implementation Gone Awry and a Researcher Going Gonzo

“…I mulled endlessly over my research and my inability to focus and rethink my project—even considering what I was doing in this job and if I should find something else to do with my life. In what follows, I will try to tell the story of how this changed through what I later came to call a form of gonzo 3 sociology or research (Kumm & Pate, 2018; Sefcovic, 1995; Wozniak, 2014). Thus, this article is not just a methodological discussion and neither a report of my findings, instead, adhering to gonzo research, it is the story of how my research and choice of methods came about, told as a narrative.…”

Grief as Disorder: On the transformation of grief from existential emotion to pathological entity

“…(Thompson, 1979a, p. 95) This is what the concept of gonzo research made possible. I'm not the first person to try out this approach -several papers have been published on it (see Fedorowicz, 2013;Harmon & Dunlap, 2020;Kumm & Pate, 2018;Sefcovic, 1995;Wozniak, 2014) and appears in handbooks on qualitative research (Tedlock, 2011). What it makes possible and what the quote from Thompson shows, is that it lets one participate in one's field of research, simultaneously researching and changing it.…”

“…I mulled endlessly over my research and my inability to focus and rethink my project -even considering what I was doing in this job and if I should find something else to do with my life. In what follows, I will try to tell the story of how this changed through what I later came to call a form of gonzo 38 sociology or research (Kumm & Pate, 2018;Sefcovic, 1995;Wozniak, 2014). Thus, this article is not just a methodological discussion and neither a report of my findings, instead, adhering to gonzo research, it is the story of how my research and choice of methods came about, told as a narrative.…”