[Air-l] Re: ethnography

[Mary Bryson]

On 2/17/04 11:46 AM, "Danny Butt" <db at dannybutt.net> wrote:

> But the bottom line for me is that if the
> goal is to improve the world, and not just ourselves, we need to find a way
> of negotiating between the needs and desires of those under study and our
> own desires for knowledge - and the power imbalances between these. In some
> cases there's alignment between those two desires, which makes things easier
> - both 'me' and the 'others/subjects' are working toward explicitly the same
> thing.

Dunno about the goal of "improving the world". I very much appreciate the
ongoing discussion about ethnography and media studies. I have found Kamala
Visweswaran's Fictions of Feminist Ethnography extremely useful for thinking
through any enlightenment notions of "reading culture" as we write it/up/
I prefer to think of the field work I have been involved with as a species
of culture-jamming. Moving resources into certain places to set up
microcultures that live for just a brief time and show that certain things
are possible, either as speech acts or performances - whether that is girls
and women doing high-wired acts of computational bravado or queer women
jacking into the Net and talking about the potentials of net spaces for
enacting deviant identities and relations, or whatever else is
counter-hegemonic and makes people in suits very nervous and/or really
angry. 
Power imbalances - yes, of course. Always-already. Foucault is always
helpful here, I find, since in the end it seems more helpful to excavate the
fault lines through which power circulates and is productive of particular
relations and voices, and of course, as he so keenly appreciated, desire.

mary
----------------------------
Mary Bryson, Associate Professor and Coordinator, Human Learning,
Development and Instruction Graduate program,
Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia
Research Site: http://www.shecan.com
Online C.V.:  http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/cv.html