Title

"What Goes On Here?": The Uses Of Ethnography In Composition Studies

Abstract

"What is the postmodernist critique of ethnography?" was a question posed to me by a member of the search committee on a campus visit for a compositionist job I thought I desperately wanted. As a newly minted doctorate who had written a dissertation that was an ethnographic study of undergraduate reading and writing practices (that would become Academic Literacies), I knew I should be able to answer this question since one of the strengths of my interdisciplinary graduate program was my coursework in ethnography, a research approach to the study of cultures, including the subculture of schooling. In answering this question, I was hyperaware of how skeptical an English department might be about hiring a faculty member who could be viewed as a social scientist in English studies clothing. So, discarding my newly acquired knowledge of the ongoing critiques of ethnography by anthropologists and feminists, I stumbled through a response about how ethnographic approaches provided composition researchers with a methodology for examining reading, writing, and language practices within specific contexts such as their own classrooms, a pedagogy for teaching students to observe, reflect, and write about cultures and subcultures, and theoretical grounding for engaging in activist fieldwork, all ideas that skirted the question asked of me.

Publication Date

1-1-2012

Publication Title

Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, and Perspectives

Volume

9780874218831

Number of Pages

199-210

Document Type

Article; Book Chapter

Personal Identifier

scopus

Socpus ID

84917507257 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84917507257

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