Capturing Changes Across the Years: Two Decades of Ethnographic Writing

• In Event: Stabilizing Change in Ethnography Inquiry

Abstract

What happens when a professor gets older, but the students he’s studying don’t? What happens when a researcher starts observing her son when he’s a baby and is still watching him when he turns 18? This paper juxtaposes our experiences of changes occurring in our ethnographic inquiry over time. Rawlins started writing about cross-sex friendship in 1982 and recently published reflections on fifteen years of witnessing his undergraduate students’ discussions about friendships with the opposite sex (Rawlins, 2009). Jenks’ started exploring the topic of communication and visual impairment when her oldest son was born legally blind in 1990, a study that continues today as he gets ready to graduate from high school (Jenks, 2005).

While ethnographers of communication have moved well beyond assuming the neutrality of the researcher, there is still the tacit assumption that ethnographers maintain relatively stable perceptions of their scholarship. Individuals come to be seen as “experts” in their fields, which encourages us to concretize our ideas rather than admit the world we live in, including the topic we study, is constantly changing.

In this paper, we explore changes that have occurred in ourselves as researchers, professors, family members, and human beings. We explore changes that have occurred in the participants we study. We explore changes that have occurred in our perceptions of the topics we examine. And most importantly to this panel, we explore changes that have occurred in our ethnographic writing over time. Using two decades of our work as the examples, we examine the unstated, but ever-present, changes in the stories we publish.

Jenks, E.B. (2005). Explaining disability: Parents’ stories of raising children with visual
impairments in a sighted world.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 34(2), 143-169.
Rawlins, W.K. (2009). The Compass of Friendship: Narratives, Identities, and Dialogues.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Authors

• William Rawlins, Ohio University

• Elaine Jenks, West Chester Univ