Moving from Art or Science to Art and Science: Crystallization in Ethnographic Inquiry

• In Event: Stabilizing Change in Ethnography Inquiry

Abstract

Social scientific conventions have lost their hegemonic power over the field of qualitative research, but they remain valuable and widely used tools of inquiry. Creative forms of representation have gained legitimacy widely, albeit not universally. For the last twenty years, ethnographers have chosen their paths towards ethnographic representation at either end of the continuum, producing groundbreaking, theoretically informed, socially relevant social science, or alternatively, fashioning fabulous artistic, dynamic, emotionally powerful work. Both contribute to the fields of communication and qualitative inquiry. Yet rarely have scholars combined social scientific data analysis and truly artistic (beyond a mere colorful anecdote) representations within a single text. An emergent trend now manifests through scholars who choose to traverse the methodological and epistemological continua of qualitative research to analyze and represent our findings in widely divergent genres (Ellingson, 2009). Narrative, poetry, photography, and performance now partner with grounded theory, theoretical critique, and discourse analysis, and community oriented genres—such as organizational reports, newspaper editorials, and stage plays—bring our research to communities and policymakers. This paper documents the shifting epistemological currents in ethnography and urges audiences to widen their horizons to include the process of crystallization, that is, of producing multiple truths through multiple genres, thus enriching and destabilizing our findings.

Ellingson, L. L. (2009). Engaging crystallization in qualitative research: An Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Author

• Laura Ellingson, Santa Clara University