Examining Writing
Published on Nov 29, 2015
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PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Field Site and Duration of Fieldwork
"From November 1994 through December 2006, we became part of the daily lives of several dozen homeless heroin injectors who sought shelter in the dead-end alleyways, storage lots, vacant factories, broken-down cars, and overgrown highway embankments surrounding Edgewater Boulevard (not its real name), the main thoroughfare serving San Francisco’s sprawling, semi-derelict warehouse and shipyard district" (4).
Photo by why 137
"At the same time, we had to participate in the moral economy to avoid being ostracized from
the network for being stingy and antisocial....Gifts of money, blankets, and food were the
primary means—aside from sharing drugs—they used to define and express friendships,
organize interpersonal hierarchies, and exclude undesirable outsiders. Participating in the moral economy allowed us to understand its importance on an embodied and intuitive level and revealed its social structural and public health implications" (6).
Explanation of Data Collecting Process
Photo by kennymatic
Collaborative Ethnography: "In our case, we often purposefully conducted fieldwork together and wrote fieldnotes side by side in order to compare what we had seen, heard, and felt. Working together was also
more fun and safer. We each developed a range of different kinds of relationships with the Edgewater homeless, allowing broader access to more people and generating distinct perspectives on the same individuals and events. Over the years, seven additional ethnographers (named in the acknowledgments) also assisted us for more limited periods, further diversifying our access to individuals and interpretations of events" (11).
Photo by Jordi Payà Canals
Photo ethnography: "The photographs were all taken by Jeff. The composition of the images recognizes the
politics within aesthetics; they are closely linked to contextual and theoretical analysis. Some photographs provide detailed documentation of material life and the environment. Others were selected primarily to convey mood or to evoke the pains and pleasures of life on the
street. Most refer to specific moments described in the surrounding pages, but at times they stand in tension with the text to reveal the messiness of real life and the complexity of analytical generalizations. On occasion, the pictures themselves prompted the writing. Jeff never
deliberately staged the actions portrayed in the photographs" (11).
Portrayals/Vignettes: "'Truth' is, of course, socially constructed and experientially subjective; nevertheless, we did our best to seek it out...Our fieldnotes and transcripts came to several thousand pages. Some of the dialogues presented in the text are, consequently, combinations of excerpts from multiple conversations with more than one ethnographer spread out over time. Whenever possible, we fact-checked official records for births, deaths, marriages, military service, employment, and incarceration; we also consulted newspaper articles
and public archives to confirm the veracity of accounts of past events. When we documented notable discrepancies, we discuss their significance" (12).
Photo by *Muhammad*
"The question of the personal privacy of our research subjects is more complicated than the immediate practical risk of legal sanctions against them, however...The major characters in this book wanted to be part of our photo-ethnographic project. They gave Jeff permission to photograph and encouraged us to use their real names...Most important, the Edgewater homeless do not want to be treated as public secrets or hidden objects of shame. They struggle for self-respect and feel that their stories are worth telling. We ultimately decided to use pseudonyms but to reveal faces in our publications" (9).
Photo by doegox
"Understandably, ethnographers generally desire to present positive images of the people they study. The stakes around negative images are especially charged when one explores the subject of drugs, crime,race, sexuality, poverty, and suffering in the United States; and we paid attention to those stakes when making our editorial choices, but we did not sanitize or distort. For example, comic aggressive teasing,roleplaying, and posturing are performances in street settings that can translate into negative or mocking portrayals...Consequently, we have omitted some interactions that appeared excessively cruel or outrageously shocking and would have distracted from the analysis or misrepresented the fuller character of
an individual" (13).
Photo by jenny downing
Theoretical Framework
Photo by garryknight
"Structural violence refers to how the political-economic
organization of society wreaks havoc on vulnerable categories of people (Farmer 2003)."
Photo by Dave_B_
"Scheper-Hughes began using the term everyday violence to call attention to the social production of indifference in the face of institutionalized brutalities" (17).
Photo by marco.giumelli
"Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence links immediate practices and feelings to social domination (Bourdieu 2000). It refers specifically to the mechanisms that lead those who are subordinated to “misrecognize” inequality as the natural order of things and to blame themselves for their location in their society’s hierarchies" (17).
Photo by Frank Wuestefeld
"According to Foucault, the locus of state power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
shifted from a logic of “sovereignty,” which exacts obedience through bloody repression,
to one of “biopower,” which promotes the health and well-being of citizens (Foucault
1978:140–144). The mechanisms of control shifted from coercive terror and torture to an internalized self-disciplinary gaze that responsible individuals impose on their bodies and psyches
as a moral responsibility" (18).
Photo by Caucas'
"...people like the Edgewater homeless represent the all American tip of an iceberg, overshadowing an ever-larger proportion of the world’s population
who, beginning in the early 1980s, have been politically and economically excluded
by the imposition of U.S.-style neoliberal policies across the globe (Harvey 2005). In a nutshell,
services for vulnerable populations have been dismantled in favor of a punitive model
of government that has expanded investment in prisons, police forces, and armies while
promoting income inequality and corporate subsidies" (23).
Photo by exquisitur
