Open to Disruption: Time and Craft in the Practice of Slow Sociology - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826519857 ISBN 13: 9780826519856

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014

Synopsis

At a time when an emphasis on productivity in higher education threatens to undermine well-crafted research, these highly reflexive essays capture the sometimes profound intellectual effects that may accompany disrupted scholarship. They reveal that over long periods of time relationships with people studied invariably change, sometimes in dramatic ways. They illustrate how world events such as 9/11 and economic cycles impact individual biographies.

Some researchers describe how disruptions prompted them to expand the boundaries of their discipline and invent concepts that could more accurately describe phenomena that previously had no name and no scholarly history. Sometimes scholars themselves caused the disruption as they circled back to work they had considered "done" and allowed the possibility of rethinking earlier findings.

About this title

About the Author

Anita Ilta Garey is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her book Weaving Work and Motherhood received the William J. Goode Award from the Family Section of the American Sociology Association. She has co-edited three other books, including (with Margaret K. Nelson) Who's Watching?: Daily Practices of Surveillance among Contemporary Families, also from Vanderbilt University Press.

Rosanna Hertz is the Classes of 1919-1950 Reunion Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Her latest book is Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family. With Barry Glassner, she co-edited Our Studies, Ourselves: Sociologists' Lives and Work.

Margaret K. Nelson is A. Barton Hepburn Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Middlebury College. She is the author and editor of several books including, most recently, Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times.

From the Inside Flap

The backstage stories of the surprises, personal and professional, that disrupt research but often enrich it

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Open to Disruption

Time and Craft in the Practice of Slow Sociology

By Anita Ilta Garey, Rosanna Hertz, Margaret K. Nelson

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2014 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8265-1985-6

Contents

Introduction: On Being Open to Disruption Margaret K. Nelson and Rosanna Hertz, 1, 
Part I: Changing Subjects, Changing Relationships, Changing Worlds, 
1. From a Study to a Journey: Holding an Ethnographic Gaze on Urban Poverty for Two Decades Timothy Black, 23, 
2. Conflicted Selves: Trust and Betrayal in Studying the Hare Krishna E. Burke Rochford Jr., 45, 
3. Returns Joanna Dreby, 63, 
4. Studying My Hometown Albert Hunter, 85, 
5. Breaching Boundaries and Dowsing for Stories on the Great Plains Karen V. Hansen, 100, 
Part II: Changing Methods, Changing Frameworks, 
6. Disrupting Scholarship Susan E. Bell, 119, 
7. A Sociology of Inclusion and Exclusion through the Lens of the Maid's Daughter Mary Romero, 141, 
8. Getting to the Dark Side of the Moon: Researching the Lives of Women in Cartography Will C. van den Hoonaard, 152, 
9. Getting It Right Pamela Stone, 161, 
10. "Breakfast at Elmo's": Adolescent Boys and Disruptive Politics in the Kinscripts Narrative Linda M. Burton and Carol B. Stack, 174, 
Part III: Reflections on Disruptions: Time and Craft, 
11. History on a Slow Track Emily K. Abel, 197, 
12. A Serendipitous Lesson: Or, How What We Do Shapes What We Know Margaret K. Nelson, 205, 
13. Paying Forward and Paying Back Rosanna Hertz, 224, 
14. Rethinking Families: A Slow Journey Naomi Gerstel, 241, 
15. Time to Find Words Marjorie L. DeVault, 255, 
16. The Days Are Long, but the Years Fly By: Reflections on the Challenges of Doing Qualitative Research Annette Lareau, 266, 
Contributors, 279, 

CHAPTER 1

From a Study to a Journey

Holding an Ethnographic Gaze on Urban Poverty for Two Decades

Timothy Black

In 1990, when my research began in Springfield, Massachusetts, I had no reason to expect that twenty-four years later I would still be recording fieldnotes and tracking the lives of the boys I met then—in particular, three Puerto Rican brothers: Julio, Fausto, and Sammy, one year apart in age. The trajectories of their lives extended my work into different social spaces (schools, streets, job training, workplaces, courtrooms, prisons, drug treatment facilities, and churches) and across a range of social contacts (family members, friends, neighbors, girlfriends, street associates, teachers, counselors, attorneys, and some city leaders). These spaces and faces transformed a study into a journey.

Much of what I have learned is due to the breadth of my study—time situates analysis. First, it allows for new directions to emerge in the course of the research. Emergent themes and the flexibility of field research are commonly valued qualities of ethnographic research, but when practiced over a lengthy period of time, multiple themes emerge that can provide fresh insights and broader analytical connections, and push beyond balkanized divisions within the discipline. Second, thick sociological description is written from within and through webs of relationships. When thick description is sustained over a long period of time, the positioning within relationships changes, the duality of researcher-respondent is transmuted, and knowledge claims become relationally, or interpersonally, grounded. Third, long-term ethnography helps us document the intersections of macrosociological, institutional, and individual dynamics, illustrating the interconnections between social and individual changes, which are rarely apparent immediately but take shape over longer periods of time.

Pivotal Moments

Ethnographic study is shaped by relationships in the field, inspired and uninspired observation and documentation, imaginative sociological construction, and serendipity. It becomes a journey, however, through a series of pivotal moments over long periods of time. Urban ethnographies typically focus on place—a social space in which external forces shape local conditions, while internal cultural strategies and routines negotiate these forces. Across time, these ethnographic studies see a community in motion, shaped for instance by housing and educational initiatives, economic and employment trends, policing tactics, and health strategies, and lived through the hierarchies of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and/ or sexuality. Time in the field allows for emergent directions of study that can augment our understandings of place and its related complexities, but longer time in the field provides the opportunity to move our gaze beyond the confines of place, as relationships take us beyond a singular social space and require that we make sense of the intersections between these varying social spaces.

Pivotal moments are junctures in the course of research that lead to new directions of inquiry. I distinguish these junctures from what we may refer to as emergent themes. Emergent themes suggest a bounded study in which the unexpected occurs and theses are modified, or else an unstructured study in which our observations and predispositions "find" a topic or issue to study. Pivotal moments convey movement, or eruptions, that foster new directions of inquiry, new social spaces to comprehend, and definitive departures from the familiar. There have been many pivotal moments in the course of my journey—too many to document here—but I will describe a few to illustrate.

My study began in a high school where I developed relationships with a few boys who were considered likely to drop out of school. I documented their school and job experiences, their family and neighborhood dynamics, their relationships with institutional authorities, and their social networks, which became the basis of my doctoral dissertation. Shortly after I defended my dissertation, Fausto, the middle Rivera brother, went on a ten-week robbing spree that ended in a failed bank heist. Little did I know at the time that his incarceration would become the first pivotal moment in a twenty-four-year research journey.

I began making visits regularly to the prisons where Fausto was incarcerated, as my research remained in motion. These Sunday trips to the prisons were all-day affairs. I picked up Fausto's older brother, Julio, early in the morning, drove to the eastern part of Massachusetts, and spent long days in waiting rooms and visiting areas before returning to Springfield. During this time, my relationship with Julio developed. Julio was a high school graduate who had lost his job in 1993. Unable to find another one, he turned to Jorge, a childhood friend and a drug dealer, to fill the gap. In 1996, Julio introduced me to Jorge and other men who hung out regularly at "the block," an open-air, Puerto Rican enclave in Springfield, where mostly men gathered each evening to socialize. The block was also a staging ground for the night's drug dealing activities that Jorge organized. I spent two years, from 1996–1998, learning from men on the block.

I had continued to track Fausto's prison experiences during the seven years he was incarcerated. This was not only a period of prison expansion, largely attributable to the War on Drugs, but also an era of getting tough on prisoners. William Weld, the governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997, was a leading public figure in the movement to punish criminals more harshly, and Fausto's story illustrated this. When Fausto was released, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to live with his mother. I recorded his efforts to reintegrate into civilian life—particularly his experiences in off-the-books jobs, as well as emerging problems in his family and neighborhood—to document the struggles of community reentry among former prisoners. When reintegration efforts failed, Fausto's life spiraled into crime and drug addiction—another pivotal moment. Fausto moved from robbing drug dealers to counterfeiting money to "boosting" merchandise from large retail stores. He was arrested for shoplifting (larceny) and, with my intervention, ended up in a Salvation Army drug treatment facility—yet another pivotal moment.

After Fausto completed the Salvation Army treatment program, he returned to the streets and alternated between periods of drug relapse and recovery. Meanwhile, his younger brother, Sammy, was living in Hartford, working mostly temporary jobs, living with Maria (his partner and the mother of his youngest child), and managing his drug addiction to heroin. Working a second job, he was driving home late one snowy night when his car slid off the exit ramp and was totaled. Lacking the resources to secure a loan to buy another car, and dependent on the car to get his children to school and himself to work, he returned to Springfield to "double up" his paycheck by selling cocaine. That night, however, he sprinkled cocaine in a marked dollar bill in the bar's bathroom and was arrested. I followed Sammy through the court process, tape-recorded ten hours of his life story, and tracked his life until he was led away in handcuffs for three years of incarceration. At this juncture, my study of the War on Drugs deepened.

If pivotal moments, however, give a study its vitality and its sustenance, then how do we know when it is time to end a study, or to write? There is, of course, no single answer to this question. In my case, my tenure or promotional clock did not bind the study. I saw a narrative running through my fieldwork toward the end of my tenure period and took a sabbatical in 2001, soon after acquiring tenure, to begin writing. However, shortly thereafter, I was pulled back into the field. As I continued writing, the circular processes of writing and doing fieldwork deepened, and both became more focused. The last third of the book was written from this fieldwork, while the fieldwork reorganized and reconceptualized the first two-thirds of the book (Black 2009).

My journey did not end with the publication of When a Heart Turns Rock Solid—the relationships continued, especially with the three brothers, as did the occurrence of pivotal moments. In the first few years after the book's release, Julio quit drinking, while he and his wife, Clara, became regular members of a Pentecostal church. Julio ended a seven-year extramarital affair in his efforts to reform his life and devote himself to God and family. Fausto also became a member of the church, although he continued to cycle through drug relapse and recovery. Sammy split up with Maria, quit his job, and returned to the streets, where he made more money and was more highly regarded for his knowledge and skills.

More recently, the matrix changed again. Nearly $100,000 in debt, Julio explored bankruptcy. He owed $46,000 to the company he worked for because of an unpaid lease on a truck he had driven as an "independent operator" for two years, as well as over $50,000 in unpaid federal and state taxes. Blame moved in different directions. Julio blamed himself; his father blamed Julio's wife, while I blamed the trucking company. Financial problems increased pressure on the fault lines in his marriage, which erupted after their daughter moved out of the house into her own apartment.

Meanwhile, Fausto completed a government-funded culinary arts program. As the chef's star pupil, Fausto embraced a new identity. However, his criminal record preempted finding a job, and only through my own networks were we able to secure him an entry-level job at a chain restaurant. In the fifteen months that followed, Fausto made the transition from the streets to sobriety and precarious work. Searching for a new set of routines, identity, and status, Fausto received emotional support from his former street partners; in fact, one asserted how impressed he was by Fausto's courage, a statement reflecting deep divisions that articulate social marginalization.

Finally, Sammy's street activities resulted in his arrest and incarceration. He was videotaped twice selling to a Puerto Rican undercover police officer, who in the second exchange purchased a .45 caliber handgun from Sammy. The district attorney attempted to give Sammy a fifteen-year sentence for the offense, but his attorney threatened to argue an entrapment case at trial that even the DA had to admit had some validity. When Sammy's attorney threatened to subpoena the informant in the case, the DA lowered the plea offer to a four- to seven-year sentence and Sammy was sent upstate to prison.

As I close in on the twenty-fourth year of my relationships with the three Rivera brothers, the journey is hardly complete, and pivotal moments continue to shape the study. My study became a journey as the men I was tracking took me into different social and institutional spaces that were intersecting with their biographies, including bilingual education, street life and the drug trade, the trucking industry, the housing market and predatory lending, prisons and the War on Drugs, drug treatment, and now the Pentecostal church, the food industry, and prison gangs.

The interconnections of these lived spaces, however, tell a larger story. The demise of bilingual education, the changing constellation of the informal and formal labor forces, the growth of the precarious workforce, the increasing role of the criminal justice system in managing the lives of the dispossessed, and the struggle to establish and sustain community, family, and intimacy amid depleted resources, personal vulnerability, social insecurity, and endemic uncertainty provide us with the profile of an era—the era of neoliberalism. Longitudinal ethnography allows us to see these patterns and interconnections over time, and to bear witness to the lived experiences.

Thick Sociological Description and Long-term Relationships

In qualitative research, writing is the medium through which we explore our relationships and record our observations, experiences, feelings, and insights. The relationships are not separable from the field—there is no subject-object curtain that provides us with clarity or purity of observation. Nor is the time in the field linear, any more than the experience of aging is linear. Birthdays mark time in scientific increments, but life itself defies the simplicity of the measurement; instead, personal change and lived biography are rooted in experience, and experiences mark time as memories, turning points, pivotal life events, and epiphanies (Denzin 1987, 1997; Erdmans 2007). Writing occurs within relationships, which, in a sense, make their own time, as connections and disconnections are defined and redefined in the movement of closeness and distance, and recorded as shared experiences. This becomes the medium of understanding—naked, vulnerable, ambivalent, and shorn of grounded certainties.

"We Were So Much Older Then, We're Younger Than That Now"

It is true that if I had written my book soon after I completed my dissertation in 1993, it would have been a very different book. And it is true that I know more now about the men and women in my book than I did then, which gives depth to the relationships and to the writing. Even here, however, I would warn against imposing linear criteria. The book I would have written in 1993 would not have been "wrong," "misguided," "shallow," or "premature." It would have been different—no less engaged, no less co-created through the medium or the intensity of relationships, and no less right or wrong—just different. For instance, the scope of the book would have been shorter and more focused on the processes that lead adolescent boys to remain in school or to leave prematurely, and would have examined the immediate consequences of those decisions. It was a period characterized by much angst, doubt, and confusion for these boys, and the intensity of my relationships with these adolescents was grounded in an effort to see the organization of the school, the ways in which school authorities perceived and responded to these boys, and the multiple, and often contradictory, influences that these adolescents were negotiating. In retrospect—after twenty-four years—this may appear truncated, and even premature, but it would have been no less rich in detail, emotion, and insight, capturing a moment in time in which an understanding of the social world was co-created through relationships developed in school classrooms and counselors' offices, on basketball courts, and around family dinner tables.

So what then marks the benefits of longitudinal ethnography in the contexts of relationships and understanding? I would suggest that it provides an expanded horizon of possibilities. Slow sociology allows us to write through the webs of relationships as they emerge within varying social and interpersonal contexts. The journey that I sketch above gives us some flavor of the changing contexts of experience, while the interpersonal horizons that are created through a history of shared experiences allow for the material of understanding. Relationships are deeper and thicker, and with more shared history, we can experience the world together through a longer horizon of conversations, memories, and stories, from which our understanding of the present, or the moment, becomes more textured, co-created, biographically interpreted, and hermeneutical (Denzin 1989; Denzin and Lincoln 2008b; Schwandt 2003; Gadamer 1975; Guba and Lincoln 2008; Probyn 1993; Gearing 1995; Lather 2001; Adler and Adler 1987). In fact, it is this process that challenges the idea that understanding is a linear practice—question asked, question answered, analytical construct examined—but is instead a more circular process in which memories, experiences, prior conversations, interpretations, and emotions are woven through a conversation in which meaning is co-created.

A recent example illustrates this point. In the summer of 2012, I drove Fausto to a job interview. He had completed two years of sobriety and had worked at a restaurant for over a year, and was searching for full-time work. Afterward, we walked through a park, sat for more than an hour on a park bench, walked some more, and discussed a range of topics: the complexities of his relationships with both his father and with his live-in partner; the haunting, recurring memories about the tragedies in his past, particularly the deaths of friends, and the guilt he feels for surviving while others did not; the many times that we walked through this same park in the past and how different our conversations were at those times; the ways in which he currently negotiates relationships with former street friends; his work experiences and his strategies for dealing with authority, coworkers who use drugs, and attractions to coworkers; the extreme anxiety and triumph he felt when he planned and drove two hours to a beach for the first time in his life; my move to Cleveland and how the move would affect our relationship; and my fears about moving away from the familiar and how the anxieties of the move were affecting my moods and relationships.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Open to Disruption by Anita Ilta Garey, Rosanna Hertz, Margaret K. Nelson. Copyright © 2014 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826519857
• ISBN 13: 9780826519856
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Garey Anita Ilta, Hertz Rosanna, Nelson Margaret K.