Happy Winter!

Photo by Per Ola Wiburg

We’ll be taking a short blogging break while DePaul is closed for Winter Break.

Stay warm and cozy and we’ll see you in 2012. Happy New Year!

Message from the Director

Legitimacy and legitimation—the sociocultural construct and its attendant socio-political process—occupy a central position in everyday life.  We all want to be taken seriously, even when we want to be taken amusedly. For the past couple of months I’ve been in a small South Carolina town working on a documentary series about Irish Travelers in the United States.  Integral to the local cultural “ethos” is the notion of “authenticity”—acting and speaking such that fellow Travelers take one seriously, perceive, and treat one as a “real” Traveler.  This aspect of the Traveler ethos differs only in form from the cultural structures that impinge on—shape and get shaped by—the goings-on in other cultures, arguably in every other culture.  Capturing and re-rendering on film the ways of “Authentic Travelers” constitutes my principal mission as an ethnographic filmmaker charged with the task of producing a mainstream media “truth movie” about Travelers here in South Carolina.

 

Simultaneously, I am working with colleagues at Louisiana State University (LSU-Baton Rouge) to elevate the “legitimacy factor” of ethnographic filmmaking more generally.  Day in and day out, we find ourselves facing many of the same challenges elucidated in the compelling book Social Knowledge in the Making, the recently released edited volume we mention in this issue of re/search.  With regard to the place of “all things visual” in the social sciences, these are indeed fortuitous times.  Never before has The Image played such a vital role in the public sphere or figured so heavily into the actual doing of social science.  SSRC’s ongoing collaboration with the Video Ethnography Laboratory at LSU is beginning to bear the fruit of legitimacy.  Our slate of endeavors, present and planned, includes cross-institutional and multi-disciplinary ethnographic film working groups, an ethnographic documentary film festival, and a variety of ethnographic video “publishing” initiatives.  With respect to the latter, we’re tinkering with all sorts of alternative academic legitimation mechanisms, including the kind of crowdsourcing of peer review described in this issue’s first article.

Research Origin Stories

The Beer Can Museum in Northampton, MA. Photo by C-Monster on flickr

Conceptualizing. Counting. Classifying. Categorizing. Typifying. Whether we’re studying jellybeans or the regrettable “jelly” shoes fashion trend, we’re academicians who’ve been deeply conditioned to adopt a critical approach to categories, taxonomies, typologies, and other mechanisms for arraying people, places, things, and phenomena. At the same time, we’ve learned along the way that much of our work hinges on our ability to conceptualize, count, and classify with theory-informed sensitivity and acumen. It’s a difficult tightrope, a love-hate relationship if ever there was one.

The articles in this week’s re/search ushered me through a time warp: I’m 7 years old, and my father has just introduced me to his brother for the first time. See, my Uncle Roger — our family’s ill-fated “bad apple” — had been in prison since before I was born, since the day after he dropped out of high school. Now he was out of the joint and needed a place to stay. That place turned out to be my room. My mother separated my bunk beds, arranging them side-by-side, and under matching NBA/ABA bedspreads my “ex-con” uncle and I slept in what had theretofore been MY room.

re/direct: Jessica Speer

Well, the quarter is off to a great start and our fearless leader Greg is in the field conducting some serious ethnography. While he’s gone, the rest of the SSRC staff is putting the finishing touches on a new Atlas.ti training (in addition to the SPSS and NVivo trainings we offer regularly), consulting with faculty on their research, thinking up ingenious new ways to support research at DePaul, doing some research of our own, and, as ever, keeping our ears to the ground for new and interesting research tidbits to bring you in this newsletter.

This week, we outline some proposed changes to the federal regulations governing research. Next week, we’ll get the perspective of Susan Loess-Perez in the Office of Research Protections. It seems that re-evaluating research regulations has become a trend, since the NIH also released a new conflict of interest policy  worth checking out, whether you plan to do research in that area or are simply interested in the rules regarding disclosures by researchers about income from drug and medical device companies.

re/direct: Greg Scott

“They could watch themselves. No one who ever comes to know himself with the detachment of an observer is ever the same again.” – Edmund Carpenter (1972, 1973, p. 135)

In 1988 I was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California when I first read the work of Edmund Snow Carpenter—in particular his amazing, truly timeless classic Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! At the time, the quote above captured my then-budding sociological imagination. I had recently confirmed “social science” as my major and was taking my third visual anthropology course. I couldn’t seem to get enough of these courses, the topics they covered, their exploration of all things visual, and the works of scholar-filmmakers like Carpenter. In Oh, What a Blow he writes about the participatory nature of the visual (film and photography) ethnography he and his colleagues were doing among villagers in Papua New Guinea and how so many things were irreversibly changed when the tribespeople saw themselves on “the big screen” for the first time in their lives.