Turning the kaleidoscope: telling stories in rhetorical spaces

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, March, 2003 by Bonnie M. Winfield

In this essay, I reflect on the work of Lorraine Code on Rhetorical Spaces and the work of Dorothy Smith on Institutional Ethnography to explore how stories are translated and seen as though looking through the different turns of a kaleidoscope. The stories I am referring to here are intake stories in human service agencies. The question is how do the front line human service workers translate the noise of everyday/night life of the "client" into the human service jargon/forms. I also explore the issues of how the front line worker with the intention of being professional, disembodies herself and the self of the client by dissociating from her life story during the translation process The ultimate purpose of my work is to develop a pedagogy for a human development program.

Introduction

As I write these words, I contemplate my position as a social researcher. I question my ability to use the language of Smith, Code, Lugones and other social theorists. I question my legitimacy, my ability to write in a persuasive manner the many thoughts dwelling in my head, heart and soul. I question my fluency in a language, a scholarly discourse, which is not my first. I wonder if, perhaps only secretly, those who "know," who have dwelled in this situated territory of sociological discourse, will discover upon reading my work that I am indeed an impostor, an illegal alien in their land. I experience a bifurcation of consciousness, I dissociate from my being, from my roots and experience, I am afraid my real self, the struggling working class, single parenting "other" will appear like the green hulk from an old television show, filled with rage when I write of my experience and the experience of students who are also learning a second language.

As I anticipate my story telling, I turn and adjust the kaleidoscope, a kaleidoscope of rhetorical spaces, to find the pattern that is most authentic to the telling of this story. The many colored pieces are always there, placed between two plates of glass for all to see. As I turn the kaleidoscope the pieces reconfigure and shift into different patterns, making visible different stories in the same space and time. It is this visibility of the same yet different stories that I want to explore in this essay. As I tell my story in the discourse of sociological theory, I want to be sure the pieces of my self remain, perhaps reconfigured yet at the same time authentic to the meaning and circumstances of my experience. It is through this process that I hope to begin a pedagogy that will enable students, future human service workers, to turn the kaleidoscope of both theirs and their client's stories. This process will enable them to meet professional standards and at the same time stay embodied in both time and space and true to the authenticity of their real selves.

I will first define and discuss Institutional Ethnography. I will then using a life story define my own standpoint in this research. This is followed by a discussion of Lorraine Code's work on rhetorical space and a reflection on the theoretical understandings of Code and Smith as it applies to the work of human service agents. As a department, my colleagues and I have made a commitment to introducing a critical, reflective awareness to our students. In addition, we are searching for a vehicle, a window, if you will, through which as human service workers, they can resist the hegemonic ruling relations of our capitalistic society at work in their profession, a hegemony which reduces names, places and stories to numbers, statistics and social problems. My purpose in writing this essay is to inform that pedagogical philosophy and practice.

Institutional Ethnography: Unveiling the Rhetorical Spaces

Dorothy E. Smith describes her beginnings in the women's movement as a time when women needed to find a place in the sociological discourse. Until that time, sociology was written for and by men. The profession of sociology has been predicated on a universe grounded in men's experience and relationship and still largely appropriated by men as their `territory' (Smith, 1990:14). Women's experiences as well as other oppressed groups were not found in this discourse. Smith recognized a need for a sociology in which people's everyday/night world would not disappear. This "consciousness raising" was a process of discovering oppression in the everyday world of women. Beginning with the everyday/night experience we can open a window to the social relations "that give our daily lives their particular shape" (Smith, 1990:202). Further, Allison Griffith states, "From this standpoint, we can see and explore the disjuncture between lived experience and the social relations of objectified knowledge" (Griffith, 1998:3). "Thus we look for a method of inquiry where inquiry itself is a critique of socially organized practices of knowing and hence is itself an exploration of method" (Smith, 1990:12).

The question for this method of social inquiry is how do things work? "We're not after `the truth' but ... to know more about how things work, how our world is put together, how things happen to us as they do" (Smith: 1990:34). For my research, the questions would be: How are the everyday/night experiences of the women in homeless shelters, the parents in child-protective cases, or the teens in group homes connected to the discourse of social work, the language of social welfare policy, and/or statistics used in the debates of legislators? For example, how does a social worker, after an intake interview, translate the story of the everyday experiences of the women interviewed into the professional language her clinical notes and subsequently into the single DSM IV category needed for insurance and other policy-based purposes? How much of the "clients" life experience is erased in order for the professional to fit that life into the categories defined for her? Who defines the categories in the DSM IV and who benefits from this practice? "People's lives, difficulties, conflicts, and problems provide raw materials to be inserted into professional frames and theories to produce the case. The transformation of the everyday into the extended discourse of professional social work comprises a taken-for-granted bedrock for social work intervention" (de Montigny, 1995:26).