Ethnographic writing as grassroots democratic action

Composition Studies, Spring 2003 by Kahn, Seth

Another way to describe the problem: cultural studies pedagogies, especially those grounded in various (post-)Marxist theories, rely on structures of production, distribution, and consumption for their explanatory value. However, in none of these accounts is the notion of distribution clearly explored. Hall's "Encoding/Decoding" and Richard Johnson's "What is Cultural Studies, Anyway?" make strong claims that studying any element of the production-distribution-consumption cycle to the exclusion of the others distorts any understanding we might come to of the cycle as a whole. But even McComiskey's attempt to attend to distribution ultimately risks eliding distribution when he offers students the option not to distribute their texts to sites where they might do their cultural work. As a result, students' roles in both production and distribution are undervalued.

More to the point, while these cultural studies pedagogies may demand a great deal of student writing, there is little attention to the grassroots work that the students' writing might do. Some versions of service-learning pedagogy address this particular problem by emphasizing the production and distribution of active interventions into the lived experiences of non-academic culture/community members. Thomas Deans has argued that service-learning pedagogies construe writing in three different relations to the communities in which students do their service: writing about the community (which often resembles ethnographic writing in many ways); writing for the community; and writing in the community. In any of these relations, the writing that students do (and I should say that in any given course, more than one of these might happen) either directly intervenes in the lives of agencies (or their clients) or inscribes a direct intervention into those lives.

The directness of these interventions aligns my own thinking closely with service-learning. Several times, as I've described assignments, colleagues have said that they didn't realize I teach service-learning courses, and I don't. What distinguishes my vision of an ethnographic writing course from service learning is the distinction between participation (what participant-observers do at their sites) as intervention and service as intervention. Put simply, I'm concerned about pre-structuring students' experiences in their sites by positioning them as volunteers, or as resources for agencies to use. Rather, based on the assumption that both students and teachers are equal participants in democratic culture, an ethnographic assignment allowing students' participant roles to be negotiated more fluidly from the beginning of their fieldwork seems to increase the assignment's grassroots potential. I want to be clear that this issue is a matter of preference. There are certainly interesting problematics for students and teachers to work through when students have to consider the pre-structured positions they enter in service sites.

DISCIPLINARY INFLUENCES IN ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING