(a mood change of some sort is evident in this post…it starts out very dry but by the end sounds like a gossip column. I am trying to process the possible meaning of this…Basically, it starts out boring but gets interesting later on 
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My degree requires me to take an advanced class in qualitative methodology – non-statistical analysis of social phenomena and human beings. One would think that I would flourish in such a class, since I do not believe in the validity of statistics, in part because this kind of data analysis removes any “outliers”, instead searching for an average, a “norm” – it’s not a far stretch from “norm” to “normal”. I prefer to examine the outliers, the “cases” – whether they involve the micro-analysis of a conversation between a small group, or the macro-examination of a war – that don’t fit. I find that what society labels “abnormal” speaks volumes to what is considered “normal”, more so than painting a picture based on numerical averages obtained from census collections and the like.
However, my graduate level qualitative methods classes have proven to be my biggest struggle in my effort to complete my M.A. Last semester, I attempted to take the methods class offered in my own Department of Sociology and Anthropology. I did all of my readings like a good little girl, but I ended up being the outlier – each piece on the use of methods like interviewing, participant observation, and media analysis that I took a liking to was disliked by almost everyone else in the class. This may have been in part because of others’ desires to please the professor – a well-known anthropologist who preferred “old school” methods (ex/ the manual transcription of interviews). When I heard that he was also well-known for trying to pick up young female students at social events, I was disturbed, and started dressing like a boy, trading in my cowboy boots and skirts for baggy sweatshirts, combat pants, and sneakers. Then, when I proposed to do a project that involved investigating the experiences of psychiatric patients while in Emergency Rooms using feminist methods (Institutional Ethnography) and my proposal was shot down three times before being brought to the Departmental level, I had suspicions about misogyny in practice.
Institutional Ethnography, created by Canadian scholar Dorothy Smith, looks at a microcosm of society – the founding example being the different treatment women are subject to when compared with men – and then brings it a level up, making suggestions about larger malignant political realities. When I stepped into the office of the Chair of my Department, along with the Chair of graduate studies – both feminist scholars – I expected to be vindicated. Instead I was shot down. I immediately began crying, something I had never done in front of a professor or boss before, but I wouldn’t take a simple “no” for an answer, I needed to know the reason why my proposal to speak with ER staff and psychiatric patients/survivors who self-identified as being keen on participating in academic research, many of whom were already involved in psychiatric political action groups, was not acceptable. First, my professor had told me that the project would be too “quantitative” in nature. I found this bizarre, as institutional ethnography is one of the most well known and currently used qualitative methods in the discipline, but agreed to conduct fewer interviews, to reduce the size of my “sample”. He then told me that such a project would be “not representative enough”, and vaguely mentioned ethical concerns.
Ethical concerns? Speaking with psychiatric patients who were eager to have their voices heard, and medical professionals? At this point, the professor suggested that he assign me a new project of his choice. I was furious. However, I was even more furious when two female professors and researchers sided with him. As ashamed as I was to shed tears in a formal meeting, I questioned them for twenty minutes before the answer as to why I could not complete such a project was finally answered. The professor of the class “did not want students’ projects to speak to a larger political situation.” Thus, I made the only political statement I could – I dropped the class even though I had completed all but the final project. I simply would not take a sociology class where social dysphoria on a large scale could not be discussed. Staying in the class would have meant denying my core values, and what I believed to be the core values of the discipline.
However, I did not walk away from the class feeling strong. I felt strong about my decision, but incredibly disillusioned about departmental politics, and the state of sociology itself. Even other professors in the department had assured me that I would be backed up by the two Chairs, and when they put up a glass ceiling upon which an old male professor sat, I, naively I suppose, was in a state of shock which played a huge role in the period of depression I went through that autumn. I isolated myself from everyone but Alaryyk, and curled up on the couch in the fetal position for days that turned into months. My first semester of grad school was a failure, not because I got any “F”s, but because I did not complete the work for my other class either, and had it deferred, something I had never had to do before.
Then even worse academic news came – in order to take the “prospectus” course that is required for one to write their Thesis, I had to first have completed the qualitative methods class. I already wrote my prospectus when applying for the government grant that is funding my research, and I am already working on my Thesis. These types of bureaucratic obstacles did not used to exist in this department, but now they do, as graduate school has become an assembly line. The focus is not on education, but on completing requirements timely and in order. I smelled and continue to smell a resocialization process that looks more like those that occur in the institutions we examine under a critical lens (such as prisons, mental hospitals, and the army) than the path to knowledge.
Fortunately, my dear supervisor came up with a solution for me – to take a qualitative methods class in the department of criminology. When I sat in the make-up class for the first time I was overjoyed to hear that the professor would allow us to do anything for our major project, albeit interviewing minors. He didn’t want interview transcripts, but wanted his students to get out into the community and talk to people – to place themselves within social realities that are unacceptable if we wanted to -and most of us have done so – and see what there was to discover. He approved my proposal to study the (mis)treatment of psych patients in the ER, but I decided that I would rather do an ethnography of Shamanism in Peru, wanting to save the former project for another time when I could do a thorough investigation, i.e. research that spanned a longer period than a month. I am now writing about the North American colonization of Shamanism in Peru for the purpose of profit. Traditional Shamanic ceremonies have been exploited by North American entrepreneurs that have created a new genre of tourism – Shamanic tourism. These businesspeople have taken over certain Peruvian cities that lie in the heart of the Amazon jungle, and hire Shaman to entertain them or “enlighten” them, take your pick. I am pleased with my project.
Then today happened.
All others in the class are members of the same graduate cohort in the criminology department (recall: assembly line) and know each other well. It appears that they have more collective social events than we do in the soc/anth department, and that there is more peer-support going on. Thus, I have been an outsider since the beginning. The level of work expected from students in this department is markedly lower, and when I assumed that a presentation that would comprise 20% of my final grade should take up about half of the class, but was met with rolling eyes and no interest in discussing the questions that I had worked hard to come up with. All presentations after mine (of course I chose to go first, of course!) were barely 10 minutes long, and the professor of this class e-mailed me afterwards saying that he had “mixed feelings about my presentation” rather than giving me a grade. I replied saying that I had never presented as a teacher or peer before and been so unable to initiate lively discussion, and asked if I was doing something wrong, such as using sociological jargon that students were unfamiliar with. I asked for advice on how I could connect with my peers more. I did not receive a reply. But that was not today.
Last class (last Tuesday), we were asked to interview another student in the class, either in person, over the phone, or via e-mail, and write a 1-2 page paper on “who they are”. The exercise was not worth any marks – the collected vignettes were to be used as data for a tutorial on using the qualitative analytic software “NVivo”. NVivo reeks of quantitative methods, but I have kept this opinion to myself.
I was paired with another female student. She really wanted to do an in-person interview, but the only times during which she was available, I was already booked – once for an ultrasound, and the next time for a last minute doctor’s appointment. I suggested that we meet on Saturday, but her social calendar was booked for Saturday. I did not go on a tirade about how many social plans I have had to cancel due to grad school obligations or about how this has dismantled a couple of friendships, and we agreed that we would do the interview via e-mail. I very wrongly assumed that the responses she gave to my list of interview questions should not be copied and pasted into a word document, but used her words along with mine and drew connections from different things that she said to try to summarize, as we had been instructed to do, “who she was”.
There are 12 students in the class. All 12 interviews were sent to all 12 students so that we could save them on a memory stick and bring them to the computer lab to try out the software. I did not read the interviews when I received them – not because I wasn’t interested in getting a better idea of who my fellow peers in the class were, but because I am busy, and assumed that the interviews would strictly be used in the lab. I again found myself to be the outlier, as the others had anxiously awaited the arrival of the papers in their inbox and read all 12. Oh well. It was what transpired in class that I did not expect, and that is disturbing me on this Tuesday evening, the beginning of my “workend”
One of the first questions our professor asked is if any of us felt we had been misrepresented and his question was met with silence. My interviewee was waiting for a more dramatic moment to lodge her complaint, just before we broke up for 15 minutes before it was time to hit the computer lab.
Just like in my meeting with the Chairs, there was an explosion of tears, but this time not mine. She hated what I had written about her. She thought that my write-up, based on her answers, was not only inaccurate but intentionally cruel. I had made the following errors: 1) I included a statement about her being “privileged”, based on an answer to a question I posed in which she stated that traveling abroad had made her realize how privileged she was, 2) I wrote about her lack of interest in politics, which she referred to three times over the span of the ten questions I posed, 3) I had asked her about her career goal, and she replied that she had always dreamed of being a lawyer, but decided it was not for her after an internship at a law firm during which she was horrified at the amount of time lawyers had to spend away from their friends and families. In the write-up I used the phrase “her dream turned out to be a bit of a nightmare when she realized how much time…blah blah blah.”
I had used the words politics, privilege, and nightmare. She defended herself by saying that she was a “passionate person.”
I replied, “Don’t worry, so am I, I didn’t mean for this to sound nasty, perhaps I was too creative in my choice of words…”
She answered that having had her fellow cohort members read this one and a quarter page document was going to give everyone a new, false impression about her (she has been in classes with these people for as many as five years, the least amount of time being 8 months). She didn’t use the word “reputation”, but it seemed she felt her reputation had been ruined. It didn’t appear so, as another female classmate piped up, “no, I thought it sounded nothing like Alicia at all.” I continued to apologize and try to solve the problem of where I went wrong – this was a class after all.
Until this point, I was bothered by the fact that she hadn’t come to me on her own as soon as she felt this way, but I wasn’t angry. I could sympathize with her. Yes, I am a passionate person too, and things that are said in my seminars often cause me to make outbursts as well. I have cried in front of my superiors. But then she had to “get even”.
She claimed that the reason the description of her was so false because I had cancelled on her twice, and she had even “offered to come to my apartment!” one of these times. Thus, in order to attempt to defend myself, I had to air in front of the class that I had been compromised by an ultrasound appointment and an emergency appointment that could not be missed.
Meanwhile, she refused to meet on Saturday because of social plans. How long would an in person interview to write a one page document have lasted? 30 minutes tops? But she couldn’t squeeze me in anytime later than 9:30 am on Wednesday or Friday. Unfortunately, doctors usually schedule last-minute appointments in the morning.
All in the name of her reputation, or the “image of her”, to use the words she did, that her peers had of her.
Almost everyone hugged her as she ran out of the classroom before I could speak to her. I approached her in the computer lab –
“I’m so sorry…”
“I just don’t want to talk about this. Okay? Thank-you.”
The world thinks that women talk about their feelings excessively, but I continue to find myself in encounters with other women where the decision is made that I am “bad” somehow, and they refuse more than ever before to even consider the possibility of having an honest conversation about how one another feels to come to “making up” – there was a misunderstanding, feelings were hurt, and we’re sorry. Hug.
I’m so excited to go to my next five weeks of “Advanced Qualitative Methods for Criminology”. I’m most excited about presenting my project on Shamanism in front of this group. I will wear my dunce cap with pride. Bring on the stigma. Once again, clearly, one of these things just does not belong. I interpreted the assignment differently than the other students, who copied and pasted e-mail responses, if the interview was done via e-mail. Then, there could be nothing unethical in the documents, right?
Again, I defend my method. I thought copying and pasting someone’s words was called plagiarism. This incident has not changed my opinion.
As men are more likely to received tenured professorships, I have heard competition between women can be sadly fierce.
Is making another woman cry an achievement in academia?
