Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
The backstage stories of the surprises, personal and professional, that disrupt research but often enrich it
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.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: On Being Open to Disruption
Margaret K. Nelson and Rosanna Hertz
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
2. Conflicted Selves: Trust and Betrayal in Studying the Hare Krishna
E. Burke Rochford Jr.
3. Returns
Joanna Dreby
4. Studying My Home Town
Albert Hunter
5. Breaching Boundaries and Dowsing for Stories on the Great Plains
Karen V. Hansen
Part II: Changing Methods, Changing Frameworks
6. Disrupting Scholarship
Susan E. Bell
7. A Sociology of Inclusion and Exclusion through the Lens of the Maid's Daughter
Mary Romero
8. Getting to the Dark Side of the Moon: Researching the Lives of Women in Cartography
Will C. van den Hoonaard
9. Getting It Right
Pamela Stone
10. "Breakfast at Elmo's": Adolescent Boys and Disruptive Politics in the Kinscripts' Narrative
Linda M. Burton and Carol B. Stack
Part III: Reflections on Disruptions: Time and Craft
11. History on a Slow Track
Emily K. Abel
12. A Serendipitous Lesson, Or How What We Do Shapes What We Know: Reflections on Interviews as a Method for Qualitative Sociology
Margaret K. Nelson
13. Paying Forward and Paying Backward
Rosanna Hertz
14. Rethinking Families: A Slow Journey
Naomi Gerstel
15. Time to Find Words
Marjorie L. DeVault
16. The Days Are Long, but the Years Fly By: Reflections on the Challenges of Doing Qualitative Research
Annette Lareau