Abstract
This collection of sixteen chapters offers a moving counterpoint to the fashion or rather pressure in the academy to publish ever more and to do so as quickly as possible. That has long struck me as an odd and sad mandate, and I will return to it later.
The essays are primarily about the virtues and advantages of very drawn-out projects. For example, in “A Sociology of Inclusion and Exclusion through the Lens of the Maid’s Daughter,” Mary Romero studies a live-in maid through the eyes and words of her daughter. Over a twenty-year period, Romero sees how the maid becomes a trusted adviser in her immigrant community and family and also a financial success. The rich evolution of this maid’s life would not be possible to grasp without the longitudinal method Romero chose.
Twenty years after she had studied a couple in an Israeli kibbutz, Rosanna Hertz explains in “Paying Forward and Paying Back” that the couple’s son asks if he can live with Herz and her family while he works in the United States. She had studied mothers’ ambivalence about children sleeping in children’s quarters away from their parents. Her house guest was one of those children who now offered her and her husband trenchant questions and observations about their lives in this country. Hertz reflects on paying back to the kibbutz, about how there is no closure to a field experience, and how increasing chances for travel and interaction do not necessarily lead to understanding and opening up to the Other.
Susan Bell entitles her chapter “Disrupting Scholarship.” A study of DES daughters stretched out for 27 years as Bell found raising a family and continuing her activism meant pausing her research. Bell shifted from studying stress and adaptation to a focus on narratives, which helps her order her findings and interpretations in ways not foreseen at the beginning of the project. As do other authors in this collection, Bell persuades the reader that the narratives focus worked in her study, which is all the fuller for not being rushed.
Margaret K. Nelson’s “A Serendipitous Lesson: Or, How What We Do Shapes How We Know” reveals a researcher long accustomed to one-time interviewing of subjects. When circumstances become such that she re-interviews a subject after a 15-year hiatus, she learns how and why stories change, at least in part according to what the interviewer asks and how she asks it.
In “Studying My Hometown,” Albert Hunter, a Chicago school urban sociologist, kept returning to his hometown, Evanston. He did several projects on aspects of life and history in Evanston and eventually returned there with a position at Northwestern University. Because of his lifelong involvement in (and obvious love for) Evanston, he brings time and caring dimensions to his various studies that would not be possible for an outsider to the community.
Personal connection with place also appears in Karen Hansen’s “Breaching Boundaries and Dowsing for Stories on the Great Plains.” Hansen’s Norwegian grandparents settled in North Dakota on land her great-grandmother had “stolen from Native people.” Hansen’s task was how, as a white woman, she could create rapport and reciprocity with descendants of the people her family had wronged. By repeated visits to the reservation where she focused her work, Hansen found the time to create trusting relationships with people from whom she wished to learn. And learn she did.
And so on—each of the chapters is a gem unto itself and very much worth reading. The chapters were chosen wisely with an eye toward extending the reader’s knowledge not only of what constitutes slow sociology but of the great variety of topics presented. There is integrity, passion, and wonder in these chapters, and I found the book a great pleasure to read.
That said, there are issues that came unexpectedly (or serendipitously, if you prefer) to mind. These are not in the task the editors set for themselves in gathering this excellent collection, but they popped out at me all the same as I read it.
Three quarters of the sixteen chapters are by women. Most appear to be single mothers and/or divorced. Hints of the significance of these realities is mentioned in quick passing by several authors. It is not clear in most cases if they slowed down the one project under discussion or others too or perhaps their publishing careers altogether.
There is a sort of apologetic tone to many of the discussions. Although the authors persuade this reader that the research and the investigator benefited greatly from disruptions, they seem to hesitate to take the next step of suggesting that a lot of projects might benefit from slowing down.
My own personal disappointment in the wonderful increase in the number of women in academics is that in general they seem to have accepted the masculine/patriarchal notion of “productivity,” with its assumption that more is better and the correlative assumption that publishing trumps teaching and even family obligations. While it can be argued that in conventional gender terms, teaching is a proper feminist concern, valuing relationships highly and offering support, nurturing, empathy, and compassion to students, that’s not the way male-determined norms of promotions, salaries, and intramural respect are met. (As one who publishes perhaps less than average, I can explain what teaching means to me and why I wait until I have something I really want to say before I write, but this is not the venue for that discussion.)
On the first page of the Introduction, the editors observe: “most published descriptions of the research process take a standard narrative form: an idea for study, followed by data collection, analysis, and writing.” They go on to argue convincingly for the virtues of disrupted or otherwise prolonged projects. What is left hanging there, as in most sociological discourse on the research process, is the “idea for study.” There is in the academy an assumption of complete democracy in selecting topics for investigation. On one hand that make sense, and I support it. But at the same time, while we sociologists have at our disposal extraordinary concepts and methods for studying social class issues (the latest public iteration of this harsh reality is “inequality”), structural violence, the social forces underlying climate change activism and climate change denial, the continuing and ever festering issues of race, police and prisons, gender, sexualities, usurpation of democracy by moneyed forces, and the peculiarity of institutions, including our own universities and colleges, fairly seething with cruelty, injustice, and top-heavy administrations, rather little in our journals and in otherwise outstanding collections such as this one take on the really big and urgent issues. I have noticed how, and for sadly obvious reasons, younger faculty learn to play it safe by writing on topics that do not threaten structures and processes of domination. This book’s chapters are not by those younger sociologists, but these authors follow that same pattern of choosing safe and rather small topics rather than more pressing, potentially controversial, overarching ones.
These are not criticisms of this fine book, but rather issues that came to my mind while reading it.