Digital Migrating and Storyworlding with Women We Love: A Feminist Ethnography

Abstract

This contemporary feminist ethnography draws on in-depth ethnographically-anchored lifestory interviews with loved ones and uses digital media (such as ArcGIS) to expand the ethnographic collection around the globe. Members of the FRC conceived of the WomenWeLove Project as an opportunity for the lesser-told stories of six ordinary women from different places to take center stage. By digitizing the stories, researchers and participants are able to join in the use of public digitalizations (like the #MeToo movement) to connect through empowering ethnographic efforts. Their stories are contextualized within and across one another as a complex study of women’s lives in geopolitical heterosexism and patriarchy. The name of the project, WomenWeLove, both honors those we are writing about and acknowledges love as methodologically salient. It is unusual to conduct studies of any kind within the context of such close researcher/participant relationships. At the intersection of ethnography and love, emerges the methodological innovation of migratory storyworlding. The paper contributes to our contemporary ethnographic theories and practices by committing to love as a methodologically interesting orientation toward one’s research, examining the migratory and digitized possibilities for ethnography, and by introducing a migratory storyworlding methodology.

Keywords

feminist ethnography storyworlding lifestory interviews digital ethnography love

Project Website: OfWomenWeLove.org

I think what I would like to do is talk a little bit about my granddaughter Samantha, because to talk about Sam is to talk about myself. Instead of starting with the usual, “I was born” kind of stuff, I would like to start with when you were born into this world and you came into my life. (Lorraine “Raine” Chanin 2018)

When Samantha (one of the co-researchers) asked her grandmother, Raine (a participant), to share memories for our WomenWeLove project, Raine began her stories with Samanthta’s birth, jumping right over all the intervening years between her own birth and Sam’s birth (see Image 1). Samantha was as much the focus of Raine’s life as she herself was.

Image 1.

Raine and Sam.

It would be difficult to get much closer than this in a relationship between a researcher and a participant. Our paper demonstrates new methodological concepts that intimately build upon close relational engagements with and for participants. We connect a discussion of love with our concepts of migratory ethnography and storyworlding through which emerges the methodological innovation of migratory storyworlding. The paper contributes to contemporary ethnographic theories and practices by:

Committing to love as a methodologically interesting orientation;

Examining the migratory and digitized possibilities for ethnography; and

Introducing a migratory storyworlding methodology.

We advance the counter-oppressive potential of diverse stories to foster the vision of new worlds through which the good will of love, equity, and justice are imagined and brought into being. We invite readers to visit the aforementioned project website in order to engage with the multimodal, digital ethnographic project on which the paper is based.

If one of the goals of ethnography is making the strange familiar, then ethnography and love have a lot in common. Familiarity is a kind of knowing that goes beyond cognitive knowing (without excluding it). The word familiar, based in the word family, implies emotional investment, shared experience, and immersion in a social context. The steps an ethnographer takes in learning about communities are similar to those that family members or friends would implicitly take in building relationships: listening, attention to detail, reciprocity, position taking, and willingness for people to change over time (Carspecken, 2018). The name of the project, WomenWeLove, honors those we are writing with/about and acknowledges love as methodologically salient.

The WomenWeLove ethnography begins with people and contexts already near and dear to us, connecting with our families, friends, and neighbors. We draw on conversations and interviews with women we have been close to over a long stretch of time, as well as our impressions of them and the images, recipes, and songs they’ve shared or that we associate with them. Love as an ideal is foundational to the way we interact with our participants. We define the word love in this context as affection or fellow feeling (feeling alongside others) with positive intentions, but this is a rough definition since even within our small collective, there are varied words and histories associated with the concept. Love in the Black U.S. community, for example, involves resistance since relationships have to be built in the face of disproportionate levels of incarceration, and in the face of memories of family separations under slavery (Cunningham, 2017; Jones-Rogers, 2016) while, also, enriched by the Greco-Christian concept of agape (Semien, 2015¹). In Hindi, some of the many terms for the English word love include prema—unselfish affection—and maitri—friendship or alliance. In Mandarin, the Confucian virtues include ren—altruism. All these meanings and manifestations of love have connections with us as researchers and the women in and around our lives.

We begin this paper by briefly describing our research collective and some of the technical aspects of our methodology. Following this, we clarify the importance of the project by locating its key characteristics. Then, we explore the concepts of digital migration and our new methodological concept storyworlding. In the end, we will look at the future implications of our approach for contemporary ethnography.

Our Feminist Research Collective and Methods

The Feminist Research Collective (FRC) is a group of researchers working together to explore feminism in education. The group was founded at Indiana University during Fall 2017, expanding recently to the University of Florida. We wanted to do a collaborative study meaningful to each of us. Drawn to the idea of exploring the ordinary, we decided to engage with women in our lives. The process of bringing our thought piece to reality integrated both conventional and emergent methods.

Our group collaborates through/with diverse perspectives that are influenced by our identities and social locations. Our collective positionality is shaped by our varying racial, ethnical, and economic experiences, career statuses, educational opportunities, and stages of life: We are graduate students, early career faculty, and senior faculty. We are of different racial, ethnic, and social situations. United as feminist scholars, we continue to work together from our care for each other and from a passion for this project. Emerging from our work is a new type of ethnography: migratory storyworlding ethnography.

Feminist Ethnography

We clearly identify our work as feminist without settling on a succinct definition of feminism. We are in the process of deepening our own understandings of both feminism and feminist inquiry. Having come together with that label in place, we interrogate its race, class, and heteronormative assumptions and effects. “Feminism,” as a concept, has a history of important definitional debates. In the first paragraph of Bloomsbury’s (2019) Handbook of 21^st Century Feminist Theory, Robin Truth Goodman claims that “It is impossible to consider feminism as having produced a settled body of theory. . .feminism must be presented in active development” (Goodman, 2019). Yet, there is a risk in failing to pin down an orienting set of definitions and theories. Namely, opportunities for critique, dialogue and social action get stifled. Across the shifting and competing definitions of feminism, rest the divergent experiences of women’s lives. This is not primarily an academic problem (Goodman, 2019). More importantly, the history and contemporary aspects of the definitional debates indicate the breadth of diversity across experiences, social locations, and opportunities for sociological and psychological reflection associated with the varied ramifications of sex and gender. bell hooks (2000) argued that the feminist movement has suffered because it lost clear definitions. She claims that, “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” (p. 1). This definition is clear enough to inspire affinity and open enough to invite diversity.

Despite definitional complexity, this ethnography is feminist in ways that are important to identify (Korth, 2002; 2005; Schrock, 2013). First, our ethnography centers on the lives of women, including transwomen, as a matter of equity and justice for women and children, whose lives have been minoritized across the spectra of social opportunity. Second, our research is collaborative in ways that are largely characteristic of feminist work. We challenge ourselves to reflect relationally and collaboratively on our positions both with one another in the FRC and with our participants. Further, we debrief our work, read, and write with one another. Third, we engage in research that is relevant for the lives of our participants. Fourth, we remain collaboratively open to critiques (both from within and from without, including those from our participants) that wrestle our own understandings, engagements, and expressions anchored in oppressive cultural and ideological roots. Fifth, we center equity and justice in both methodology and substance, believing that there can be no love where there is domination (hooks, 2000, p. 103). These commitments could also characterize ethnographies that do not call themselves “feminist”; thus it is important to state that, for us, these ways of engaging specifically work to undermine traditional, male-centric, and sexist ways of thinking about inquiry enacted through the paradigm of the lone, aloof, disembodied researcher of enlightenment imagery (Harding, 1993). One of the important methodologies to emerge in U.S. feminist consciousness-raising was sisterhood—or sister circles. We locate ourselves within the practices of sisterhood as described by hooks (2000) and embodied in the Combahee River Collective (Taylor, 2017): it is an opportunity for interpersonal collective political solidarity, bonding through differences, a refusal of domination, anti-sexist thinking, and consciousness-raising (hooks, 2000).

In-depth Interviewing in the Context of Long-Term Relationships

The heart of our ethnography is constituted of in-depth interviews with women we love about their lives. The interviews are situated within long relationships that we expect will persist across lifespans. Many of us conducted the interviews face to face, using audio recordings to capture the talk. These recordings were then transcribed. Some of the interviews were conducted and recorded using digital technology (FaceTime, for example). Each participant was interviewed two or more times lasting hours. As a collective, thus far, we have completed over 40 hours of interviewing.

These relationally contextualized interviews are augmented through regular contact with participants; access to baby books, yearbooks, personal websites, and photo albums; family histories; sleuthing into local archives; longstanding histories/knowledge and shared memories; conversations with others who share their lives with our participants (daughters, for example); and so on forming a rich ethnographic tapestry. Across participants, we aim to be diverse and inclusive, spanning a vivid variety of times, geographies, media, and cultures.

For this paper, we reference research with just a few of our participants. White researcher Samantha worked with her grandmother, Raine, who is living with cancer. Suparna, a South Asian Indian, studied with Betty, her friend Paula’s mother. Betty is an American of Japanese ancestry who was a child in Hawaii during the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing. Barbara interviewed her mother, a white woman born the 1930s to a modest railroad family in the U.S. Midwest. Black feminist Dajanae included photographs of Black art belonging to her Grandma Bell. Lucinda, an English American, became close with her future daughter-in-law Ella, a white transwoman from a small town in Indiana. Chinese scholar Pengfei was interested in learning more about her great-grandmother, 卞夏氏, already deceased at the time of the study. Pengfei reconstructed stories about her great-grandmother in conversation with her grandmother, 徐艳秋. Though more participants were involved, this paper elucidates the methodological points by drawing only on the stories are already included on the WomenWeLove website.

In-depth interviewing is an important element of ethnographic research, which formatively draws on multiple ways of generating data (Walford, 2018). Many ethnographers, however, would argue that interviews alone cannot constitute an ethnography (Walford, 2018). Thus, we will clarify how our interviews form the hub of our ethnographic project. First, including interviews as part of an ethnography typically means that those interviews are contextualized within a broader effort. Each interview is lovingly nestled within long relationships. Second, our broader ethnographic effort involves the creation of a website through which women’s lives can be told collectively. Moreover, both within and across the interviews, other sources are drawn upon so that interviews do not stand alone, but are set within their own contexts for understanding (including Ella’s culturally sensitive poetry, Barbara’s childhood during the U.S. depression, and 卞夏氏’s historical China, for example). Third, interviews ought to reflect what would be assumed to be a multitude of experiences, perspectives, and so forth. Here, the contextualizing relates to making sure there are enough alternatives through which to make sense of the very particular experiences expressed through interviews, for example, photos and newspaper articles. Fourth, traditional ethnography is concerned with culture. Individual experience animated through interviews are informative of and understandable through culture. Our interviews draw out multiple, globalized understandings of woman, and elucidate relevant cultural contexts for the individual lives of our participants in part through our own ongoing participation in their lives. The study, as a whole, stands as a cultural critique of devaluing ordinary women and their lives, which compromises much of the world’s social development in cultural contexts of patriarchy.

We most closely followed a life-story approach to the interviews, with a few questions pre-planned in case they were needed to stimulate conversation. Our loved ones primarily led the interviews, taking the talk in the directions of their choosing, and nurtured by our careful, empathetic and engaged listening.

Interpretations and Analyses

Research of any kind enters an ongoing stream of cultural activity, through which interpretations of ordinary life are already underway. There is no particular starting point to this process for researchers. There are, however, entry points. To enter ethnographically is precisely to join the intersubjective life of a community through participation, dialogue, witnessing, and so on. We always do this to some less-than-perfect extent. Description, interpretation, and analysis will necessarily be recursive and intimate, and will involve one’s intersubjective engagement with participants. One is describing, interpreting, and analyzing even as one is taking field notes.

Ethnographically speaking, we articulate intersubjective understandings with our loved ones on the one hand while simultaneously establishing intersubjective intersections across participants. One example of how we are doing this includes reading and commenting on drafts. The interpretations of each participant are set into a broader analytic context using a digitized web-based, storymapping software (ArcGIS)². This ethnography is ongoing, and our analyses will continue to deepen and expand. For us, the analysis process always includes participants.

Validity

“[In ethnography] what is said [in interviews] will not be taken as the only possible thing that might have been said about an issue and will be tested against other data generated in different ways and against what is said by the same person or others in different interviews” (Walford 2018, p. 2). On the one hand, we are taking our participants’ words on their own terms. We know that there are stories that were not told and that our loved ones were selective in what they said. We know the stories unabashedly center through their own perspectives. This does not mean that the stories they offered are less valid. Those stories help us meaningfully understand how they as participants want to be seen and known through the ethnography. Their stories are validated on subjective terms—through their honesty and sincerity (Carspecken, 1995). We interviewed the participants multiple times, we shared what we wrote with them, and we met with them at places of their own choosing using loosely structured interviews to give them the opportunity to choose what they talked about, all within the context of loving relationships. We returned to them with any disjunctures across the stories to clear up misunderstandings or clarify discrepancies. We know that meaning is multiple and contextual, and that how our beloved women felt at the time of the study indicates their feelings in those moments and is, therefore, not totalizing.

Moreover, relevant cultural understandings are required in order to recognize the identities and values energized through the stories. Such sociocultural values and norms can be reconstructed from the interviews to deepen our understandings of each person’s life. They also put into motion the cultural contexts of traditional interest for ethnographers including norms and values.

The stories also involve objectivity. For example, Betty was a youngster in Hawaii at the time of the Japanese bombing. This is an objective claim. When we had questions of an objective nature related to our participants’ stories, we sought additional sources to fill in or complexify what we heard. We are committed to strong objectivity (Harding, 2015), which assumes that a diversity of perspectives contributes to strengthening the objective claims. In our overall ethnographic project, this diversity is achieved across participants and researchers. Moreover, strong objectivity benefits from including the experiences and perspectives of those marginalized through mainstream knowledge and practices, like ordinary women around the world. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, we consider our project, as a whole, to be validated through the meaning it has for the participants and the potential it holds for the transformation of an oppressive society.

The use of the concept validity is contested amongst qualitative methodologists, with some scholars finding it useful and others straying away from problematic connotations of universality and singularity of perspective (Dennis, 2013). We use a more nuanced understanding of validity as communicatively structured engagements of multiple perspectives (Dennis, 2018).

Locating Our Project

The following ethnographic points are crucial to the WomenWeLove project: ethnography as close at hand, migration as a central metaphor, stories as a way of knowing, and ethnography as digitized practice. Each of these brings forward an aspect of doing ethnography. Thinking of ethnography as practices rather than products is important to how the characteristics of our project are meant to be interpreted.

Ethnography Close at Hand

The traditional form of ethnography tells of ethnographers as strangers/travelers who gradually integrate themselves into cultures other than their own and become community members over time (Darnell, 2001). This was the thread running through Harriet Martineau’s ([1838]2017) writing on methods after visiting the United States in the 1830s. She advocated both “sympathy”³ and “discourse” as essential means to understanding other people’s communities. There is an equally long tradition of ethnographers maintaining a language of distance in their accounts (Harding, 2015), aligning themselves with the methods of the physical sciences, in the footsteps of Comte (1848) and Durkheim ([1895]1919). We have more in common with the former than the latter, but in contrast to both, we take familiarity as a starting point. We work from home, so to speak, skipping the first steps of an ethnographer’s journey into an unfamiliar social world. The distinction between “outsider” and “insider” is blurred and complex, but we begin as relative insiders, who are in a process of further discovery with the people we thought we knew well. Suparna, for example, could be considered an “outsider” who slowly became privy to the family stories that Betty and Paula shared with her. This contrasts with Samantha, Barbara, Pengfei, Sylvia, Alycia, and Dajanae who were intimately enmeshed in longstanding relationships with their family members.

Ethnography on home ground builds on the work of the many researchers who, also, focused on their own families and communities and who were not afraid to include their affective selves in their narratives (like DuBois, 2007; Barbara Myerhoff, 1978; Zora Neale Hurston, 1978; Kirin Narayan, 2012). Several authors have drawn out the implications of this, writing explicitly about mutuality and care as a basis for their research methodologies (Behar, 1996; Carspecken, 2018; Dennis, 2013; Sanjek, 2014; Skoggard and Waterston, 2015). Affective distance results in real barriers (Jenkins, 2015). Like those before us, we incorporate ourselves within the ethnographic process and center our care for our participants throughout the research. Aligned with these scholars, our work demonstrates the benefits of bringing such close ethnographic practices into our methodological conversations.

Migration as Metaphor in Ethnographic Practices

While we, researchers, are not migrating, our project involves metaphorical migration in three different senses. First, we gather women’s stories from different parts of the globe into one online site. Second, we aim to communicate our participants’ life experiences to enable academic readers and lay readers to migrate—to imaginatively step into the participants’ worlds. Feeling with others (fellow feeling) is implied in critical ethnography’s advocacy for social change through the recognition of “others.” Ethnographic writing (and imagery) has the power to expand the range of solidarity across communities and expand advocacy for newly familiar “others” along the way. Third, migration as a metaphor encourages us to set our ethnographic present in the context of constant change. We accept that our knowledge is provisional, and by establishing the shifting nature of any ethnographic effort, we are called to locate that knowledge in a migrating context.

Toward a specifically feminist notion of the migration metaphor, we move women from being outsiders to insiders in the public mind. For a matter of centuries, it has been rare to see women, and especially women of color, working class women, queer and trans women, and elders, as central, feeling, breathing characters in the stories on the global stage. This lack of focus on women’s experiences has consequences for everyday life. This includes inequities that are accepted as normal in political and economic systems, and the ways households divide labor. Our work centers on women whose lives are visible primarily through private relationships; thus, we shine light on people who are often passed over. They might live lives of “guileless humility” like Barbara’s mother. They might never have had a name at all, like Pengfei’s great grandmother. They might have felt alienated from their given names and bodies, like Lucy’s friend Ella. We hope through our work that our participants’ lives will migrate into readers’ imaginations and into the global mind.

Stories as Opportunities to Know One Another

Frances Trix (2018) encouraged us to ask whether we might endeavor to encounter refugees as humans rather than as categories. Trix (2018) found that migrants were most likely to be incorporated into communities where they had one-on-one interactions with residents, and where there were collective memories of previous successful incorporations. Stories mattered, images mattered, the words leaders used mattered, and opportunities for interaction mattered. Without prolonged engagement, it is difficult to appreciate another as a fluid human being with needs, desires and insights.

Kirin Narayan (2012) noted that ethnographic writing has been “from its very inception torn between contrary impulses” (2012, 2) between systematic, empirical, and theoretically oriented writing that is, also, vivid and emotionally compelling. She underscores the power of the latter to bridge social distance through the kind of “thick description” advocated by Geertz (1974), which “helps make people’s behavior more comprehensible when we aren’t immediately familiar with their assumptions” (Narayan, 2012, 8). Vivid writing, particularly in the form of narrative, conveys understandings that are not easily accessed by more typical scholarly formats. For one thing, focusing on people and places enables both writers and readers “to move beyond cultural generalizations” to “potentially challenge prevailing themes” (Narayan, 2012, 15). For another, narrative always incorporates time and change, carrying a reader along with it. Finally, it uses sensorial and affective language, images, sounds, and even flavors to transport readers viscerally into the participants’ spaces and experiences. By generating online archives of vivid, experience-near, materials we build a project that harnesses, rather than avoids, emotional ways of knowing. Narayan (2012) wrote, “I learned to think about how stories carry personal and cultural meaning and how their telling has social consequences” (2012, 8). We endeavor to be change-makers as well as researchers; and narratives can be a means to change.

Ethnography Digitized

Hallett & Kristen Barber (2014) distinguished between ethnographies of cyber spaces and ethnographic inclusion of cyber space within the contexts of more traditional face-to-face ethnographies. They pointed out that the adoption of digital approaches to ethnography, in contrast with ethnographies of digital spaces, has been slow. They suggested that because ordinary life for many involve online engagements, ignoring such aspects of life produces a disjuncture between the ways of life being studied and the modes of study themselves. This point is particularly relevant for ethnographers whose fundamental orientations have brought them into living lives with participants (Eisenhart, 2018). Our study extends this position to include digitization as a way of bringing forward the lives of our participants so that they might touch one another from disparate times and spaces. In addition, we use the creation of our website as a way of inviting others into the ethnography. That is, the digitalization of the ethnography is what ultimately renders it a public project for all of us.

The digital platform serves as a unifying space for our collective research. The use of the story map medium allows each of the researchers to have autonomy, shaping their work with participants while also connecting with fellow researchers in a central location. This multimodal approach facilitated opportunities for us to check-in with our participants since they can see the website and provide insight on how the presentation feels, its accuracy, and its level of detail related to moving the stories from a personal space to the public domain. This is seldom possible with articles published in scholarly journals. The website itself also represents the developing larger ethnographic project.

The Emergence of a Migratory Storyworlding Ethnography

In a modest way, we are forging methodological conversations with one another through the doing of this ethnography. We began with an idea (talking with women we love) and drew on what we knew (ethnography). Further, we articulate our current thinking regarding the emergence of a migratory storyworlding ethnography, and later we talk about its relevance for contemporary ethnography.

Migration and Ethnography: Toward a Methodological Conversation

There has been a lot written about using ethnography to study migration, but nothing written that advances a methodological concept of migration. In this section of the paper, we propose a migratory ethnographic methodology as practices of transmigrating time and space, nation and language, face-to-face and digital, self and other. At first glance, our project seems to have the characteristics of multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995). First, of course, there are multiple sites that can be mapped in relation to one another juxtaposed with a digital site. Second, we are engaging in deeply personal and social understandings given established long-term relationships with our participants across those multiple sites. Third, multi-sited ethnography examines “the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space” (Marcus, 1995, 96) that work within and across stories. According to Marcus, “[Multi-sited] ethnography takes unexpected trajectories in tracing a cultural formation across and within multiple sites of activity that destabilize” (p. 96) important distinctions on which ethnography has relied. This aspect of discovery and destabilization also manifests in our project. Nevertheless, we cannot comfortably conceptualize our project as multi-sited ethnography nor as a study of migration.

Multi-sited Ethnography and Migration

Multi-sited ethnography has been a popular approach to the study of migration (Boccagni, 2016; Coleman and Hellermann, 2011). Marcus (1995) encouraged ethnographers to consider studying “mobile and multiply-situated” phenomena (p. 102) and, sure enough, migration has long been a topic of interest for ethnographers and social researchers. As multi-sited ethnography has developed specifically for use with transmigratory communities, critiques and advancements have emerged. Some of those relate well to our project. For example, one of the challenges in multi-sited ethnography has been how to deal methodologically with the “multi-local distribution of the field itself” (Boccagni, 2016, p. 4)—which we have addressed through the digitization of the “field” and by having multiple and expanding cadre of ethnographers. Our project can include Pengfei’s deceased great grandmother in China who did not have a name of her own (卞夏氏) while also including Dajanae’s “Mama” Katherine in the kitchen in Riverside, California.

Matsutake (2009) innovated multi-sited studies through “strong” ethnographic collaboration in which participants are actively involved in tracing and accounting for their own migration experiences and practices. Matsutake’s work critiques the hard distinction between ethnographer and subject-participants of study. In our work, we practice collaborative life-storying and we intend to extend the ethnography to include others around the globe who want to similarly engage with women they love.

Some critiques (Marcus, 2009; Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2003) “highlight the implausibility of traditional overreliance on a bounded, territorially based supposedly homogeneous entity. . .as a field or unit of analysis” (Boccagni 2016, 4). Multi-sited ethnography would do a better job articulating the experiences of migrants if it focused on “interconnected relationships” rather than on multi-sites—what is in-between the sites so to speak (Boccagni, 2016). Because we begin our ethnography with relationships of love between ethnographer and the women we are storying with, we emphasize the withness. That is, the being with which is in-between people. It is relational and intersubjective.

What has surprised us is how the relational aspects have also been mobile. For example, Suparna has been working with Betty to share her story (see Image 3). Recall that Betty is a Japanese American who was living in Hawaii when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor (see Image 2). Betty’s daughter, Paula, also got involved in reconstructing some of the stories. For example, Paula looked for Betty’s father’s obituary and texted it to Suparna at 10:45 p.m. one night. These relational synergies were not strategically established, but, instead have emerged organically in the process of engaging with one another.

Image 2.

Betty as a child in Hawaii.

Image 3.

An example of Black art in Grandma Bell’s home.

This ethnography establishes relationships across women who otherwise would have no opportunity to be on the same page. Dajanae’s Grandma Bell, a woman who adorned her home with Black art, would have no occasion to meet Barbara’s mom, a woman whose worldly travels left its footprints in mementoes carefully placed but only partially noticeable. In this migrating ethnography, there is an in-between to be honored and explored—an in-between that asks us to think about race and class amidst the women’s common desires to adorn their homes. In Grandma Bell’s home, Dajanae can’t miss the Black art because it lives out loud (see Image 4). In Barbara’s mom’s home, the clock on the wall is hardly noticeable until it strikes (see Image 5) and even then, one easily learns not to hear it, beautiful as it is. The contrast that emerges in-between helps us appreciate and understand both women in new ways.

Image 4.

Mama Barbara’s clock.

Image 5.

Betty walking to school with her gas mask.

Conversations happen in-between

Gieseking (2016) critiqued the role that nation-state borders play in conceptualizing migration work. They write about the ways in which lesbian and queer folk have carved out neighborhoods for themselves within the larger landscape of New York City, marking boundaries around their own safety, drawing on their own agency to do this. These lesbian and queer folk cross into the borderlands and come to know themselves in between (Anzaldua, 1987). Such contemporary critiques resonate with our work, but still leave the idea of migratory ethnography and migration as under-developed methodology. Gieseking (2016) described their participants as having created “intermittent and informal territories” to both describe their experience of constant mobility and expand their self-expression as lesbian and/or queer women (2016, 264). The WomenWeLove project draws multimodally on the possibility of creating digitized spaces through which this mobility and expansion for women whose long survival of public/private misogyny, racism, intersectional violence, and so on deserves its voice. We hope that globally others will interview women they love and share those stories through our project. The ethnography, then, expands in ways not entirely charted, but rather curated by us.

In a deeply personal way, Ella (Lucy’s loved one) described the dysphoria she experienced in a male body. The physical and hormonal migration of Ella’s body brought her home to herself so to speak. Ella’s story reminds us to think of migration as movement from one “state” to another where the static nature of the states is what forms the sense of border crossing. Ella had to build bridges between herself and the outside world AND between herself and the physiology of her birth body. Ella’s use of words (she is a poet and story writer) reaches out to others whose experiences are radically different from hers while simultaneously affirming those who have also experienced dysphoria. This migratory process of becoming foregrounds the trauma one experiences when the world insists on naming or categorizing you and on dictating your life opportunities through those names and categories. Migration can be a response to such traumas. The personal is political. This radical trans/gressing of gender in Ella’s story narrates becoming/coming out/coming as migrations of personal and political selfhood.

Migration as methodology

Migration as methodology explicitly acknowledges long-standing tensions and practices in ethnography. Our migrating methodology dialogues and exacerbates ethnographic tensions such as border crossings/border makings, insider/outsider, situated/global, with/for, material/imaginary, site/field and the root contrast between self/other. Our project exacerbates these tensions. Migration as methodology assumes that “We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain” (Phillips, 2013, xiii as quoted by Dick, 2018, 1), and that this imaginary is methodologically salient. Migration as methodology involves engaging these tensions and their imaginaries across time and space; materially and digitally; and physically and socially.

Our project requires continual border crossings and transgressings. For example, we have intentionally interviewed women of different generations than ourselves (crossing generations) while simultaneously dissolving generation as a border between us. Sam’s grandmother’s story brings this point to life. Raine narrated her life as a love story to Samantha. Sam’s presence in Raine’s life generated something new for them both that was equally dependent upon and free of generation as difference. Samantha and Raine did not simply position-take with one another’s perspectives; they invested in the very being of otherness—that most sacred of borders that constitutes the person of the self and the person of the other while also establishing the communion of the two. We think of this tension between the self/other, sameness/difference, as withness.

In migration studies, the field is dispersed. Our “field” migrates with us across space and time in very real ways, both in terms of what has been done and in terms of what is yet to be done, as women from all over the globe have their stories shared with people who have never travelled to their space or experienced their situations. Sharing stories and images in this way, through a field that is not bound by locale, creates opportunities for border crossings in the metaphorical sense. This dispersion means that each of us (participants, ethnographers, and readers) must traverse the strange/familiar, the material/imaginary, situated/global, insider/outsider, and the fascination with ourselves/others all along the way.

By opening ourselves up to the stories our loved ones want to tell, we accept those stories as interesting, valid, and worthwhile for their own sakes. Likewise, we let readers establish the meaning of our ethnographic tales for themselves. The point here is that the goal of our project is not to represent or depict a life only in terms of an objective, chronological storyline, but rather to animate our understandings of women’s lives on their own terms for what matters to them and then experience what becomes new when we open ourselves up in that way, through love. We know that our storytelling (like any storytelling) is partial, positioned, and purposeful. The ethnography is built of these partial stories, story seeds, and collections of stories, generated through loving engagements. The unique ways the stories are (re)told has everything to do with the loving relationships through which they are coming out. We think that there is something real, new, and creative that comes forth when one person listens to and writes about/with another person. Migration as methodology accepts longstanding relationships of good will as valid and worthwhile ethnography while acknowledging the ongoing possibilities for newness.

At last, our migrating methodology is decentering. The stories do not revolve around a central idea or starting/ending place so there is no set structural path. Each of the stories that comprise the ethnography take their own form and can be read/experienced in multiple ways. There is no central story, as the centers themselves migrate and shift within and across stories and the ethnography is ongoing and incomplete with no final whole established at the outset. This can be seen at the individual level and across the ethnography as-a-whole.

Digitized Ethnography

Tarana Burke, the African-American activist who founded the MeToo Movement, 2006, argued that survivors and advocates are stronger together (2018). Actress Alyssa Milano boosted the movement by digitizing it—she tweeted #MeToo. The hashtag was used over 12 million times around the globe in the first 24 hours (CBS, 2017). Recently, feminists have been drawn to digitalized opportunities to resist, challenge, document, learn, and intervene. Contemporary feminist media scholarship has established how digital spaces are sites of public creativity for feminist activism and connections (Mendes, Ringrose, &Keller, 2018). Hashtags are used to create conversational communities for disparate and even unfamiliar people across time and space, bridging incredible traditional divisions. A study on responses to sexual violence, women said that participating in the hashtag opportunities created meaningful networks of solidarity across women who felt heard in a digitized world of strangers (Mendes et al., 2018). They found that “this solidarity often transforms into a feminist consciousness amongst hashtag participants, which allows them to understand sexual violence as a structural rather than personal problem” (p. 4). Digitized spaces felt safe for the development of women-positive spaces and for building connections with people, but also for learning, awareness, and consciousness-raising (Mendes et al, 2018). Digitized spaces offer potential for women historically excluded to enter the public sphere in large numbers. Our project is situated within this energy of women personally communicating, connecting, telling/re-telling, and creating together by establishing digital public spaces. Digitized ethnography is by its nature both personal and public. And it transcends national borders, contributing to private and public migration.

Piacenti, Rivas, and Garrett (2014) used Facebook to study (im)migrant experiences (from Mexico to the United States). They argued that the use of technology is destroying the age-old anthropological concept of field. Distinct from virtual ethnography interested in studying virtual interactions/spaces, expanded ethnography (which is where they locate their own Facebook ethnographic research) reaches out from the participant observation, ethnographic relationships developed in face-to-face contexts (Piacenti et al., 2014). Digital media afford the co-present participation across multiple ethnographers in a myriad of sites.

Judith Aston, who advanced the practice of ethnographic montages, wrote, “As opposed to creating highly authored interactive montages, designed to communicate discrete points readers are drawn into understanding and insights that benefit from the experiences of being engaged with the stories” (Aston 2010, 8). Aston drew on Manovich (2001) who suggested that twenty-first century technology could provide users with the ability to multitask through a variety of interfaces. Aston used someone else’s ethnographic video data to create split screen montages that required the users to interact with the moving images such that “users become actively engaged in the montage process by being able to cross-cut between simultaneously presented clips” to find their “own connections between them” (p. 3, emphasis added). Their aim was to create a platform for users to interact directly with the ethnographic material opening space for innovation in research and the presentation of the outcomes of research. The WomenWeLove ethnography creates a similar opportunity, not just for “readers” of a curated set of data, but also in terms of bringing their own loved ones into the ongoing ethnography. Thus, the digitization offers broader democratization, inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility even across the roles of ethnographer and participant (though we acknowledge there are limitations related to internet/computer access).

Digitization is not just a means to an end, not only a tool in the technical sense. Digitization is a dialogic mode of engaging where images, sound, text, and arrangement on the page reflect and resource our ongoing interpretations. For example, we see visual metaphors in Ella’s story or listen to the voice of Pengfei’s grandmother in Chinese. We can experience the blended stories of Barbara’s mom’s experiences and the town’s historical record.

Storyworlding: Toward a Methodological Concept

We developed the idea of storyworlding as a combination of two words, “story” and “worlding.” The concept emerges through the experience of our ethnographic practices, and is informed by the philosophical ideas of several theorists including Heidegger (1996) and Spivak (1990), as well as more recent elaborations of the two keywords (Ong 2011; Pheng, 2016; Raja 2019). In this section of the paper, we introduce the methodological concept of storyworlding by drawing on both philosophy and practice.

Storying

Both interviews and stories are performative (Denzin, 2003). By this we mean that they are active engagements through which we reach understanding and relate with one another meaningfully. Storying is the collaborative engagement of performing stories together. Understanding a story usually involves reconstructing, at least implicitly, an implied narrative from seeds—seeds of potential stories (Dennis, 2016). Through story performances, we simultaneously position ourselves and others. The seeds of stories reference potentially shared master narratives/counter narratives relative to one another. “The partialness of stories speaks to our inability to fully capture a coherent complete sense of self and the incapacity of any metanarrative to compensate for this” (Dennis, 2016, 1073). When we, as members of a community, interpret story seeds, we are able to understand the story from multiple perspectives, including from a first-person experiential perspective, regardless of whether or not we have, actually, lived similar experiences as the storyteller. Both imagining ourselves in the story and imagining how we are positioned through the storytelling extend beyond the ethnographic lifestory interviews to include the audiences. Storying does not produce a simple, self-evident one-to-one correspondence between the expression and the meaning of that expression. Instead, storying generates opportunities to understand the experiences of selves. Samantha’s grandmother, Raine, is dying of cancer. At the end of her interview, she tells Sam that she must tell her story in this way, “This will be a type of amends, a cleansing for me, and a goodbye. Because I need for you to know how hard it is going to be to leave you, and how hard it will be for you when I go. But I will flitter back. The butterfly will flitter back, I promise, but not too often. I’m still a part of you.”

Our participants collaborated with us to author their own stories. Barbie’s (her childhood nickname) mom (Barbara) started to tell stories, but her mom did not have all of the details. For example, Barbara (the mom) knew she was born at the top of a local hotel, but she didn’t know much about why. Barbie (the daughter) did some sleuthing to fill in that information and her mom was happy to get those missing details. Ella’s pages in the ethnography are stories in her own words, in the first person, but 卞夏氏’s stories are told by Pengfei from a personal third person perspective. Dajanae is telling the stories of her grandmother, “Mama” Katherine, through kitchen-time recipes. These differences in positionality and authorship influence both form and substance of the stories. By acknowledging the act of storying, ethnographers take responsibility for the positioning, authoring, and fielding of the stories themselves. And in our case, collaboratively. This storying is also an engagement with the digital medium.

Worlding

In Being and Time, Heidegger (1996) described a phenomenological and existential meaning of “world” in relation to human beings (human Dasein). According to Tugendhat, Heidegger developed the thesis that all understanding and knowledge of entities is based on a conception of the world, whereby world is grasped not as the ‘totality of entities,’ but as ‘relative to human Dasein.’ (Tugendhat [1979]1986, 151). Heidegger’s insight is that as human beings, we exist always already as being-in-the-world. One lives in the world with others “who care in the midst of entities about which one can care” (Tugendhat [1979]1986, 177). Being-in-the-world means being open to various possibilities for human engagements within the world. Because Heidegger’s use of the term “world” has a praxis-orientation (that we come to being through our action in/with/through the world), being-in-the-world simultaneously means to make sense of the world as both the totality of the situations in which one’s praxis takes place and the praxis or coming-to-be itself. In this sense, we can talk about the verb form of being-in-the-world as worlding.

It is Gayatri Spivak who gave the term “worlding” sociopolitical relevance, and a feminist and postcolonial, anti-global-capitalist spin (Spivak, 1974, 1984, 1985a, 1985b, 1987, 1990, 1999, 2012). Spivak (1990) wrote of “the worlding of a world” (1990, 1) to call attention to the manner in which colonialists inscribed names onto territories they presumed were uninscribed. Accordingly, such worlding depends on the assumption that one is the only and first author on a blank slate. Drawing on Spivak, Raja (2019) proposed that worlding can be understood as that epistemological sense by which the colonial masters not only established themselves (and thus by extension their laws and their perceptions of the world as the norm) but, simultaneously, also ensured that the subjects whom they governed would see their own world through the eyes of their masters. Spivak revealed the profound dynamics upon which the British colonial masters governed in India, namely, that colonialism sought to control not only one’s actions but also the way one perceived the world. In both Heidegger’s and Spivak’s writing, worlding is intimately related to the possibility or the erasure of the possibilities for human beings to act agentically. It is a keyword that connects how one perceives/interprets/experiences the world within which they ARE and how one acts within that experienced world.

In the WomenWeLove ethnography, we animate a new sense of worlding, one that aims to release the counter-oppressive potential of women’s stories in order to envision a new world in which women’s experiences of different cultures, races, and ethnicities are interconnected. By fostering the interconnectedness of the women we love, we reversely use the Spivakian sense of worlding, not as a strategy to govern and to repress, but as an approach through which we both nurture and act freely and agentically in the spirit of good will.

For both Heidegger and Spivak, worlding was more than spatiality. In this sense, worlding is significantly different from mapping, as mapping primarily seeks to represent the spatial relations of different locations to one another. In our project, the act of worlding is brought to life through narrating stories and engaging in conversations among participants and researchers. As stories are recollected and shared, ethnographers and participants together turn their faces to the past in order to envision an alternative future. They participate in the impending beingness (Heidegger) of one another. With the ArcGIS web-based, digital mapping medium, maps are used both within stories and across the ethnography as whole, but subordinate to the worlding activities.

Storyworlding

Every story, every act of storying, is seedling potential indicative of worlds in the sense established earlier—worlds of understanding, relationships, and knowledge through which one comes into being. Suparna’s relationships with Betty and her daughter Paula illustrate this. Suparna would meet with Betty and Paula as friends. When they decided to participate in this ethnography, Suparna started audio recording their conversations. Soon Betty was bringing photo albums. Suparna shared these photos and stories with the rest of us. We began to understand ourselves and Betty through her experiences as a youngster, like carrying her gas mask to school.

This storyworlding methodology assumes that stories do not merely reflect an experience; they, also, become a way to grasp and produce meaning with others as it relates to us, and as it relates to caring for and with ourselves and one another.

Storyworlding and migrating as methodological concepts actively engage traditional ethnographic tensions (self/other, subject/object, and familiar/unfamiliar, for example) in productive ways. As with other forms of critical ethnography, storyworlding and migrating both situate inquiry through its active, relational, doing. Storyworlding acknowledges the act of bringing into being and migrating acknowledges the act of transgressing movement.

Implications

This paper aims to provide new methodologies for ethnographic researchers and offers implications for the social world as well. Our project expands the typical ethnographic approaches and orientations from which we drew. In the implications section, we look toward future possibilities for contemporary ethnography and for the social world, where our most meaningful marks are left.

Implications for Contemporary Ethnography

We have drawn on ethnographic principles and tensions to move forward a way of thinking about migratory digitized storyworlding. All three of these descriptors fit our project and reflect some interesting highlights for ethnography. Of course, one could engage in migratory, but not digitized ethnography and so forth. However, taken all together, and with an eye toward what might make this interesting for ethnography practices, we would like to suggest the following implications and questions.

Our work encourages ethnographers to engage more democratically with their participants, and to open opportunities for study to evolve in ways that are meaningful for participants—and maybe even co-opted by them. Perhaps the ethnographer is, herself, destabilized. Contemporary ethnographers can, also, benefit from thinking relationally with their participants in the long term. Perhaps in specific situations ethnographers cannot start with those they love, but they can take up a loving attitude in relation to their participants. Such an orientation does not, by default, result in bias. Our idea of beginning with love is to maximize good will and character throughout the process without assuming that such an orientation automatically produces biased work. Love is an aspect of knowing rather than an impediment to it.

We can begin to conceptualize digitized social movements like the #MeToo movement as transformative moments in society creating stunning opportunities for previously hidden conversations to emerge. We think about Ella’s stories and how vital they could be for trans inclusion and acceptance. The digitization broadens their reach, but also makes it possible for closeted LGBTQIA+ to find encouragement and solace without putting themselves at risk.

Storying methodologies can be exciting ways to engage ethnographically even when trying to understand institutionalized systems. For example, Barbara interviewed Winifred Kysoba, a Ugandan friend, who decided to talk about her educational life. Winnie’s stories illustrate how she thought of herself as a learner when she was young, the gendered struggles she endured, and the way she thinks of learning now. Through her stories, we find out about the schooling structure, its perceived values, and how Winnie’s own self-conceptions were linked to those.

Storyworlding as methodology foregrounds withness. Ethnographers have long valued being with their participants, but storyworlding suggests that contemporary ethnographers take seriously that the withness and storying implicates shared worlds of understanding, worlds within which and for which we have something at stake together. When we study social practices, we are not only studying about those practices and peoples, we are becoming together. More attention could be paid to this.

Implications for the Social World

Storyworlding, as collaborative and migratory ethnographic practice, offers an opportunity to create a new vision for the social world. Storyworlding recognizes that both the storytellers and listeners have something worth saying/hearing. Stories, either ordinary or special, create connections. We find ourselves relating to and empathizing with the lived experiences of those who may be deemed as different or other, with a deeper understanding comes a deeper care.

Such a culture of care has reinforced existing ties and forged new ones. For instance, some of us have intimate familial connections with our participants, like Samantha, Alycia, and Dajanae and their grandmothers, Pengfei and her great-grandmother, and Barbara and Sylvia with their mothers, while some of these have blossomed into supportive, bonding relationships like between Betty’s family and Suparna or between Pooja and her domestic helper, Rajdevi. Instead of colliding and dividing insider/outsider relationships between the research participants and researchers, boundaries have collapsed and newer stories have emerged as the conversations with the women we love have carried on during family get-togethers, reunions, vacations, or virtually. As the WomenWeLove project grows beyond this group the continuing culture of care and empathy will create a unique pathway of democratization in research. Our research participants have the final say in choosing the stories they want to share or not to share, and in taking the initiative to do further research on their own. Future participants and researchers will continue doing likewise.

In an era marked by renewed interest in family history and genealogical records of ancestors, storyworlding can generate a fascination in families for tracing their histories. Betty’s daughter and niece have started looking for memorabilia and have unearthed Betty’s father’s draft card dated 1917. Dajanae’s family has been discussing how their family’s migration story differed from those of other contemporary African-American families. As we share and tell stories of migrating to new countries, regions, bodies, and selfhoods, we ourselves become familiar and/or are re-familiarized with the stories of these migrants with the hope that the stories of “others” will be included, expanding our familiarities with global women’s stories yet to come.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Barbara Dennis

Notes

Author Biographies

Barbara Dennis is a professor of Inquiry Methodology at Indiana University. She is interested in the intersections of activism, justice, and inquiry. Her recently published book, Walking With Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Education Promise, tells of the methodological innerworkings of a critical ethnography.

Lucinda Carspecken is a lecturer in Inquiry Methodology at Indiana University. Her work focuses on the non-cognitive aspects of research, and she recently edited a book on love and ethnography. She has also published on Utopianism, religious minorities and dementia caregiving. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology.

Pengfei Zhao (PhD, Indiana University) is an assistant professor of qualitative methodology in the College of Education at the University of Florida. She works on a wide spectrum of philosophical, social, and methodological theories to formulate a praxis- and social justice-oriented qualitative research methodology. In her empirical work, she primarily uses ethnographic, narrative, and action research approaches to conduct studies in both China and the United States.

Samantha Silberstein is a PhD candidate in Higher Education at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research sits between feminist epistemology and critical whiteness studies to explore spaces for critical consciousness development in higher education and the role of methodology in this process. Her dissertation explores the potential for co-curricular learning as consciousness raising in teacher education through a critical whiteness lens.

Pooja Saxena recently successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at Indiana University. She focuses on the impact of the embedded masculinity of the STEM fields and the symbolic representation of gender in policy formulation and implementation. By providing a thick description of the intersectionality of gender, caste, and class embedded in the interplay of power structures and rituals of gender policies and programs her research project makes theoretical and empirical contributions to education policy, feminist theories, and power debate.

Suparna Bose is a doctoral candidate in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education in Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation research focuses on stories told by multilingual English composition students in their self-reflections. Her research interests include ESL/EFL teaching, diversity, and feminism.

Dajanae Palmer is a PhD candidate in Higher Education at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests are in examining and uplifting the experiences of graduate students, feminist methodologies, and the use critical race theory to analyze the systems of domination in higher education. Dajanae is currently writing her dissertation on the use of sista circles as a counterspace for Black women doctoral students as they navigate gendered racial microaggressions in the academy.

Sylvia Washington is a PhD student in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program at Indiana University Bloomington. She holds a BS in Sociology with an emphasis in Criminal Justice and an MSE-PD in Higher Education and Leadership from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Sylvia’s research interests include racial identities and representations of African American womyn, race and gender in popular culture, sense of belonging of African American students, and intersectionality of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Sylvia’s dissertation will explore the influence of prime-time television on African American undergraduate womyn identity development and socialization.

Alycia Elfreich is a clinical assistant professor of Curriculum & Instruction in the School of Education at Indiana University. Her research focuses on both gendered and racial inequities in K-12 schools. She is an associate editor of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

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