Inviting Emotional Connections to Ethnographic Research

The Initial Ask

The scene is an upscale office downtown. Angel, an executive for a local not-for-profit funding agency, and Dakota, a local activist and resident of the CCL neighborhood are meeting about funding for a community change initiative, the CCL. They have known each other for a few years through various community projects. Angel had been intrigued with the CCL, hoping it would be an innovative reform, more successful than others the agency had funded over the years. Dakota, seeing Angel as an ally, had requested this appointment to follow up on earlier conversations about the CCL planning phases. Now that there was a Civic Blueprint, Dakota was ready to make an official “ask” for money.

(Lights come up, revealing a medium-size office with an oak-colored wooden desk, a black executive’s chair behind it. A small, round, wooden table with four red-padded chairs sits off to the side of the desk, piled with folders, a calculator, an aging laptop, and an open boxed lunch. Dakota pushes opens the slightly ajar door.)

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Who are Angel and Dakota?

As The Initial Ask shows, negotiations around ways to describe the CCL and its residents and appeal to external funders were fraught, represented by the raised voices, control of tempers, and eventual tense return to the Blueprint. The struggle over shared commitments, resident control and positioning, and ways to represent CCL residents in the Civic Blueprint strained the relationship Dakota and Angel had developed over time as people committed to improving the lives and conditions of communities under pressure. The schism between them, between their worlds, serves as a proxy for relationship between the CCL and external governmental, moneyed interests (the references to race/ethnicity, immigration status, socioeconomic status were stripped from the final version). Even the use of the phrase “The Children” had different meanings, with Angel using it to represent those who saw them as the endangered future of the area and Dakota using it to represent those who saw them as the potentially fertile future. Both cared about children and families, which allowed them to talk to each other and to have some common ground from which to negotiate. Such messy, contradictory, hopeful, urgent, and consequential relationships are not easily conveyed in traditional scholarly texts. This short ethnodrama aims to draw readers into the scene, with its sounds, feelings, and air of hope, fear, and strain.

Dakota and Angel were created as composites of participants in the planning and implementation of the CCL. Saldaña (2011) writes, “A composite character may be created when several interviews with different participants refer to similar themes or stories. Thus, the composite character is a fictional creation that nevertheless represents and speaks the collective realities of its original sources” (p. 17). In this case, interview and focus group transcripts, videotaped meetings, and the Civic Blueprint were the data sources from which the composites were created. Thus, Dakota is a composite of 17 people who comprised the group of resident activists, social service personnel, school district personnel, and city government staff that guided the initial planning phases of the initiative. Angel is a composite of local community foundations staff, United Way administrators, City government officials, a partner in a local law firm, and City and State legislators. The prior relationship Dakota and Angel had as represented in the scene captures the reality of social activism in Lakeview—many of the people involved had been active over many years in numerous attempts at community reform. The CCL was yet another attempt, but designed to be unique in its positioning of residents as central actors and as powerful. Dakota-as-composite had been involved from the beginning of the CCL and continued to be central to its development. Angela-as-composite had been involved peripherally and sporadically throughout the process.

Similar to the characters, the scene itself is an assemblage. Returning to Saldaña (2011), “. . . triangulation, . . . relies on more than one information source or type to collect, compare, and corroborate information. Triangulation might also be employed by ethnodramatists to gain a broader spectrum of perspectives or richer dimensions to the story” (p. 23). The scene is meant to embody clashes of sensibilities and world views—dramatically different conceptions of the CCL and the people who live there, power relations among the CCL, and external privileged interests—and the messy mix of shared commitments that ensued when Angel and Dakota negotiated funding for the CCL.

Ethnodrama as (Re)presentation and Activist Scholarship

A central question for this work is: How do the arts help social science research challenge privilege, silencing, misrepresentation, inequity, and help incite people to engage difficult questions that research, by its very nature, can be critically important to helping answer? Ethnodrama is an appropriate choice for disseminating research findings because of the roles afforded participants and audience, creating a venue in which emotional connections and closeness of data and experience are highlighted. Methodologically:

An ethnodrama, a word joining ethnography and drama, is a written play script consisting of dramatized, significant selections of narrative collected from interview transcripts, participant observation field notes, journal entries, personal memories/experiences, and/or print and media artifacts such as diaries, blogs, e-mail correspondence, television broadcasts, newspaper articles, court proceedings, and historic documents. . . . Simply put, this is dramatizing the data. (adapted from Saldaña, 2005, pp. 1-2). (Saldaña, 2011, p. 12)

Beyond dramatizing the data, many ethnodramatists are critical scholars as well. Anna Deveare Smith is the most recognizable, using verbatim interview transcripts in her plays and performances. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Smith, 1994/2003) and Fires in the Mirror (Smith, 1992) bring two race-based conflicts—after the Rodney King trial and the violence after a killing in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY—to the public in ways that foster sociopolitical awareness of the endemic nature of racism in U.S. society. I found this approach helpful in responding to two of the central struggles facing activist scholars, including critical ethnographers of education: (a) the power relations that researchers and participants/co-researchers navigate (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Mura & Sharif, 2015; Weiner-Levy, 2000) and (b) the dissemination of our work in ways that can reach multiple audiences, including those who participate in our studies as well as others outside of academia (Saldaña, 2005; Schultz, 2014). During her Presidential Address to the Council on Anthropology in Education, Perry Gilmore (2008) advocates for explicit attention to both activism and our own positions in the academy:

I urge each of us to keep track not only of our own tenure, rank, and promotion records, but also and more significantly, of the successes of the people in the communities with whom we work. We should be judging our worth, not only by our contributions to research, but by our contributions to the advancement of the communities in whose service we are committed. (pp. 110-111)

Shifts in the ways activist scholars engage in research have been happening over several years now: Denzin and Lincoln updated their presentation of paradigms of educational research methodologies in 2011 to include participatory action research, 7 years after publishing their typology that included positivism/post-positivism, constructionism, and critical theory. That this journal is publishing an ethnodrama speaks to the strong influence of these shifts and influences coming from participating communities themselves (Brown & Strega, 2005; Tuck, 2009; Yosso, 2005) as well as scholars who combine advocacy and anthropological approaches to education research (Foley, 2002; Madison, 2011). The crisis of representation that Fabian (1990), Denzin and Lincoln (2011), and others have written about is something the field of anthropology of education is taking seriously.

In moving to playwriting and arts-based representations of data analyses, questions of credibility in dramatic representations of ethnographic data and writing in a script-writing genre pose additional challenges. My own positioning as an academic and as new to playwriting may illuminate some of them, specifically, systematic and rigorous data analysis and working to achieve aesthetic quality in an arts-based representation.

Epilogue

The scene continues to play out in the CCL area and in Lakeview, with different actors but largely the same script. Hopefully, representing our ethnographic data and analyses via a variety of genres (literary, scholarly, performance) will incite people to see the CCL and other such reform initiatives differently than has been the case, to uncover what were invisible bottlenecks and transformative possibilities from new perspectives, and to appreciate the nature and quality of information about such initiatives that creative representations of ethnographies of education can provide. More broadly, ethnodramatists write in the hopes “that constructive community reflexivity and dialogue can emerge among audiences after viewing their productions. Many of these playwrights also maintain explicit social justice or social change agendas, hoping that their events serve as cautionary tales for the public to never let the inequities portrayed in their plays ever happen again” Saldaña, 2011, p. 31). Ambitious, yes, but, I believe, critically important.