Abstract
This is one of an occasional series of invited contributions by writers who reflect on their research careers.
There are many ways I could narrate my career. I have traveled a crooked road to finally achieve a comfortable place in narrative studies. Looking back to write about it now, I could craft a linear and coherent account—how one choice and set of intellectual relationships led to others and the final outcome––but I think a line with lots of detours and false starts better represents my understanding. Like all narrators, I want to make some order and sense out of all that has happened to me—this is, after all, a major function of personal narrative––and by writing this piece I have discovered some of the teachers and ideas that clearly shaped the kind of work I do today. But the process wasn’t smooth and to construct a unity among the facts I would have to delete a great deal. So let’s see if I can craft the crooked line into a meaningful plot.
My early life was spent in Northern California in the 40s and early 50s, where I grew up in a Republican family and was educated by nuns in a convent school. I credit one nun with initiating the politics behind my enduring interest in experiences of inequality; she tutored me one summer (in American history so that I could skip the 7th grade) when, I found out later, she was completing her dissertation at Stanford University on the Southern cotton slave economy. Her ideas about racial inequality, economic exploitation, and creative resistance practices didn’t appear in U.S. history books of the time. I was excited by the subversive stories and brought them home where they were not welcomed at all—it was 1950, after all, and most whites held an illusion of the “happy slave.” Another rub with my family’s politics occurred when I was in high school (no longer a Catholic one, I was then living in NY after my parents’ divorce). In this elite private girls’ school we read and discussed The Communist Manifesto––ironically for it was the height of the McCarthy era. I was totally persuaded by the ideas and brought them home excitedly to my mother—a highly educated attorney and former judge—who countered with a strong defense of capitalism. Such critical responses to my nascent ways of thinking anticipated an essential skill I would eventually develop: how to survive intellectually in contexts where my “deviant” ideas were unappreciated. For many years, unfortunately, I had to draw on the skill in social work schools when I advocated for the serious study of the social sciences and qualitative research methods. But I am getting ahead of my story …
Again going against the expected family script, I chose to go to Bard College in Upstate New York—a fortuitous decision for it was a hot bed of non-traditional ideas and renegade professors in the mid-1950s. My enduring interest in philosophies of knowledge was born in a small seminar with German poet and philosopher Heinrich Bleucher (better known, perhaps, as Hannah Arendt’s husband). I remember going into the women’s room to cry during one class break because I was so moved by what we had been discussing—can’t remember the ideas, only the tears. In college, I had no interest in sociology, anthropology, or psychology—never took a course in these areas although now they consume my reading––but was drawn instead to the literary. Important teachers included Delmore Schwartz, Dwight Macdonald, Ralph Ellison, and a slew of other gifted literature professors (eventually my major after a brief foray into modern dance). I learned the difficult craft of good writing. I learned the value of close reading—not just for the plot or “gist,” but rather to unearth assumptions, the developing logic and the particular mode of construction of a text. A colleague in narrative studies, Rita Charon (2006:113), puts it eloquently: the kind of reading taught in graduate programs in literature in which the reader … pays attention not only to the words and the plot but to all aspects of the literary apparatus of a text [including] ambiguity, irony, paradox, and “tone” contained within the words themselves … [Recent literary criticism interrogates] those texts historically, politically, semiotically, economically, in terms of gender or sexuality or colonial status … [grounding] their critique in their own close readings of texts.
How did I settle on this focus? Social work school in the late 60s, the clinical placements, several years in a Community Mental Health Center in the Bronx and other years working in an out-patient psychiatric clinic certainly made me aware of the impact of disruptions on the expected course of people’s lives: from “public issues”––the effects on families of a highway constructed through the neighborhood that divided a community—to “private troubles” such as a divorce or the death of a child (Mills, 1959). The compelling theoretical framework and ethnographic research of the Leightons and Gerald Caplan that underpins the Community Mental Health Centers Act (signed by President Kennedy less than a month before his death) anticipated contemporary thinking on the social determinants of illness. The theoretical framework attracted me to working in one of the early centers; our services included “micro” and “macro” interventions—clinical care based on crisis theory as well as community development activities to repair disruptions in the social fabric of the neighborhood. Undoubtedly, there were disruptions in my personal life too that attracted me to the topic.
One course in social work school developed my awareness of the interpretive power of narrative in the face of disruption, although it took me many years to incorporate the insight into my research practice. Bill Rosenthal taught Human Growth and Development by pairing particular theoretical/clinical readings with literary works about the same “developmental phase.” I often found the literary representations of lives more revealing about the dilemmas of the human condition than the dry Freudian accounts. But I was attracted to clinical work nonetheless and to the complexity of psychoanalytic theory. Research courses were totally uninteresting to me—all technique, no humanity, no space to locate myself in the research process.
And yet I ended up in a research-driven interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in medical sociology. Was this move an accident or a detour? It felt like an accident at the time: I took several courses at Columbia School of Public Health, did well, and was advised to apply, which I did on a lark and was accepted. A generous NIMH fellowship was provided; a wise psychiatrist (the director of the mental health clinic where I was happily working at the time) told me I simply could not refuse it. Socio-medical sciences at Columbia University, an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, became my intellectual home from 1972 to 1977, during which time I studied for the first time sociological theory (structural functionalism from Robert Merton), social survey methods, social stratification (also from a structural functionalist perspective), epidemiology, biostatistics, and health policy—remote fields for me now. There were two intriguing summer courses, one in field methods that perked my interest in how research might be done differently, and another in gender/sex roles that forever changed my thinking, and my life. As the women’s movement was sweeping the nation, feminist thought was creeping into the social sciences and practicing professions.
But at the time I loved the seeming objectivity and neatness of quantitative research, and eventually completed a dissertation in psychiatric epidemiology with some attention to sex differences (as they were called then). I discovered that I loved to do research—to muck around in data. Perhaps in retrospect my mental health research colleagues did reignite an interest in disruptions in the life course; life events scales were captivating the investigators of the time. I was curious about the meaning of particular events for individuals, families and communities involved—an aspect that objective summary scales of stressors could not address. How did people understand the dire events that interrupted their lives? Did the interpretive process play any role in mental health outcomes? Addressing such questions requires attention to language use and an interpretive paradigm, not valued at Columbia in the 1970s. Without a doubt, the course of my development as a qualitative researcher would have been more direct had I gone to a different university and been exposed to Chicago School sociology. Perhaps the Columbia detour can best be understood retrospectively as a function of my gender and family situation: I was the mother of three small children. My husband was very supportive of my intellectual aspirations, but I was also expected to be the primary parent and cook dinner at night. Feminism had not changed the gendered division of labor in the family.
To solidify the skills I had developed at Columbia, after the Ph.D. I worked for several years in health services research in pediatrics in a medical school, followed by a move to a social work school and many difficult years teaching social structure and inequality, health policy and research methods in a psychoanalytically oriented program that at the time did not value social science knowledge or qualitative research. I loved teaching the students but to survive the academic politics I initiated with another sociologist a research project on gender and the divorcing process (by this time, a personal experience for me); it was primarily a structured interview study but we did include a few open-ended items that proved to be the most interesting. To learn how to analyze the data, I began to study the qualitative literature on my own, not only by reading the textbooks that were beginning to appear in the early 1980s but also by reading the work of Glaser and Strauss, Renee Fox, Peter Marris, and others. To survive, I also secured an adjunct appointment in the Sociology Department where I taught medical sociology, and began to teach the authors I was reading who did participant observation of hospital process and case studies of communities (such as Kai Erikson’s) that were ravaged by “natural” disasters. Imitating my teacher years before, I tried to pair literary works (a Tillie Olson story) with sociological work (an article on stress theory in mental health). Quite a few pre-med students from the women’s college elected the course and I tried to prepare them with feminist readings critical of medicine—the representation of women in gynecology texts, for example.
I had what feminists call a “click moment” during the divorce research (Norm Denzin might call it an “epiphany”). I asked a man in an interview one of our standard questions: “What would you say were the main causes of your separation?” We expected––and often got in response––a listing with some elaboration, but this man paused for a long time and then said “Well, that’s a long story, maybe I can sum it up by saying … ” The proverbial light bulb went off in my head: of course, I was hearing divorce stories in interviews, not simply responses to items on our interview schedule. Could I analyze them as stories with a plot, protagonist, other characters, and a turning point? About the same time I went to a Women’s Studies conference where sociologist Susan Bell gave a paper on the structure of women’s stories of their medical encounters, which they had developed in interviews with her. She drew on analytic concepts from sociolinguistics that, I learned later, she was learning in a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard with psychologist Elliot Mishler. I wanted to learn this approach and see if it would help me make sense of the divorce stories.
Forty-five years of age by this time, well into an academic career, with three grown children and a home far from Boston, I began a post-doc in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard University, aided by a modest three-year award from NIMH. It was a transformative time for me intellectually. I could play again with philosophical ideas about language and knowledge that I had been introduced to in college, but now I dug deeper and interrogated the epistemological rationale for various research approaches. Eventually questioning the illusion of the objective researcher—the view from nowhere (Nagel, 1986)—our post-doctoral seminar discussions made me want to situate myself more explicitly in my research writing. Reading in hermeneutics and sociolinguistics, we learned to take talk and conversation seriously during the analytic process, rather than treat them as a simple container of ideas. The accidental timing of the fellowship––the mid-1980s—was especially fortuitous as I think about it now. The “narrative turn” was engaging some of the best minds, including psychologists Bruner, Sarbin, Spence, and Mishler, all of whom produced major books on narrative within a few years. Anthropologists such as Myerhoff, Rabinow, and Briggs were producing a kind of narrative work that emphasized their positions as sentient beings in their research, in sharp contrast to the objectivist tradition in anthropology.
The “long stories” about the divorcing process that developed during interview conversations became my empirical material. I came to see how they were collaborative projects involving the actions and subjectivities of both interviewer and interviewee. With close reading and an interpretive focus, I saw how the divorce stories were laced with history and gender ideology; aspects of the social world were refracted through individual stories, recalling the feminist insight: the personal is political. Women had different ideas than men did about what marriage was supposed to provide, and these understandings shaped the narratives they developed about the divorcing process. Participants used various forms to craft their tales collaboratively with a listener, and communication wasn’t always smooth. In a case study I am still proud of, I showed through careful analysis how a Latina participant was misunderstood when she deviated from the classic linear, topically centered, temporally ordered, beginning-middle-end form of storytelling. Her tale (and married life) involved back and forth movement between Puerto Rico and the U.S., complicated by the two families’ expectations about a woman’s proper place, which she developed in a long complex narrative that the Anglo listener was unable to follow (Riessman, 1987). From this case study came an enduring interest in different genres of storytelling and what they can and cannot accomplish.
Elliot Mishler was my gifted teacher—through him I found a voice. His model of teaching has strongly shaped my own approach to teaching in the 30 years since I was his post-doc. It was as if he led me into a candy store that displayed a rich assortment of writings. I could sample the empirical and theoretical offerings and then select what suited me best. In weekly conferences, as we would discuss my choices, he would quietly ask seemingly simple questions that forced me to think further about an idea or a choice and how it would fit into my project. He would always smile when I delighted in a particular offering he had selected for the display. Liberating my mind, he insisted I find a way to do the research my way, rather than imitate his work.
The eventual outcome of this transformative period was an outpouring of publications that, I gather, have helped other investigators. Because I deeply enjoy the process of writing—it has always helped me figure out what I think about something––I had published in the area of health and illness and in gender studies before the post-doc, but a narrative focus has been primary in the years since: the first book, Divorce Talk (Riessman, 1990), followed several years later by two methodologically oriented books (Riessman, 1993, 1994), a final one more recently (Riessman, 2008), many articles, and a series of case studies where I look back and reanalyze data I had analyzed and published in the past. I wanted to share with others all I had figured out, and in ways that didn’t set up an arbitrary hierarchy of preferred methods. Narrative researchers are members of a broad and diverse family; we practice the craft of narrative study in very different ways. My substantive focus has continued to be on interruptions in the expected life course. In a Fulbright-supported research project in South India, I witnessed the forms that the meaning-making process took among childless married women and how they creatively managed the stigma of infertility in families and communities. I learned with the translated interviews the problems and opportunities of working with narrative materials in a language other than English, and drew on several qualitative approaches for different parts of the study.
After the post-doc, I returned to academic teaching but with a greater presence in sociology over time (social work in the U.S. has been slow to take up the challenge of narrative analysis, although social worker researchers in Sweden and the U.K. were beginning to publish narrative studies by the mid-1990s). I have also been part of an interdisciplinary Narrative Study Group that has met in Elliot’s living room for more than 27 years. Since my first appointment in a social work school I have witnessed with pleasure the sea change in social work education, particularly at the doctoral level, where a diversity of qualitative methods is now taught. For more than a decade now, experience teaching outside the U.S. in European and Australian universities suggests that social work research in these contexts is more aligned with social science and humanities knowledge; the full diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches is valued. The advantage of such interdisciplinarity for social work is a topic for another day.
What am I up to now? Less travel abroad, no formal teaching, but always some writing. I just finished a paper on reflexivity that was great fun to do (Riessman, forthcoming). It took me back to the anthropology literature of the 1980s when investigators began to interrogate their influence on their fieldwork, and to the critiques of objectivist research in feminist philosophy and sociology. The paper forced me to interrogate how I increasingly and purposively located myself in my research writing over the years. I figured out a few things while doing the reading, writing, and thinking that went into the paper.
In conclusion, my career trajectory has been anything but smooth, though it did settle down as I was approaching 50. I could have constructed a narrative that smoothed out the bumps by writing an abstract account about how my career has treaded a borderline between sociology, women’s studies, and social work. I wanted instead to develop a story with specific incidents, important characters, chance events, choices, detours, false starts, and some fortuitous opportunities, not the least of which was the historical moment for my “narrative turn.” Donald Campbell once remarked on the value of being able to “reduce the need to put up a brave front of continual competence, and enable one to talk about intelligent hypotheses that proved wrong, stupid investments of research energy that were never worth undertaking even in anticipation, and promising lines of research that were dropped before fruition due to faintheartedness or doing too many things at once,” and how such a story illustrates “the chancy indirectness of discovery, and the further chanciness of recognition” (Campbell, 1981: 455).
Drawing on the philosophical truth that narrative is a primary mode of human understanding (Ricoeur, 1991), I wanted to construct something that could include the discontinuities in my professional development. Mark Freeman (forthcoming) puts it well: “we can become fetishists of coherence, so doggedly insistent on our own unity and integrity that we gloss over the patent incoherence that characterizes much of our lives.” However unconventional my career narrative may be, I think what I composed is truer to my experience than a smoothed out version of the same facts would have been. Like all narratives, it is by nature retrospective and involves the phenomenon of hindsight (and insight). Aided by advanced age and recognition, I was freer than a younger scholar might be to reveal the jagged trajectory. Perhaps it can help others free up how they think about their career paths over time.