Schenectady Synecdoche

Thanks much for posting this for those of us who weren't at the conference. The persistence of the 'research camps' (legacy of Steve North's book? human nature to divide into cliques?) is surprising, given the abundance of good work about methods/methodologies grounded not in a pre-fab taxonomy but rather in kairotic moments. I'm thinking of Cindy Johanek's book Composing Research especially, but also Porter et al's "Rhetorical Methodology article a few yrs. backs, and Sue McLeod's piece in Comp in the New Milennium). Jeesh, why aren't we responding more effectively to such sensible and compelling calls.

Well, from my point of view, we live in a subordinated discipline. And rather than fight common enemies (whoever they may be) we fight each other. It's much easier than fighting someone who might actually retaliate and hurt us. Taking a page from community organizers and building coalition politics seems to me much more useful.

I think the camps are necessary early on for most of us, though, as we struggle to accomplish a few years' worth of work in a much shorter time as we write dissertations--it's one of the ways that we set boundaries around our projects and hope to keep them manageable.

Problem is, once we hit the t-t, we're being held to the same kinds of expectations as other humanities disciplines, and hit from both sides. There is valid work for us to be doing that is quantitative and qualitative, but you'd have to really kick @$$ to finish and write it up in time to get tenure. Nor are we generally encouraged to avail ourselves of the kind of collaboration in social or hard sciences, which could help compress such projects. This is really thumbnail, and there are smart exceptions, but the fact is that there are some institutional reasons why it's difficult to do the kind of research that Chris called for. What's a little sad (and this is Rich's article) is that we've made it even harder on ourselves by neglecting or discouraging that kind of research.

Johanek was a real eye opener for me, and I've used Jim and Pat's book in courses and in projects with students, but my encounters with them have largely been kairotic--our ability to find nuanced methods shouldn't be a matter of chance...

cgb

Spot on. That's a very accurate assessment of the situation; as I rev up to launch a project involving both quantitative and qualitative research, I am quite sobered by the prospect and am marshalling all the support I can get. I will, for example, have to hire a statistician; I have no training that prepares me for statistical analysis. Thus I've stalled for several years, finding a variety of reasons for not launching this research. The difficulties are enormous—too enormous for most graduate students and the untenured, unless, as you point out, they're part of a collaborative group or a social-science-style consortium. Fair enough.

But that's a separate issue from the problem of quantitative research being bracketed in the discipline as unintellectual. And that, too, has happened. To our collective detriment.

True enough. I don't know that I'd separate them quite as cleanly as that, though. That attitude (which I myself held for some time) is part of what keeps us from working against the institutional blockage. Which keeps most of us away from such research, and seems to reinforce the attitude--hard to convince our students/selves that it's worthwhile work when so few do it...etc etc.

The more I think on it, the more it seems to me a vicious cycle--it's tough to fight against any one part of it without confronting all of it...

cgb