On 2/17/04 11:46 AM, "Danny Butt" <db@dannybutt.net> wrote:
But the bottom line for me is that if the goal is to improve the world, and not just ourselves, we need to find a way of negotiating between the needs and desires of those under study and our own desires for knowledge - and the power imbalances between these. In some cases there's alignment between those two desires, which makes things easier - both 'me' and the 'others/subjects' are working toward explicitly the same thing.
Dunno about the goal of "improving the world". I very much appreciate the ongoing discussion about ethnography and media studies. I have found Kamala Visweswaran's Fictions of Feminist Ethnography extremely useful for thinking through any enlightenment notions of "reading culture" as we write it/up/ I prefer to think of the field work I have been involved with as a species of culture-jamming. Moving resources into certain places to set up microcultures that live for just a brief time and show that certain things are possible, either as speech acts or performances - whether that is girls and women doing high-wired acts of computational bravado or queer women jacking into the Net and talking about the potentials of net spaces for enacting deviant identities and relations, or whatever else is counter-hegemonic and makes people in suits very nervous and/or really angry. Power imbalances - yes, of course. Always-already. Foucault is always helpful here, I find, since in the end it seems more helpful to excavate the fault lines through which power circulates and is productive of particular relations and voices, and of course, as he so keenly appreciated, desire. mary ---------------------------- Mary Bryson, Associate Professor and Coordinator, Human Learning, Development and Instruction Graduate program, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia Research Site: http://www.shecan.com Online C.V.: http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/cv.html