Sunstein, Bonne Stone and Chiseri-Strater, Elizabeth. FieldWorking : Reading and Writing Research. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.

“In my experience, the best way to observe a community is with a walkabout, observing climate and current social interactions” (26).

This differs greatly from the way a journalist would approach a story

“The sympathetic imagintation” (28).

“Obviously, my question related to logbook procedures, and I made a mental note to avoid that type of inquiry” (31).

“I was exercising what Clifford Geertz calls ‘an intellectual posing license’ (Local Knowldege 12), engaging in what John Van Maanen terms, “the peculiar practice of representing the social reality of others through the analysis of [my] own experience in the world of other” (ix) (40).

***“Disconfirming and Complicating” (43).

-Questioning my own beliefs about African American literacy

Writing Strategies (44)

“You can be sure you will be both participant and observer during the course of your fieldwork” (44).

“No two fieldstudies are any more the same than the people who write them. Each fieldstudy is unique, shaped by the researcher who is, as we’ve mentioned, the key instrument of the process” (54).

39- complete reversal of previously stated ideas by a subsequent interviewee

“What about the complaint, first voiced by Gordy, that times were worse now than 20 years ago?” (40).

Using data to interpret subsequent data. (Sort as you go). “The portfolio allows flexibility” (57).

“It’s preferable, we believe, to use I in fieldwriting. I allows you to write with your own authority and with the authenticity of your own fieldwork, and it will insure your credibility” (58).

“A distanced, objective voice would be dishonest. Your reader needs to know you as the person who has been there” (59).

“Often the most compelling techniques for writing up research are the ones that fiction writers use” (63).

“I was surprised to find how much people like to talk about themselves” (63).

“The goal of freewriting is the process, not the product” (69).

“I would draw the fish; and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature” (87).

“Double-entry notes are designed to make the mind spy on itself and generate further thinking and text” (90).

“Fieldworkers research cultures in the same way readers approach novels” (118).

“Someone who didn’t know how to ask wouldn’t know how to listen” (Mama Day 125). “‘Ethos’ in speakers’ or writers’ texts, implies their ethics and emerges in writing or speech as their credibility” (128).

“While notetaking and audiotaping are essential field techniques, they can become liabilities and get a fieldworker into trouble” (129).

“Our credibility, or ‘ethos,’ arises from our receptiveness to what and to whom we’re introduced” (129).

Look at online ethics statements (129)

Look at sample ethics statement (130)

“Most contemporary scientists …realize that objectivity is not possible—that the observer is part of the person or culture observed” (131).

“Fieldworkers achieve a type of objectivity through intersubjectivity, the method of connecting as many different perspectives on the same data as possible” (131).

“Approaching fieldwork from this perspective demands a constant awareness of realities—power and privileges—for both the researcher and the informants” (137).

“We must always be “unlearning our privilege” (138).

• Explain your project clearly to the people you will study, and obtain the requisite permission from those in charge.
• Let your informants understand what part of the study you’ll share with them.
• Think about what you can give back to the fieldsite in exchange for your time there. (141) “We know that we cannot know the meaning of an object through observation alone because our eyes can deceive us and there are meanings that lie beyond the surface of an object” (144).

“As field researchers, we learn that the main text we read in any kind of community or cultural experience is ourselves” (165).

“The key word in developing a research portfolio is reflection” (167).

“One exception to information that requires documentation is common knowledge. Common knowledge refers to information that everyone might be expected to know” (169).