What’s there and what isn’t? Thinking about Texts, Truths, and Analysis

1. What’s there and what isn’t? Thinking about Texts, Truths, and Analysis Pamela Moss Studies in Policy and Practice University of Victoria

2. Who’s interested methodologically? • Ethnography • Standpoint epistemology • Critical discourse analysis • Genealogical analysis • Feminist critical discourse analysis • Feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis • Transversal Discourse Analysis • Anything dialectical • Anything deconstructive

3. Whose interested methods-wise? • Perhaps more so in: • Ethnography (in the doing and the analysis) • Active listening (in the doing) • Empowerment (in the planning and the doing) • Participatory Research (in the planning, not in the analysis) • Oral histories (in the planning, the doing and the analysis) • Perhaps less so in: • Institutional ethnography • Grounded theory • Autoethnography (?) Autobiography (?)

4. Why look at silence? • Insight into phenomenon • Anomaly in the information/data • Truth • Access to the world of taken for grantedness • Something doesn’t sit right • …

5. Types of silence • Lack of information • Result of marginalization • Absence of something expected • The ‘hegemony’ • … • Evasions, diversions: ratio

6. Thinking about Texts, Truths, and Analysis

7. Texts

8. Truths • 1 – Title of journal article • 2 – Ding Ling’s short stories • 3 – Bree from Desperate Housewives • 4 – Absence of queer subjects • 5 – Enlightened disciple

9. Analysis • Small life-history project on mothers and daughters • Interview-based project with Irish women diagnosed with Myalgic encephalopathy • Textual investigation of two categories of illness over time

10. What do you do when you know something is ‘true’ but it isn’t there?

11. What if her narrative is vague?

13. Áisling • Mid 20s • Teacher prior to onset of ME • Housebound for about 18 months • Lives with her parents in a farmhouse in a central county • Spends extended periods of time with other supportive family members and friends • Focused more on space but in a slightly different way: she tried to control what comes into her immediate social and physical spaces so that she can attend to her body.

14. Mary • Early 40s • Physical labourer prior to onset of ME • Housebound for 11 years • Lives with her father in a farmhouse in the west • Has a personal assistant for two hours a day to help her with her meal preparation, bathing, and tidying • Told me about the extensive measures put into place around the house so that being housebound became less problematic, especially in times of crisis.

15. Mary • Altered the water supply system to ensure a more reliable supply • Installed stop cocks for shutting off water pipes in living area of the house • Fitted indicator light so that water pump can be monitored from indoors • Packed rations of food, soft drinks and fresh water upstairs alongside overnight bag for emergencies • Mounted an on/off switch and extension cord near the bed so that TV, computer, electric kettle and toaster can be turned on and off from the bed • Learned computer to make research possible through internet and email • Keeps phone and touch sensitive light at bed side • Has front door key always upstairs in a basket in the sill in her room

16. What can we say with what we’ve got when we know there’s so much more?

20. What do you do when you know something is ‘true’ but it isn’t there? • What if her narrative is lopsided, lacking focus? • What can we say with what we’ve got when we know there’s so much more?