This is an outdated version published on 2023-03-28. Read the most recent version.

Skulking and spying then telling tales

Becoming a walking-writing-researcher

Authors

  • Hazel R. Wright School of Education & Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge & Chelmsford, United Kingdom

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/qs.v8i1.136796

Keywords:

Flâneurie, Narrative research, Covid pandemic, Writing qualitatively, Voice, Storying

Abstract

I share a different way of writing about research by doing and discussing it. First, the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic forced me to adapt my methods of researching, to catch snippets of data when and where I could, by email, phone, and family chats and then by observing and eavesdropping on passers-by on my daily walks in rural England. Then, to protect identities I adapted my way of writing, crafting partly fictionalised composite stories. I use my short vignettes, Living in Lockdown, to show how I wrote as ‘others’, and changed roles to fully examine my processes-in-action. Writing narratively and ‘telling’ stories to engage my audience, led me to parallels within the theatrical tradition, especially the Method Acting approach of Stella Adler. I also found that the archetypal figure of the flâneur (particularly as conceived by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin) provided a conceptual framework for my walking/watching practices. He, too, simply wandered, seeing what there was to see, but usually in a city. I use these frameworks to reflect on my own work, drawing on parallel methodologies to show how it constitutes research, and explore the role that writing plays overall.

References

Atkinson, P. (2017). Thinking Ethnographically. Sage

Baudelaire, C-P. (1863/2010). The Painter of Modern Life. English Edition (2010) of Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne (Translated by P. E. Charvet, 1972). Penguin

Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. English Edition of Das Passagen-werk, 1927-1940 (Translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin from German version edited by R. Tiedemann and published in 1982). Harvard University Press

Boutin, A. (2012). Rethinking the flâneur: Flânerie and the senses. Dix-Neuf, 16 (2): 124-32

Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as Method. Routledge Clandinin, D. J. (2013). Engaging in Narrative Inquiry. Left Coast Press Cohen, M. (1984) Walter Benjamin's phantasmagoria. New German Critique, 48 (Autumn): 87-107

Coleridge, S. T. (1817) Biographia Literaria, Ch XIV, Project Gutenburg [Ebook #6081, 2004]

Coutu, W. (1951). Role-playing vs. role-taking: An appeal for clarification. American Sociological Review, 16 (2): 180-87

Elkin, L. (2017). Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Frank, A. W. (2010). Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. University of Chicago Press

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday

Goodson, I. (2001). The story of life history: Origins of the life history method in sociology. Identity, 1 (2): 129-42

Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press

Gordon, M. and Lang, A. F. J. (2009) Stella Adler. In Stanislavsky in America: An Actor's Workbook. Taylor & Francis Group

Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free

Association, Narrative and the Interview Method. London: Sage.

Holstein, J. A. and Gubrium, J. F. (1995). The active interview in perspective. In The Active Interview. Sage

Leslie, E. (2006). Ruin and rubble in the arcades. In B. Hanssen (Ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Continuum

Lynes, A., Craig, K. and Uppal, P. K. S. (2019). Benjamin’s ‘flâneur’ and serial murder: An ultra-realist literary case study of Levi Bellfield. Crime Media Culture, 15(3): 523-43

Martel, J. (2013). Anti-fetishism: Notes on the thought of Walter Benjamin. CLT, 22 Apr 2013. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/04/22/anti-fetishism-notes-on-the-thought-of-walter-benjamin/

Mishler, E. G. (1995). Models of narrative analysis: A typology. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 5: 87-123 Pei-wen, C. K. (2013). The flâneur/flâneuse and the Benjaminian law of ‘dialectic at a standstill’ in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Conradiana, 45 (2): 125-44

Peshkin, A. (1988). In search of subjectivity – One’s own. Educational Researcher, 17 (7): 17-21

Polkinghorne, D. E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. In J. A. Hatch & R. Wiesniewski (Eds), Life History and Narrative. RoutledgeFalmer

Pool, I. de S. (1957) A Critique of the 20th Anniversary Issue. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 21(1): 190-98

Pope, R. (2010). The jouissance of the flâneur: Rewriting Baudelaire and modernity. Space and Culture, 13 (1): 4-16 Renders, H., de Haan, B. and Harmsma, J. (2017). Introduction to: The Biographical Turn: Lives in History. Routledge.

Roy, A. (2011). The agonism of Utopia: Dialectics at a standstill. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 23 (1): 15-24

Serlin, D. (2006). Disabling the flaneur. Journal of Visual Culture, 5 (2): 193-208.

Shields, R. (1994). Fancy footwork. In K. Tester (Ed.), The Flâneur. Routledge

Toiskallio, K. (2002). The impersonal flâneur: Navigation styles of social agents in urban traffic. Space and Culture, 5 (2): 169-84

Van Leewuen, B. (2019). If we are flâneurs, can we be cosmopolitans? Urban Studies, 56 (2): 301-16

Van Maanen, J. (1995). An end to innocence: The ethnography of ethnography. In J. Van Maanen (Ed.), Representation in Ethnography. Sage

Wilson, E. (1992). The invisible flâneur, New Left Review, I (191): 90-110, January February

Wolff, J. (1985). The invisible flâneuse. Women and the literature of modernity theory, Culture & Society, 2 (3): 37-46

Wright, H. R. (2009). Trusting the Process: Using an emergent design to study adult education, Kaleidoscope Special Issue, December 2009, pp.62-73.

Wright, H. R. (2010). Integrating lives through adult education: A case study of mature women training to work in childcare. Unpublished PhD thesis, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge UK

Wright, H. R. (2013). Remembering our lives or learning to tell the truth? The researcher role in recall. ESREA Life History and Biographical Research Network Conference, University of Canterbury at Christchurch, 28 February - 3 March 2013 Wright, H. R. (2021a). Learning to live differently in lockdown. Teraźniejszość – Człowiek – Edukacja (INSTED: Interdisciplinary Studies in Education & Society), 23 (1-89) September: 63-79

Wright, H. R. (2021b). Through the eyes of the elderly: life under lockdown or what to avoid in future crises. The Sociological Observer, 3 (1): Remaking social futures through biographic, narrative and lifecourse approaches: Story-making and story-telling in pandemic times (Online): 113-17

Published

2023-03-28

Versions

How to Cite

Wright, H. R. (2023). Skulking and spying then telling tales: Becoming a walking-writing-researcher. Qualitative Studies, 8(1), 110–136. https://doi.org/10.7146/qs.v8i1.136796

Issue

Section

Articles in English