Full Description
At a time when an emphasis on productivity in higher education threatens to undermine well-crafted research, these highly reflexive essays capture the sometimes profound intellectual effects that may accompany disrupted scholarship. They reveal that over long periods of time relationships with people studied invariably change, sometimes in dramatic ways. They illustrate how world events such as 9/11 and economic cycles impact individual biographies.
Some researchers describe how disruptions prompted them to expand the boundaries of their discipline and invent concepts that could more accurately describe phenomena that previously had no name and no scholarly history. Sometimes scholars themselves caused the disruption as they circled back to work they had considered ""done"" and allowed the possibility of rethinking earlier findings.
Contents
Introduction: On Being Open to Disruption, Margaret K. Nelson and Rosanna Hertz
Part I: Changing Subjects, Changing Relationships, Changing Worlds
1. From a Study to a Journey: Holding an Ethnographic Gaze on Urban Poverty for Two Decades, Timothy Black
2. Conflicted Selves: Trust and Betrayal in Studying the Hare Krishna, E. Burke Rochford Jr.
3. Returns, Joanna Dreby
4. Studying My Home Town, Albert Hunter
5. Breaching Boundaries and Dowsing for Stories on the Great Plains, Karen V. Hansen
Part II: Changing Methods, Changing Frameworks
6. Disrupting Scholarship, Susan E. Bell
7. A Sociology of Inclusion and Exclusion through the Lens of the Maid's Daughter, Mary Romero
8. Getting to the Dark Side of the Moon: Researching the Lives of Women in Cartography, Will C. van den Hoonaard
9. Getting It Right, Pamela Stone
10. ""Breakfast at Elmo's"": Adolescent Boys and Disruptive Politics in the Kinscripts' Narrative, Linda M. Burton and Carol B. Stack
Part III: Reflections on Disruptions: Time and Craft
11. History on a Slow Track, Emily K. Abel
12. A Serendipitous Lesson, Or How What We Do Shapes What We Know: Reflections on Interviews as a Method for Qualitative Sociology, Margaret K. Nelson
13. Paying Forward and Paying Backward, Rosanna Hertz
14. Rethinking Families: A Slow Journey, Naomi Gerstel
15. Time to Find Words, Marjorie L. DeVault
16. The Days Are Long, but the Years Fly By: Reflections on the Challenges of Doing Qualitative Research, Annette Lareau
