Download My aim in the first part of this presentation is to exemplify the

3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
Tracing prison staff trajectories and rewriting notions of
the field – conceptual and methodological innovations?
DRAFT – PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE
Andrew M. Jefferson
Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims
Borgergade 13
P.O. Box 2107
DK – 1014 Copenhagen K.
[email protected]
Lotte Huniche
Institute of Public Health
University of Southern Denmark
J. B. Winsløws Vej 9
DK – 5000 Odense C.
[email protected]
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
Tracing prison staff trajectories and rewriting notions of the field –
conceptual and methodological innovations?
Andrew Jefferson
A theory of changing practice must start off with an exploration of the
complex multi-sided character of the everyday changing participation of
participants in practice. (Lave 2004a: 34)
Subjectivities and their more objectified components, identities, are
formed in practice through the often collective work of evoking,
improvising, appropriating, and refusing participation in practices that
position self and other. (Holland and Lave 2001: 29)
Everyday engagements in socially structured, often institutionalised, daily
activity are the most powerful sites where history is made in persons as it
is made in practice. (Lave 2004a: 4)
My aim in the first part of this presentation is to exemplify the importance of taking
seriously persons changing participation in changing practice. This is to say I want to
demonstrate that if we want to develop comprehensive understandings of the
complexity of people as they live their lives it is necessary to consider people as they
are in movement, as they are mobile and as they cross between locations and action
contexts as their personal (and collective) trajectories unfold. This is a methodological
and conceptual point. The methodological implications are integrally connected to a
conceptual project involving the recognition of persons as fundamentally persons-inpractice.
I have been inspired by theoretical critical psychological work by Ole Dreier and by the
ongoing work of Jean Lave to develop a theory of social practice that does not
reproduce dominant relations of inequality. I/we see conceptual developments,
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
empirical material, questions posed and overall aims of research projects as four
interlocking factors that combine as the researcher endeavours to develop new
understandings of changing practices.
I have conducted research amongst Nigerian prison staff and I will briefly exemplify my
main point with reference to that empirical material. (Let it be said though that I could
not approach the empirical material in the way I do were it not for the understandings of
social practice and trajectories of participation that Dreier and Lave are developing.)
How are Nigerian prison officers moving? The unfolding of persons’ trajectories
involves movement across locations and through time. In chapter 8 of my dissertation I
examine the shift prison officer trainees make from being trainees to being fully
disciplined prison officers with new responsibilities and positions in relation to
colleagues and prisoners. The shift from being subjects of a logic of penality in the
training school caught up in disciplinary practices governed by an ideology of
corrections to being trained, disciplined officers responsible for correcting, reforming,
rehabilitating and reintegrating prisoners within this same logic of penality represents a
shift in subject position as well as a shift in job location and status. Trainees move from
the bottom of the hierarchy to one step above prisoners. In their new jobs in the prison
they acquire a position whereby they themselves are no longer subjects of the logic of
penality in the same way; rather they are in a position to subjectify prisoners to that
same logic, that same discipline. (The logic of penality that dominates prison training
school practice and prison practice is not taught in the school; it is just there. It is
incidental, yet it is dominant.)
I could not have made this discovery only by interviewing prison officers in the school
and/or the prison. It was necessary to observe practices in both settings, indeed to live
amongst prison officers and trace their movements, not only their pursuit of trajectories
illustrated by the shift from trainee to trained officer but also the way in which officers
traverse the everyday contexts of their lives. Let me give two illustrations
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
Torhile, my key informant was caught up in a set of contentious practices and intrigues
in the training school that resulted in him being transferred to a new position in a prison.
That fact that I was living with him at the time gave me a unique opportunity to observe
and trace what this shift meant for Torhile. It also placed the accounts of newly trained
officers in a different light. At the same time I was also able to trace Torhile’s daily
shifts across contexts of action. This involved waking up in his rat-infested parlour,
eating breakfast with him, attending church with his family, accompanying him on the
parade ground, to the library, travelling with him etc. Tracing these traversals as a
researcher one gets a sense of the different demands put on the person as they move and
conduct their lives, in a way which would not be possible via an isolated interview or a
completed questionnaire. Through the joint traversal of contexts, context itself becomes
an aspect of the researcher’s subjectivity as it is an aspect of the person in practice who
is the subject of research.
A second example involves my own multiple encounters with another officer – the chief
discipline officer. The first time I met him was as the godson of Torhile who sent him to
the market to purchase a watch on my behalf. The second time was in his office where
he presented my with the log books and records associated with his position as chief
discipline officer. The third time, I sat and watched as he adjudicated on a case of some
trainees who had been absent from the school for longer than permitted, an incident
where I got my first inkling of the logic of penality referred to earlier the main features
of which is an assumption of guilt and the inevitability of punishment (seen as
correction). The fourth time I encountered him was on the way to the prison staff club
where I met his family visited his home and then had drinks together. Subsequently we
planned to purchase a jerry can of fuel together in case of a future lack. Each encounter
added further complexity to my understandings of the job of the chief discipline officer
and of this particular person’s way of handling that job. A further encounter involved
escorting a sick trainee from the training school to a clinic, to the local hospital, to the
prison hospital back to the local hospital and gave me the opportunity to get a sense of
how care and control are simultaneous aspects of the job of the chief discipline officer.
Again joining in the movements of one’s research subjects gives one a sense of the
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
complexity of the ways in which they conduct their lives which we contend is necessary
if we are to account for complex social practice in a way which does it justice.
Lying beneath the above reflections is the development of a concept of persons-inpractice as a way of thinking about persons as they carry context as an aspect of
subjectivity. Persons are not merely dropped into container like contexts that change.
Context is carried at the same time as we move across contexts and as contexts are
created. Persons-in-practice is a tentative way of escaping the idea that we must either
understand persons in relation to context or context in relation to persons. The point is
persons, that is we, are always already implicated in context as context is implicated in
our very ways of conducting our lives and being ourselves. It is our contention that
traversing contexts, tracing trajectories of participation by accompanying research
subjects as they conduct their everyday lives is a necessary strategy in the pursuit of
adequate representations of what it means for subjects to participate in practice and
conduct a life. (And it is our suggestion that perhaps multi-sited field-based
ethnographies
are
to
the
ongoing
development
of
critical
psychological
conceptualisations what practice research was to earlier theoretical developments.) Lotte
will add some depth to this…
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
Rewriting notions of the field
Lotte Huniche
Relations to the field in psychological research
The Nigerian field experiences of researching persons-in-practice and their personal
trajectories of participation across contexts have turned our attention to the
methodological implications of doing field based practice research. We are both in areas
where there is an outspoken scarcity of psychologists and we have both worked with
anthropologists and sociologists as close allies and sources of inspiration. So how does
our methodological approach differ from theirs and for what reasons?
One obvious difference is the importance of the notion of the field in anthropology and
of doing ethnography. As psychologists we do not have thick description as a distinct
method nor do we have an equivalent to the notion of the field in vocabulary of
psychological methodology. The closest we get is qualitative interviewing and
participant observation (leaving out the vast amount of standardised observation and
testing protocols). To our minds, the notions of interview and observation direct our
attention towards the activities of doing research including our interaction with
participants, and leaves out the context as a methodological concern with where
activities take place and personal lives are unfolded. In a historical perspective the
preoccupation of psychology with the individual and its inner states ties in nicely with
its prevailing methodologies and with the lack of attention to context. Even in variations
of action research (xx) and practice research (xx) we do not find concrete methods that
address the issue of context in specific terms and with specific methods even if the
concepts of social practice and action contexts are at the core of the theoretical
framework. We suggest that the concept of the field, the approach to the anthropological
practice of doing science and some of the concrete methods of field work may be
productive sources of inspiration when doing practice research.
History of the field in anthropology
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
In contrast to the lack of attention to context in psychology, the field has always been a
core concept in anthropology. The notion of the field in its original form was a well
defined geographical location, exotic and far away. While anthropology has worked its
way out of the colonial straight jacket it has also broadened its scope of locations
considerably. Today a relatively large proportion of anthropological field work is
conducted in the native societies of anthropologists. This marks a fundamental change
in what questions anthropology may address and what political agendas may be
pursued. In our view, this changing understanding of the field is bringing the work of
anthropology closer to studying persons and relations in contexts and thus closer to the
purposes of psychological research from the standpoint and perspective of the person.
The concept of the field is still the central methodological reference point in
anthropology but it is taking radically new forms and is treated with much less awe in
present anthropology.
Multi-sited ethnography: the field of present anthropology
Still, I was surprised to learn that it was not until 1995 that the notion of multi-sited
ethnography was put into writing. In his much sited essay anthropologist George
Marcus talks about mapping strategies, strategies of “following connections,
associations, and putative relationships” (1995:81) in order to trace the cultural
formations of unfolding new arrangements. Also Gupta and Ferguson “…propose a
reformulation of the anthropological fieldwork tradition that would decenter and
defetishize the concept of "the field", while developing methodological and
epistemological strategies that foreground questions of location, intervention, and the
construction of situated knowledges" (1997:5). This is in 1997. If fieldwork had
previously been moving away from a conceptualisation in terms of “geographical
locations” to “spatial sites”, G and F now move it further towards a conceptualisation in
terms of “political locations” (ibid:35), locations that Holland and Lave would likely
call “sites of contentious local practice” (2001). G & F continue by stating that they
seek to shift attention from the field to “a mode of study that cares about, and pays
attention to the interlocking of multiple social-political sites and locations” (1997:37).
They characterise a new ethnography as “a flexible and opportunistic strategy for
diversifying and making more complex our understandings of various places, people
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
and predicaments through an attentiveness to the different forms of knowledge available
from different social and political locations.” (ibid:37). Similarly to Lave, G and F are
forging an alternative political vision as they make the conceptual shift from “bounded
fields” to “shifting locations”. This political vision involves seeing “anthropological
knowledge as a form of situated intervention” (ibid:38). This is in keeping with
understandings of key issues in practice research such as the way knowledge is
produced, the position and role of the researcher amongst others in practice, the political
agendas and aims of research.
Where to go and what to do?
These theoretical and methodological understandings frame our approach, but we also
quite literally direct our attention and focus as we go about our daily business of doing
research. So how do we inform our access, activities and further research strategies into
any field? What kind of arguments and reasons should guide our concrete steps in our
practice of doing research? I am just starting a new research project and so far I have:
used the internet to find patient organisations and research concerned with stem cells,
the telephone to contact some members and employees of pt. organisations. I have used
the wider research team to generate ideas about who to see and where to go and I have
looked into social science literature on the subject I am about to investigate. I have yet
to go and talk to persons in the field and to seek out relevant contexts. I still ask myself
what contexts would make for productive points of concrete entry into patient
organisations and to what they do with respect to stem cells? Our initial choices are, of
course, neither determining for what we may come to study, nor can they be informed in
a way that takes us straight to the insights that we come to gain. But our initial choices
set us of on a certain course, they point out the direction and scope of what it becomes
likely and possibly to study and therefore initial choices are neither unimportant, nor
arbitrary. So what guides us? As pointed out earlier, we take the stand that there is and
should be an intimate relationship between the overall research aims, the research
questions, the conceptual developments and the empirical materials. This means that
aims, questions, theoretical perspectives and personal pre-conceptions of the field
guides us. These are all aspects of doing research that for several other reasons must be
made explicit and worked with concretely. Furthermore, we propose that entering and
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
moving around in any field for us as psychologists with at programmatic intention of
following persons in social practice, we should focus on 1) the concerned persons in and
across the contexts where their lives unfold and on and 2) other contexts that have
important bearings on their lives and on the scope of their disposal over their conditions,
their possibilities and limitations in their conduct of everyday life. As there are practical
limits to how many persons, how many contexts and for how long we are able to follow
persons-in-practice we are obliged to choose and choices are limited and structured in
concrete practice. This is why the aims of our research, our theoretical perspectives and
the questions we want to address have to be made explicit as working method.
3nc conf, panum, kbh 3-5 September 2004
Following persons and not people, things, metaphors, stories, biographies
or conflicts
Following persons and contexts: is this new? Referring again to Marcus, his list of what
anthropologists follow in multi-sited research does not include concrete persons-inpractice. Anthropologists follow a People, a Thing, a Metaphor, a Plot, Story, or
Allegory, a Life or Biography. Not the person in and across social practice with others.
So when Andrew wanted to find out about prison staff and prison practices and when I
want to find out about patient organisations and the crafting of stem cells, our point of
departure will be persons, their perspectives, what they do, how and where they engage,
and also who else in what other contexts have a bearing on their disposal over
conditions, on possibilities and limitations, the shaping of likely personal trajectories
etc. Maybe this is not new, but we think the emphasis is different and important for us
as psychologists in order to develop out methodological approach in conjunction with
our conceptual work. As psychologists we want to qualify our understanding of persons
as participants in social practice, of how persons go about their daily business, of how
they come to feel, think and act in their everyday lives in and across contexts. The
principles of practice research as research for and about the subject suggest that the
researcher participate, cooperate, and possibly assist in moving along practice. This is
not unlike the principles in the above mentioned examples of doing anthropological
fieldwork and ethnography. But the emphasis on the person-in-practice is a distinct
consequence of the psychological theories about active persons in social relations, rather
than for example in theories about world systems, culture, symbols, or narratives.