Revisioning an Ethnographic Life: Integrating a Communicative Heart with a Sociological Eye
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2012
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-2396(2012)0000038009
Abstract
This story tells a version of my life as an ethnographer and symbolic interactionist. From an early age, I was intrigued by how people interacted and created meaningful worlds for themselves and by my own motives, actions, thoughts, and feelings. Later, as a student of sociology, my eyes were opened to the macro forces that constrained, liberated, and influenced actions, identities, and performances. Eventually, I located myself on the margins of sociology, as I experienced the constraints of mainstream sociology and how this perspective limited what and how I could study and write. I was drawn to a wider interdisciplinary community of scholars who examined experience more concretely and emotionally, and I began to work comfortably in the spaces between social science and literature, self and other, research and story. I now view myself more as a writer communicating heartfelt stories for the purpose of opening up and evoking conversations and emotional responses from readers than a reporter giving an account of what she has seen, heard, and analyzed from a distance, a researcher who works with others rather than one who collects data on them. In my current collaborative witnessing project with Holocaust survivors, I have come full circle, connecting macrohistory and structure with personal storytelling and integrating my sociological eye with a communicative heart.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Revisioning an Ethnographic Life: Integrating a Communicative Heart with a Sociological Eye, in N. K. Denzin (Ed.), Blue-Ribbon Papers: Behind the Professional Mask: The Autobiographies of Leading Symbolic Interactionists, Emerald Group, p. 123-151
Scholar Commons Citation
Ellis, Carolyn, "Revisioning an Ethnographic Life: Integrating a Communicative Heart with a Sociological Eye" (2012). Communication Faculty Publications. 284.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/284
