Ethnography Unbound: From Theory Shock to Critical Praxis

3. Mediating Materiality and Discursivity: Critical Ethnography as Metageneric Learning

INTRODUCTION IN HIS WELL-KNOWN OVERVIEW of methodological communities comprising the field of rhetoric-composition, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, Stephen North contends that “Ethnographic studies can hardly be said to have taken Composition by storm” (272). Fifteen years later, the field’s interest in ethnography has evolved, challenging North’s critique of ethnography’s methodological integrity and his prediction that “the future of the embattled Ethnographic community cannot be all that bright” (313). Responding to challenges to the authority of ethnography as a research method, several ethnographic studies have been published in the field over the past decade, and books on research methods and methodologies in the field of rhetoriccomposition regularly include sections on ethnographic methods, with a few whole texts devoted to the subject, such as Wendy Bishop’s Ethnographic Writing Research, among others.1 Despite the increased interest in ethnography over the past decade, however , it remains fairly solidly in the realm North assigned to it fifteen years ago—within the community of “Researchers”—and has made few inroads into the communities of either “Scholars” or “Practitioners.”There are positive signs that ethnography is gaining ground as a pedagogical method with the 35 3 Mediating Materiality and Discursivity Critical Ethnography as Metageneric Learning MARY JO REIFF incorporation of ethnography into writing program curricula and with more frequent discussions of the subject at professional conferences (such as the preconference workshop on “Ethnography in Undergraduate Writing” at the 2001 Conference on College Composition and Communication).2 Still, the lack of widespread validation in the field is evident in the scarcity of composition textbooks that integrate ethnography with the notable exception of Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater’s and Bonnie Stone Sunstein’s Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research. One reason that ethnography is not fully embraced as a pedagogical method is that it remains relatively undertheorized in the field of rhetoriccomposition . Although rhetoricians have called for the convergence of rhetoric studies and ethnographic studies (Cintron) and for the convergence of ethnography and pedagogy (Lu and Horner, Zebroski), these calls have mostly gone unheeded.This article attempts to fill the gaps in our field’s focus on ethnography by exploring the intersection of contemporary rhetorical genre studies and critical ethnography and by exploring the implications for teaching. Rhetorical theories of genre—which reconceptualize genres as culturally embedded actions—can be brought into fruitful dialogue with ethnography . I argue that ethnography, as both an academic research genre and a mode of genre analysis, mediates materiality and discursivity and gives researchers and students more direct access to the material interactions of social groups, a material access that has methodological and pedagogical implications for the study and teaching of writing. INTERSECTIONS: RHETORICAL GENRE STUDIES AND CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY In their detailed ethnography examining the relationships between writing in academic and workplace settings, Patrick Dias, Aviva Freedman et al. draw on the “comprehensively rhetorical character” of recent genre studies as the main framework for their study of situated discourse. According to the authors, “The most developed and comprehensive rhetorical theory to address writing in recent times goes by the misleadingly limiting name of genre studies” (18). The concept of genre is indeed limited by its traditional definition as a formal classification system or tool for categorizing texts. However, redefinitions of genre have been developing within the field of rhetoric-composition since the 1980s, beginning with Carolyn Miller’s groundbreaking article “Genre as Social Action.” Challenging views of genres as static forms or artificial classifications of discourse, Miller reenvisions genre’s formal conventions as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (159). The textual regularities of genres, rather than seen as defin36 Mary Jo Reiff ing features, are seen as responses to repeated actions—the typical ways in which groups of writers engage rhetorically within repeated situations. In addition to their pragmatic function as rhetorical strategies used to participate in and carry out the social actions of a group, genres—through their repeated actions—embody the ideologies of the group’s repeated actions—their particular knowledge and beliefs and the roles and relationships of the participants in the social practices. As a result, contemporary rhetorical theorists have redefined genres as “sites of social and ideological action” (Schryer 208)—environments within which familiar social actions are rhetorically enacted and reproduced. Genres, then, function both pragmatically and epistemologically—both as sites of material interaction within groups and as tools for understanding and interpreting these interactions. Charles Bazerman further...