More intricate words

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Originally uploaded by angie cat

This morning I've been reading a book by Susan Speer. I've really enjoyed it a lot:
Speer, S. A. (2005). Gender talk: Feminism, discourse and conversation analysis. London, Eng; New York, NY: Routledge.

I've mostly been reading sections that address her take on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. She presents ideas very clearly plus gives some words over to discussion some of the bigger issues and points of disagreement within the approaches. Her comments got me thinking about how to do my own writing more ethnomethodologically (something that I have been toying with lately). This morning's reading has generated some fresh thinking (for me) about how I want to shape up the paper I'm currently working on (Social organization of helping talk during computer use in the home -working title). It was amazing to return to my own writing and see how much I had missed in my analysis to date, and how I might shape up the paper in a richer way.

Something fell into place during the reading of the book (it was a pretty loud noise when the penny dropped). I hadn't made the (now obvious) link between feminist CA work and Garfinkel's ethnomethodologu -it was Agnes!

"One of the earliest studies to shed lght on the situated accomplishment of gender, was conducted by the ethnomethodologist, Harold Garfinkel .... Agnes learnt how to be a woman by studying behaviour and becoming highly attuned to, and aware of, conventions and expectations around gender, and the habitual but typically unnoticed working of social structures. In this sense, Agnes had become a 'practical methodologist' (1967: 180), applying her findings to her own actions. " (pp. 67-69)

Note here: Carolyn Baker suggested to me in the early days of her supervision of my PhD, that the young boy in my study who constantly approached others asking them how to write was like an ethnomethodologist. I didn't get it at the time but I think I do now.

In my own work using EM/CA, I have not addressed many of the complexities of the approaches although I do understand some of the tensions. Speer's work goes deeply into the former. She considers, for example, she considers ontological matters concluding that "ethnomethodology is relativist to the extent that it highlights the work that gives gender dualism its appearance as natural.

Further,
"Many conversation analysts, like the ethnomethodologists discussed in Chapter 3, typically resist the suggestion that their work is constructionist (Wowk forthcoming). However, others (e.g. Buttny 1993; Potter 1996b) have argued that there is a significant constructionist undercurrent in CA. Indeed, in her CA work on male-female laughter, Jefferson (2004) notes that she tends to think of the categories of 'male' and 'female' as something like careers rather than conditions i.e. as constructed rather than biologically intrinsic' (2004: 118, emphasis added)." (p. 91).

Speer goes on to say that she treats CA as "compatible with a constructionist agenda" (p. 91)