Using genre literature and video in homelessness research: A feminist sociological experiment in insurrectional textuality
Mary Teresa Madden
Research Fellow, Department of Health Sciences, University of York, United Kingdom
PP: 100 - 112
Abstract
It is a truism that research does not occur outside of the life which researches and that 'things happen' which impact constantly on the development of thinking, knowing, theorising and writing/making (Oates 1992). Such things for me include reading novels, watching films and listening to music. Here I discuss the use of a literary feminist gothic style and the interjection of video excerpts and montages/mashups into a written academic text as a means of exploring the source, affect and dis/crediting of knowledges about homelessness at a time when British neo-liberal capitalism was on the rise.
Keywords
Methodology, epistemology, ethnography, auto/biography, feminist cultural studies, qualitative research, homelessness
Article Text
While Clifford and Marcus’s (1986) emphasis on the written rather than reported nature of social science has been widely explored and accepted in some areas of the social sciences, most of that exploration still remains at the level of theory; applications of such ideas are much less common. The 'vast outpouring of experimentation with modes of writing', which Marcus (1997: 2), referred to ten years after Writing Culture seems (more than ten years further on) to be largely a niche movement of experimental ethnography, rather than infiltrating 'large segments of the academic world' as he suggests. The social sciences continue to produce sophisticated analyses of mass and minority media. Meanwhile, digital ethnography is starting to appear in some sociological text books (Murthy 2008) but, despite the potentialities of web publishing, there remains little social scientific experimentation with the production of audiovisual texts beyond data recording (c.f. Hockings 1975).
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