Writing is central to ethnography - we write down, write out, write up. We are always constructing a story. Writing generates critical reflection, not just ‘a way to transmit a message but as a way to grow and cook a message’ (Elbow, 1973 in Cahill, 2007: 305). Therefore, writing overlaps with analysis. Grounded theory approaches early analytical writing as ‘memo writing’, writing fragments to elaborate hunches (Charmaz, 2006). Making short analytical notes during transcribing ‘kick-started’ my writing, aired doubts and inculcated connections. I also engaged creative writing approaches such as ‘free-writing’ about evocative moments, which fed into the vignettes interspersed throughout this thesis. However, academic work should not be a ‘story for story’s sake’ and it is important to think carefully about representational choices. I briefly discuss the concerns which guided my choices: incorporating subjectivity, better capturing lived experience, and producing work for audiences beyond the academy.
It is clear that reflexivity should apply to writing, as we consider our authorial agency and gaze (Crang and Cook, 2007; Dwyer and Davies, 2010). Throughout
this PhD, I ‘write myself in’ and include first person accounts of feelings. There are criticisms of such reflexive writing slipping towards narcissism and providing
‘confessional’ resolution, constructing the author as ‘romantic hero’ (Vanderbeck, 2005). It should be highlighted that power relations are never fully knowable and reflexivity should not serve to underscore the researcher’s authority, but rather add richness to understanding of how knowledge is jointly produced by researcher and researched (Ansell, 2001). However, given the continued ‘invisibility’ of the
researcher, I believe that inserting subjectivity into writing remains important. In this, reflexivity is hoped to enrich the interpretations available to the reader rather than achieve a fully ‘transparent’ account. I attempted to ensure writing about myself illuminated things beyond myself, such as the way I was positioned or related (Crang and Cook, 2007).
This thesis incorporates experiments with writing style in order to include more animated accounts of physical settings, embodied interactions, atmospheres and feelings. The primary tool for this is ethnographic vignettes, created from participant observation data, and written in a direct, descriptive and emotional register. Evoking a moving interaction or humorous moment is in part driven by the desire to produce something more pleasurable to read than conventional academic style. These vignettes also reflect an attempt to attend more closely to the
sensuousness and details of volunteer tourism, whilst avoiding the stylised and obtuse experimentations of some ‘non-representational’ writing (Latham, 2003;
Crang and Cook, 2007). The vignettes highlight situated experience and complexity better than de-contextualised interview quotations. Paradoxically, in them, the discursive power of narrative is re-engaged to better capture the ‘more-than-representational’ (Cameron, 2012). Such writing also links to the emphasis on reflexivity, though writing about emotions as relational rather than ‘belonging’ to individuals and knowable remains a challenge. (Hadfield-Hill and Horton, 2014).
The vignettes are a product created from a series of reconstructions: firstly, of the experience by the teller (the research participants - or myself in research diaries), of the writer, and of the reader. In constructing them, I took every possible care to remain close to the ‘original’ (though never ‘objective’) data of research diaries.
The process of construction was broadly one of editing and elaborating research
diary notes. All actions, speech and atmospheres recounted are based on direct observation. All speech in quote marks are direct quotations noted at the time. Of course the very things I observed and noted, as well as the following layers of representational work are an interpretative act. However, no known information about action or intention was added and practices of reflexivity suffused the process.
The most significant differences between the vignettes and my research diary notes is that sometimes vignettes compile the most interesting and dramatic occurrences over a span of time in the service of illustrating a point. I try to indicate the absences across time by the use of terms such as ‘later’, and always specify if observations span more than one day. I found that crafting a more performative writing style:
‘…can be highly rich and invigorating, attending to playfulness, respectful to people involved in research, and having a certain ‘truthfulness’ as understood as intellectual rigour and emotional resonance’ (Latham, 2003: 2012).
The use of stories and affective writing is not ‘merely’ a tool to broaden our understanding of context, but has a politics. Writing is a performative practice which can be part of bringing alternative imaginings into being (Cameron, 2012;
Griffiths, 2014a). Narratives surround the trips and I critically engage with the dynamics of power and knowledge which make dominant discourses around the trips ‘legible, durable, and politically consequential’ (Cameron, 2012: 583).
Therefore, in my own writing, both in the vignettes but also in the thesis as a whole, I try to write in a way that grapples with what animates these ‘grand stories’ whilst recognising more heterogeneous dynamics and conflicted moments (Cameron, 2012; Hadfield-Hill and Horton, 2014). I hope this makes a small contribution to hopeful re-imaginings of how volunteer tourism might produce relationships and subjectivities.
One reason that writing is stressful is because it is the point at which we attempt to validate our research in the academic community at the same time as wanting to produce something that might benefit, or at least speak to, participants (Crang and Cook, 2007). As we fashion rhetoric, select and exclude data, we powerfully
translate ‘the reality of others’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Despite a growing emphasis on ‘public engagement’, abstractions and codified critiques are still highly valued in the academy. I often struggled with the level of generalisation required for
academic analysis which felt violent at times, and the ways ‘the cold prose of the social sciences’ (McDowell, 2001: 97) is culturally coded to seem judgement-laden or incomprehensible to participants (Madden, 2010). The vignettes are one way I have tried to write in complexity in an accessible style. But even in these a level of generalisation and an ‘authorial voice’ contains judgement, and it can be ethically sensitive to present in-depth data to wider audiences, even when anonymised (Delyser and Sui, 2014).
I made some efforts in accessible dissemination and dialogue around research findings. I fed back preliminary findings in a two-hour verbal presentation and discussion at Springboard at the end of my fieldwork (January 2014, see Appendix 5). I gave all interview participants in the Kingsfield case a copy of their interview transcripts. The presentation was a nerve-wracking and sensitive exercise, but I derived immense satisfaction from seeing my participants engage with, agree with and refine my ideas, and the organisation engage with some critical questions I raised. At a certain stage I hoped to take this commitment further through
conducting ‘participatory analysis workshops’. However, the presentation made me aware that this process would produce much new data which would take substantial time to reconcile or represent (Crang and Cook, 2007). Overall I have felt conflicted that the demands of producing the PhD have reduced my capacity to produce participant-focussed outputs. I could have been more realistic in setting expectations around such forms of reciprocity (Punch, 2001). That said, I still hope following PhD submission to produce a short report for a practitioner audience, and an audio podcast as a creative, non-textual output oriented at a wider ‘public’ (Dwyer and Davies 2007b).
Ultimately, writing this thesis has been an attempt to produce a ‘vulnerable text’
that tries to incorporate uncertainty and honesty about limits, that does justice to participants as ‘complicated and conflicted people’ (Crang and Cook, 2007: 165), and tries throughout to ‘retain a dialogue between what can be made a lively presence and what remains a telling absence’ (Dwyer and Davies, 2010: 89).