Proyectos en ejecución

As I worked through ideas, theoretical perspectives and methodologies informing the study design I came to see how the body itself can be considered a critical analytic tool. My body could philosophically demark who I was as author in the context of what I was studying, seeing myself as an ethnographer who subjected myself, my ‘body, belief,

personality, emotions, cognitions – to a set of contingencies…[to] see, hear, feel, and come to understand the kinds of responses others display (or withhold)’ (Van Maanen 2011b, p. 219). I could expose my embodied self to aspects of others’ life situations, circumstances and views, in this case those in hospital and those doing academic research writing. Archaeology provided tools to analyse discursive formations of objects, enunciative

modalities, concepts and strategies. Genealogy offered tools to make discourse visible and amenable to see the doing of what discourse does, its power/knowledge complex across various texts. Ethnographic methodologies provided material use of the body, to be a researcher physically present in material realities of the field site taken up as a text of

54 time/space realities. Ethnography offered multiple ways to use the body to view, hear and sense how to conceptualise the complexities and instabilities of participant subjectivities; to gain insight about immediacies of what happens in spaces and different perceptions of time not as separate entities but as interconnected in a Thirdspace; to draw upon notions of seeing from multiple perspectives to enrich ethnographic methods of observation; to gain deeper understanding of how the discourse of functional decline operates embedded in care technologies; how they guided and ordered care by means of the panoptic medical gaze of observation/assessment. From here I move to the next chapter for description and discussion of methods.

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Chapter 3: Methods: figuring research practices

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard. (Cixous 1976, p. 880)

Research methods are about practices, strategies and tactics to collect and analyse data for purposes of addressing a research question and writing up the analysis. Qualitative research as a field of inquiry is a discipline, ‘a situated activity that locates the observer in the world…a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible’ (Denzin & Lincoln 2011, p. 3). Discursive ethnography is a critical, qualitative research methodology. It is uncensored body work performed by reading, “doing” interviews, conversations and participant observations. Body work involves concomitant practices of analysing,

interpreting, comparing and writing up textually mediated data from a variety of sources so the body can be heard. As an ethnographer I write myself, listening to my body as I observe, read, analyse, interpret, translate and write up what I see, hear, feel, compare and think in relation to field work, data analysis and writing up the thesis. These methods are based on diverse and not easily defined strategies as the intent of discursive ethnography is to evolve with the unfolding of events under study. Such methods are informed by methodological strategies and tools outlined in the previous chapter. They are open to being questioned, challenged and rethought, leaving conclusions open to possibilities as they arise, are recognised and analysed. This approach to methods has ‘no theory or paradigm that is distinctly its own’ (Denzin & Lincoln 2011, p. 6).

Poststructuralist approaches that informed the study offered ways to engage in questioning, disrupting, and exposing sedimented truth claims and assumptions of

inevitabilities in relation to hospitalised older adults and how such claims and assumptions profoundly affect hospitalisation, care technologies, practices, and experiences for patients and those who care for them. Discursive ethnography allowed for troubling assumptions and truth claims by examining ‘reality’ as uniquely perceived, interpreted, and/or

re/presented by participants, to ‘hear’ participants as ‘tellers of experience’, to create space for unknowns or the unexpected to emerge not as outlier data but as important data for understanding what is under study and knowing ‘every telling is constrained, partial, determined by the discourses and histories that prefigure...[its] representation’ (Britzman 1995, p. 232). Thus in collecting and analysing data the aim was to avoid false short cuts,

56 realising how every ‘telling is partial and governed by the discourses of time and place’ (p. 232). Recognising such constraints has the advantage of informing how to delimit the study to ensure coherency and cogency between the research question and the study itself, to set out specifics and focus on those discourses germane to the work.

This description of methods as research practices starts with the mechanics of entering the field, ethics approval, construction of field sites, description of participants and recruitment/consent processes. These mechanics are shown to be foundational to and aligned with the research practices described and explained. How data was processed, examined and analysed was set by interconnectedness of elements explained by describing the analytic tools and textual practices used. Methods included addressing anticipated ethical concerns and rigor to maintain thesis consistency and cogency as I positioned as researcher and insider/outsider throughout data collection and analysis. Methods were designed to surface from a web of texts the complexities, messiness, discontinuities and powerful effects of entangled discursive practices to shed light on everyday care of hospitalised older adults in the context of functional decline.