I've been MIA for over a year working on my PhD. Needless to say I've written down plenty of ideas for future blog posts, however, an event this week has inspired me to write in this space.
The event sparked me thinking about analysis. I'm about to begin my data analysis on the deeply personal reflections shared to me by the participants in my research study. So, I'm using this space to have a go at analysing an event which began in jest yet took a very personal and professional turn for me on the eve of International Women's Day.
I work in a number of jobs that are complimentary to one another. It's important to note that the event I'm about to describe to you could have occurred in any one of these spaces. For our purposes the place this event occurred is irrelevant.
First, let me tell you about the context: I was sitting in a meeting. Around the table were members of the community who perform similar jobs to me, members who have just started working in this place and members in charge of overseeing our work. In other words, our job titles position us as having differing rights and duties.
The terms I use here come from positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). Consider the positioning triad:
Adapted from (Harré and Moghaddam, 2003)
I'll focus on the term positions and speech acts. Consider the following dialogue as an example to understand the fluidity of positions:
At the end of a class, a teacher (T) and student (S) have this conversation:
T: Jessica, please erase the whiteboard.
S: Sure!
This short conversation illustrates that the teacher believes she has the right to ask Jessica to perform this task. By asking Jessica to do this, the teacher positions her as having the duty to comply. From the social constructionist perspective of positioning theory, Jessica is a thinking, feeling human being capable of accepting or rejecting the teacher's positioning. Here, Jessica has accepted the position as a person who should perform this duty. The social situation would have turned out differently had Jessica rejected this position. For example, Jessica could've complained, positioned another student as a person more able to erase the whiteboard or she could have completely ignored the teacher all together. These rejections suggest, from Jessica's perspective, that the teacher didn't have the right to ask her to perform such a banal task.
Back to the event in question: Remember who's sitting around the meeting table? I'll use the following titles, each adorned with implied rights and duties, for these different people:
- Seniors: members of the community who perform similar jobs to me
- Juniors: members who have just started working in this place
- Evaluators: members in charge of overseeing our work
So, we were sitting around the meeting table, all of us with our perceptions of our rights and duties in tow. One of the evaluators, referring to another senior and I, asked what we were doing. A junior explained that we were catching up on the last meeting's material because the 2 of us 'weren't here.' Looking up from my computer, I clarified that I was at the university working on my PhD. My negotiated work schedule allows for this flexibility. I was met with the comment: 'So, Emily was at the uni sipping lattés.' I cringed and curbed my annoyance for the time being.
As I brooded over the matter with 2 fingers of single malt, I couldn't help think about my use of positioning theory in my research and also in the way I have come to understand unfolding social situations in life. I had been positioned as a latté sipping, work avoiding student, a position I vehemently reject.
The evaluator misread the social situation in a number of ways. Firstly, he/she assumed the right to position me in this way because of his/her misunderstanding of the professional relationship we ought to share. Secondly, the comment in itself was a rejection of the duties integral to his/her job title: contributing to the research-based practice of this working community.
While doing some scholarly reading this morning, without a latté, I began reflecting on how people come to accept or reject positions that are assigned to them by others. Perhaps sparked by reading social media posts related to International Women's Day (#IWD2017) I logged on to Twitter to publicly reject the latté sipper position. I wrote the following posts with the hashtag #lattesipping in the text.
https://twitter.com/EduScholar007/status/839613737908613120
https://twitter.com/EduScholar007/status/839614332027596800
So, to what extent did my #lattesipping hash tag rejection of being positioned have on the meeting conversation? Well, it's probably impossible to say because it was removed from the spacial and temporal context of the original conversation. Furthermore, there was only a slim chance of the evaluator searching the Twittersphere for hash tags derived from his/her discourse. But that's not necessarily the point. For me, part of this rejection of the latté sipper position involved a kind of digital catharsis I didn't believe was my right to have in the context of the workplace sitting with a person in a position of power.
One of my scholarly interests involves understanding how people assert their personal agency using digital technologies. While reflecting on this event through positioning theory, it struck me that hashtags could be used to understand something about the acceptance or rejections of positions assigned to people by others. Hashtags could also be used to reflect on the very public self-positioning of individuals in the digital space. This is something I'm toying with at the moment and wanted to put out there. I think it would be an interesting research endeavour that would certainly cross cultural and linguistic borders and part of me wonders what Wittgenstein (2009) would reflect on the language-games played out in conversations over Twitter.
If you got this far, thanks for reading! I'd love to hear some reflections on this post from a novice researcher.
References:
Harré, R., & van Langenhove, L. (Eds.). (1999). Positioning theory: moral contexts of intentional action. Malden, Mass: Blackwell.
Harré, R., & Moghaddam, F. M. (2003). The self and others: positioning individuals and groups in personal, political, and cultural contexts. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
Wittgenstein, L., Anscombe, G. E. M., Hacker, P. M. S., & Schulte, J. (2009). Philosophical investigations (Rev. 4th ed.). Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
