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January 23, 2004

So, what's your method?

Interesting discussion yesterday over at jill/txt (I came across it via CultureCat) about method in the humanities. Jill writes about an article by Arild Fetveit, "The Trojan horse: how the concept of 'method' serves to marginalise humanities perspectives within media studies." Her description of it made me wish that I could go read it:

An important point is that humanistic, or culture-analytical research, as Fetveit calls it, seeks to find productive, fruitful interpretations, ideas and connections that help us see new aspects of events, objects, texts - it's beside the point to talk about measurable verifiable generalisable outcomes

This is the time of the year where our soon-to-be-graduates are visiting campuses, facing rooms full of strangers, and defending their work from every angle, in the hopes of landing jobs. The inevitable question, the one that I always dreaded? "So, what's your method?" I've gotten quite good (I think) at what I think of as the "answer of no answer" in that regard. First, it depends mightily upon what the questioner counts as method. One of the real weaknesses in our field (and just about everything I say here should be qualified that way) is that we don't really have a consistent answer to that question. Some people ask the method question wanting to know whether you do quantitative or qualitative research, and are willing to accept grudgingly any kind of textual method as a weak step-sibling at best. Some ask it as a way of testing one's theoretical tendencies or loyalties. And then some ask it because it's a question that requires no real comprehension or even listening on the part of the interlocutor. It can always be asked. So step 1 is to interrogate the question, and perhaps the questioner.

Step 2, for me, involves stepping in a different direction. Forgive, please, if I'm wrong about this, but I think of method as a single approach that guides a particular project, and methodology as the study of method. So I engage in my work at the level of methodology, testing various approaches, and looking for those that seem to produce the most compelling insights. Now, most of my work ends up being interpretive and/or analytical, but you know what? That's where I get my juice. I'm actually planning a quantitative chapter for my second book, but that's not where my interests lie, for the most part. More and more, though, I've found myself asking students to think about what different studies might look like for a given topic, and what results they might produce. My sense is that those who have "a method" are remarkably boring--particularly in the humanities, where it sometimes seems that there are as many shades of analysis as there are writers, I think it's important to understand how to ask a range of questions, and to be prepared to answer those questions in a variety of ways. Asking what a body's method is is a lot like asking, "What's your theory?" Uhh, okay, theory of what? If you've got nothing to explain, then you can't really have a theory. Likewise, method is pretty meaningless outside of a particular research context. If you've only got "a method," then aren't you basically closing off a huge number of potential avenues of inquiry?

The trouble with humanities-oriented methods, I suspect, is that they're practice -based; they emerge out of the encounters we have with the objects of our study. We must not only interpret and analyze, but maintain a constant, critical awareness of those interpretations and analyses. This is a difficult thing to do, and almost equally difficult to explain to someone who asks how this process differs from reading. Here's the difference. When I teach analysis to first-year writing students, I can stand at the front of the room, and spend an hour isolating key words and ideas in an essay, "picking it apart," demonstrating how certain approaches support his or her message, and others undermine it. I can interrogate the rhetorical strategies at play, critique the word choice, find the soft spots in the argument, and/or turn the thing inside-out. I know because I've done it, and I've done it not with "academic" essays or literary texts, but with NYTimes articles chosen 15 minutes before class started. The object makes very little difference, and I choose the readings we work with almost randomly. My students, at the beginning of the semester, are mostly flummoxed by the notion of spending more than 10 minutes on a page of prose, not to mention writing a 5-page (gasp!) essay performing such an analysis. It's as foreign to them as most qualitative research is to me.

This is analysis. It is method. And it is skill. But it's skill that we internalize through years of graduate study, and we take it for granted as a result. Honestly, it wasn't until I tried to seriously understand and teach analysis to 18-year-olds that I began to articulate for myself just what it was about how I read that I wanted them to begin to acquire for themselves. We've gotten to be pretty poor at defending the methods that we actually practice, and so, even as a candidate for tenure-track positions, I was as flummoxed as my students. I mostly agree with Jill when she says that "Asking a humanities scholar to explain his or her method is ... a question that sets premises that make any answer wrong - unless you refuse to answer, and instead change the terms." I guess I'd argue that we change the terms of that kind of question by identifying our methods and defending them--that's part of why I wish I were able to read Fetveit's article. We need careful, critical consideration of method in the humanities, not shame felt in the wake of social science.

So anyhow. Go read Jill's post, and the comments that follow.

Posted by cgbrooke at January 23, 2004 01:22 AM

Comments

Posted by: Byron Hawk at January 23, 2004 01:56 PM