“Imagining Educational Research? On the Uses of Fiction in
Autobiographical Narrative Inquiry”
Author Allison Pryor
Commentary # 9

As with any good scientific research, ethnography should be untainted by any sense of the emotional.  The feelings of the subject and the researcher should be set aside along with their individual biases.  In our first class sessions we discussed how to not let our observation notes reflect too much of our biases.  Why though does ethnographic research have to be unemotional?  Education is, for many people, a very emotional field and the process of becoming educated cannot be separated from the emotions that a student experiences.  Using personal memoirs for research is a way to let the emotion of education be studied alongside the process of education.  According to Allison Pryor, using the memoir “may infuse everyday educational research with a certain color and quality of meaning that are not, an indeed often cannot, be expressed solely through technical-rational approaches to research” (Pryor 4).
When written well, a memoir can “seduce the reader, taking her beyond the text itself, while simultaneously bringing her home to herself” (Pryor 8).  As a student of literature, I learned that the text cannot have meaning without the reader.  Pryor describes the memoir as a constantly drifting “sand dune” whose content morphs with every new reader.  In this way the memoir takes on a life of its own and “becomes its own creature” (Pryor 9).
Pryor writes that the reason we don’t typically use memoirs is that we have a cultural belief that everything “ ‘soft’ or ‘touchy-feely’ ” cannot be used in academic research (Pryor 11).  She equates these things with the feminine and writes the we are conditioned culturally to think that feminne is bad or at the least not reliable.  In her article she make a very emotional argument that memoirs can be valid sources of information for the ethnographer.  Just like in Bonnie Sunstein’s article “Culture on the Page” this article encourages us to use “the writer’s craft” to draw the reader into the experience (Sunstein 189).  People are emotional and social creatures and a study that left out the emotional aspects of their existence would be incomplete.
In our discussion on Sunstein’s article our class came to the general consensus that ethnography doesn’t have to consist of boring, dry, and unemotional writing.  Ethnographic research can be interesting and useful while being skillfully and artistically written.