Reading :: Doing InterViews

InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing, Third Edition
By Svend Brinkmann and Steinar Kvale

My colleague David Guile suggested this book to me, especially because of the metaphorical distinction they make between “miners” (interviewers who are trying to excavate a specific topic) and “travelers” (interviewers who are more exploratory and tend to follow their participants through emergent topics). I gained access to it through my library and read it online, and as a result, I only now see that the authors use a pun in the title. Their approach to interviews really is about “inter-views,” exchanging views between the interviewer and interviewee.

This book is written in a straightforward, engaging manner that will likely be accessible to undergraduates, but will still provide useful advice for those at graduate and postgraduate levels. The authors provide plenty of examples to dissect, and they cover aims, epistemology, ethics, planning and conducting, interview variants, interview quality, transcription and analysis, and generalizing and reporting. Chapters are short and lucid, and examples are robust.

If you’re new to conducting research interviews — or teaching students who are — definitely check it out.

Reading :: The social life of a herstory textbook

The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook: Bridging Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory
By Massilia Ourabah

Forgive me for a brief review of a book that deserves a more substantial one. 

In this short (80pp plus index)book, Ourabah examines the textbook La place des femmes dans l’histoire (The Place of Women in History). This historiography was written to be incorporated into French primary and secondary educational curricula, but so far, it rarely has been. To examine this case, Ourabah conducts ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing the people who conceived of, commissioned, wrote, and publicized the textbook, as well as some who have actually deployed it in classrooms. To analyze her fieldwork, she applies institutionalism and actor-network theory in separate chapters.

She concludes that this “pick-and-mix” approach, applying two different frameworks to the same case, is rewarding. Through it, she concludes that

the piecemeal approach to educational change that this story embodies is grounded in a tradition of feminist reformist and “under-the-radar” activism. It argues that feminist educational change cannot be substantive if it only relies on individual and opportunistic action, and if it requires a great amount of translational work from educational practitioners, as in the present case study. (p.71)

Although I didn’t double-check this, I suspect this book began its life as a dissertation or thesis. It’s short; the analysis is neatly bifurcated; the uptake (applying two frameworks to the same case is generative) isn’t particularly surprising. Yet I think it’s also useful for understanding how a piecemeal approach runs into the institutional wall of secondary education. If you’re interested in dual frameworks, secondary education, or educational change, definitely take a look.

Reading :: Making Christ present in China

Making Christ present in China: Actor-network theory and the anthropology of Christianity By Michel Chambon

In this ethnography, Michel Chambon examines churches in the Yanping District — state-licensed and underground; Catholic, Protestant, and three-self — to understand how Chinese Christians take up Christianity and translate it in their practice. 

The book is substantial, but not exactly in my field of expertise. So I’ll only say a few things about it. 

First, although Christians encourage us to understand Christianity as an underlying truth, it’s also common knowledge that Christianity is adapted to the environment that hosts it. For instance, most of us know that Easter is celebrated with iconography emphasizing Christ’s resurrection, but also symbols of fertility (eggs, rabbits). Catholic holidays are littered with this casual synchretism. Although Christianity has been applied to colonize non-Christian countries, those countries also reinterpret Christianity in terms of their own cultures and beliefs. Chambon provides more evidence for this fact. Interestingly, he points out that Thanksgiving — a specifically American and not necessarily religious holiday — has been taken up by Chinese believers as a Christian holiday and linked with Chinese customs that predate it. This uptake apparently came from South Korea, where US troops brought it during the war. And it is so broadly accepted that the people Chambon interviewed were surprised to hear that it wasn’t celebrated by Christians worldwide.

Second, Chambon also examines the uptake of symbols. One mildly surprising symbol was the piano, which churchgoers took to be the quintessential Christian instrument — so much so that they couldn’t imagine a church without it. They could imagine a church without a cross, but not without a piano. 

Although I enjoyed this discussion, I was not convinced that actor-network theory was a necessary part of the analysis. I also didn’t think the book was especially dense — honestly, I think it could have been much shorter. 

Still, if you are interested in how beliefs are taken up and translated in new environments, I recommend reading this book.