What would an informant tell me after reading my paper? On theoretical significance of ethical commitment and political transparency
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The proposed paper will highlight theoretical significance of fair ethical treatment of informants byway of reflexive analysis of the case of asymmetrical handling of data during my analysis of instructed action. The data for the analysis were assembled during my ethnographic research of the dance improvisation project. Reading my own conference presentation based on these data I started to question myself what would one of my informants tell me after reading it with me. I was urged to ask this question especially in case of this particular informant thanks to my previous experience with making her angry by asking her some questions I needed to confront her with in order to test some of my provisional interpretations of what is going on in the field. By asking the question: what she might tell me? I realised that the way I am treating her in the analysis is not completely fair and started to search for reasons why it is so. It led me to recognise the importance of some parts of my field notes, which I had previously neglected. Realizing their importance and bringing them back helped me to deepen the ongoing analysis and reveal important theoretically relevant aspects of the issue under scrutiny. This particular informant thus helped me to reveal some of the reasons for approaching our data asymmetrically. In my presentation I would like to share what I have learned by this lesson. While the postcolonial critics show on numerous cases how ethically bad treatment of the „research subjects“ produces theoretically bad analysis, I will try to point symmetrically out also how making the analysis ethically better enhances its theoretical quality. It may shed some light on the relation between ethical quality of the research process and theoretical quality of its outcome. |