Reading Log #2 - Part 1

Reading Log: Nathan, Chap. 1
Summary:
The author, a 50+ year old professor of Anthropology, describes her growing realization of a disconnect between herself and her students. This realization eventually grows into the idea for an ethnography wherein the author anonymously enrolls as a freshman at her own university and begins the process of chronicling what it is like to be a student. She moves into the dorms, takes a full load of classes (at first), eats in the caf, and takes part in a multiplicity of activities - all while maintaining a very large-scale research agenda.

Reflection:
How much do I love this book? This sounds so much like suck-up talk, but the truth is that the writing is engaging, the topic completely appropriate to my life (hello - 45 year old librarian and mother takes on the PhD), and basically is the best guide to the world of ethnography a neophyte could find.

Nathan begins with some questions about the ethics of posing as a member of the culture under study, of writing under an assumed name, and of whether choices she made surrounding her "undercover" identity are tantamount to lying. I wanted to skip to the Afterword just to see how she answers her questions, justifies her choices, but I did not because I want to let the story unfold without that additional baggage. Still, there are potholes here that must pertain to every study a qualitative researcher might choose to undertake. How much of us is too much, too little, when we make ourselves a part of what we study in this way?

I must admit to having read few (maybe no) ethnographic books. Libraries are not typically the land of ethnography and so my professional reading is likely to avoid them. So far in my PhD course work they have been inappropriate as well, since most of what we do, and the direction in which we are pointed, is biased toward the quantitative. With that in mind, it is easy to see why my research design paper was put together in a way that did not make sense to a qualitative researcher and engendered comments about placement of information, sparse details, etc. What a difference reading this book is making in how I see myself writing about the research for this class!