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Scattered Diaries: Biographical Dialogues on the Ethnographic Imagination, Friendship and Popular Music Research

image of Scattered Diaries: Biographical Dialogues on the Ethnographic Imagination, Friendship and Popular Music Research

This chapter is a playful exploration of one of the distinctive tools within ethnography: the diary. This diary is not a linear documentation of events, but an imperfect retrospective, a scattered dialogue between two friends and research collaborators – Asya and Shane. We aim to reflect, in a new and personal style, on the biographical aspects of doing popular music ethnography, teaching and research through working together. We tell a story about an academic friendship. There are two broad theoretical frameworks to this critical dialogue which derives firstly, from C. Wright Mills' (1959: 216) The Sociological Imagination, which suggests “you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work.” Secondly, from Les Back's (2016) Academic Diary, whereby we chronicle our engagements through dates, but these dates are not presented in a chronological narrative but are scattered under the weight of pressure and rhythm.

Keywords: biographical reflections ; ethnographic diary ; Ethnographic imagination ; ethnographic voice ; Ethnography ; experimental research writing ; higher education ; PhD ; PhD research journey ; PhD supervisor ; popular music ; Popular Music Research ; reflexivity ; research partnerships ; supervisor

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References

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References

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     [Google Scholar]
  2. Adorno, Theodor, Benjamin, Walter, Bloch, Ernst, Brecht, Bertolt and Lukács, Georg (eds) (1977), Aesthetics and Politic, London: Verso.
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  3. Back, Les (2016), The Academic Diary, London: Goldsmiths Press.
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  4. Bartlett, Brydie-Leigh and Ellis, Carolyn (eds) (2009), Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal, Bowen Hills: Australian Academic Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Blackman, Shane (2016), ‘The emotional imagination: Exploring critical ventriloquy and emotional edgework in reflexive sociological ethnography with young people’, in S. Blackman and M. Kempson (eds), The Subcultural Imagination: Theory, Research and Reflexivity in Contemporary Youth Cultures, London: Routledge, pp. 65–79.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Bochner, Arthur and Ellis, Carolyn (2016), Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories, London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Bourdieu, Pierre (1992), An Invitation to Reflexive Methodology (Part III), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.329
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Cambridge: Polity Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Brown, Phillip, Hesketh, Anthony and Williams, Sara (2003), ‘Employability in a knowledge-driven economy’, Journal of Education and Work, 16:2, pp. 107–26.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Chang, Heewon (2008), Auto Ethnography as Method, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Chang, Heewon (2016), ‘Autoethnography in health research: Growing pains’, Qualitative Health Research, 26:4, pp. 443–51.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Draganova, Asya (2019), Popular Music in Contemporary Bulgaria: At the Crossroads, Bingley: Emerald.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Draganova, Asya and Blackman, Shane (2018), ‘No Blue Plaques “in the Land of Grey and Pink”: The Canterbury Sound, heritage and the alternative relationships of popular music and place’, in S. Holland and K. Spracklen (eds), Subcultures, Bodies and Spaces: Essays on Alternativity and Marginalisation, Bingley: Emerald, pp. 219–37.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Draganova, Asya, Blackman, Shane and Bennett, Andy (eds) (2021), The Canterbury Sound in Popular Music: Scene, Identity and Myth, Bingley: Emerald.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Frith, Simon (1978), The Sociology of Rock, London: Constable.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Geertz, Clifford (1967), ‘Under the mosquito net’, The New York Review of Books, 14 September.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Hall, Graham (2020), ‘Ethnographic diaries and journals: Principles, practices and dilemmas’, in P. Hackett and C. Hayre (eds), Handbook of Ethnography in Healthcare Research, London: Routledge, pp. 277–89.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Hartman, Saidiya (2019), Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, New York: Norton.
     [Google Scholar]
  19. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1926), Myth in Primitive Psychology, London: Kegan Paul.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1967), A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Primal Scream (1991), Screamadelica, London: Creation Records.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Punch, Samantha (2012), ‘Hidden struggles of fieldwork: Exploring the role and use of field diaries’, in Emotion, Space and Society, 5:2, pp. 86–93.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Smith, Dorothy E. (2005), Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People, New York: AltaMira Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Weber, Max (1930), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Willis, Paul (1977), Leaning to Labour, Farnborough: Saxon House.
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  26. Wright Mills, Charles (1959), The Sociological Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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