Sleight of Ear: Voice, Voices, and Ethics of Voicing

13. Learning to Do Research as an Ethical Practice of Voice

We began, as you may recall, with two claims about the benefits of soundwriting:

1. Soundwriting has affordances that are worth considering in learning and writing about human experience.
2. Through teaching soundwriting, it is possible to advance pedagogical missions other than that of teaching soundwriting, such as a practice of writing with sound, for its own sake.

One pedagogical application, we have suggested, is in teaching person-based research using qualitative methods. In that pedagogical situation, we believe that paying attention to (and working with) sound can help not only to foreground listening as an ethical practice for researchers but also to conceive occasions for experiential learning that predict (if not replicate) the embodied nature of person-based research.

To situate our claim about how soundwriting might advance this mission, let's consider the example of Julie's graduate Research Methodologies course (spring 2016). For that course, Julie and her graduate intern, Maria Novotny, created a curriculum designed to invoke problems and invite experiences that would progressively complicate students' understandings of the relationships between research questions, methods, and methodology. Accordingly, they decided that both the first and last projects of the course would be proposals—the first, an invitation to pose what might be a viable research question and to imagine what kinds of moves might be most useful to find answers to it; the second, a revised proposal, informed by the theoretical and practical learning of the course. From the course description:

Our goal this semester will be to practice and develop methodological thinking: With this as our primary objective, the course won't so much take a "coverage" approach, in which an array of methods are introduced and given equal time. Rather, it will invite you to think through two primary methods—ethnographic field research and interviewing—while considering their methodological affordances. However, it'll also invite you to become acquainted with other methods as they may become useful for your goals. Our aim is not so much to learn a catalogue of possible "tools" (though those are certainly useful!) abstracted from their uses, but rather to cultivate a methodological imagination: to acquire the habit of asking questions like, What questions are most interesting and relevant to problems in the field? What is entailed in finding answers to those questions—or finding better questions? Which methods and strategies are most likely to help make the discoveries I hope to make?

In addition to its goal of giving you a focused opportunity to practice and develop methodological thinking, the course will also make space for you to experience research as an embodied practice and to reflect on that experience.

Students began the course by reading two full-length ethnographic monographs with the idea that we could use these to begin to imagine what would be entailed in producing such work (much as we have done in this text with Deborah Brandt, 2001, and Kathleen Stewart, 1996): that is, what the pragmatic, rhetorical, and ethical decisions might be in designing and delivering ethnographic "stuff." We followed with John Van Maanen's (1988) Tales of the Field to invite students to consider the products of qualitative research in relation to rhetorical choices researchers-as-authors must make. We then continued the discussion of the deep rhetorical implicatedness of ethnographic research and writing by considering Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw's (1995) treatment of fieldnotes in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes—inscriptions made by the researcher as a record of what was seen and heard "in the field" as acts of authorship. Throughout this progression, we considered what it might mean for researchers to listen for, and represent, voices—theirs, and those of others—in relation to actual or potential audiences of ethnographic texts.

Once this ground had been established, the class watched the video featuring Liberty Bell that serves as our case example here. We showed the video, at that moment, as an example of how we, for the LiteracyCorps Michigan project, adapted Irving Seidman's (1991) program of phenomenological interviewing for our purposes, and to continue our inquiry into the representation of others in ethnographic research, from the moment of our encounter with those others to the production of narratives with and about them. Our hope was that, by watching and listening to the video at that moment in our emerging narrative, we might be able to make visible—and audible—the ethical dilemmas of documentation and representation the class had noticed in reading ethnographic texts (both research monographs and methods handbooks).

Though the spring 2016 section of Research Methodologies did not introduce the production of soundwriting as a method or pedagogical tool—students were not asked to use audiovisual equipment—we believe that a revised course syllabus would do well to include those experiences. As the course was originally designed, the data collection/fieldwork students did was not directed to the purpose of creating something that could be "written up" and published in the short term, but to the kind of experiential and embodied learning that might continue to inform students' lives as researchers through their graduate work and in the longer term. So, for example, students could interview each other and create audiovisual mashups in which they would have to make decisions about how to juxtapose and edit each other's voices to create a narrative. Having this kind of editorial experience—as producers of audiovisual texts, as well voiced subjects within them—may help to foreground the stakes and ethical considerations entailed in representing voices in storytelling encounters, whether or not these students plan to use audiovisual tools in future research.

Human Cameras / Human Microphones

A less obvious, and not tech-bound, way to serve this goal of inviting students to pay attention to voice is to invite students into new roles as lookers, listeners, and producers. We have enacted this in the form of an exercise we like to call "human cameras and human microphones" (see Fig. 6 below). In this exercise, we set up an artifact-based interview between one interviewer and one interviewee who has brought with her an artifact related to some interest we may have: for example, bring an artifact that represents your daily life as an academic, or bring an artifact that characterizes who you were before graduate school, or bring some sort of text that you read a long time ago but that remains relevant to you today. We then imagine that we are going to film this interview—only instead of using cameras and microphones, we use people with notepads who play the roles of cameras and microphones. Specifically, we ask two or three students to be cameras: one each for the interviewer and interviewee, and a third to pan between them imagining what may be most relevant about their visual interactions. We also ask three or four people to be microphones: again, one each for the interviewer and the interviewee (what they say, how they say it, what sorts of performance aspects seem relevant or noteworthy) and another person or two to take notes of environmental sounds to be included (e.g., questions posed from "off camera," music in the room, the playing of the violin that is serving as an artifact) and sounds to be avoided (passersby, clocks, fans, irrelevant environmental music, the sound of the interviewer's nervously drumming fingers, etc.). Frankly, it's amazing, once you start really listening, how much sound is actually noise.

Fig. 6: The Human Cameras / Human Microphones "recipe." We offer this activity as a recipe because we cannot know your specific needs or ends for employing this activity. This recipe will "feed" an entire class. That is, the human participants will have experiences as ingredients; however, other meta-observers may study the ingredients and their actions and interactions as well. Or, you may choose to "bake" several recipes simultaneously or in succession. We recommend trying one recipe and remixing the humans into the roles of different "ingredients." Have fun! Eat up! (Read the transcript of the video in the appendix.)

This exercise is aimed at yielding rich discussions about how to pay attention, which is predicated by positing what (all) is potentially relevant/useful data, what is not, and what potential data lives in between. With the notes we take, we can begin to posit what this information, if collected, could help us do and what we would need to learn in order to collect and edit that information well. In other words, this multifaceted, partial approach to information collection asks us to regard events of voicing as Jacqueline Jones Royster (1996) suggested in the epigraph in the introduction of this chapter: "voicing actually sets in motion multiple systems, prominent among them are systems for speaking but present also are the systems for hearing" (p. 38). We become these multiple systems for speaking and hearing. And in so doing, we sketch out just how complicated a matter it all can be.

The benefit of this approach is that it does not begin by fetishizing recording and editing technologies but rather by invoking/indexing a deeply embodied participation in human communicative interactions. The recording technologies, then, become things that follow our curiosities, rather than things that lead them. We wind up asking things such as, "How could you get a microphone to hear both the sound of the interviewee whispering to herself and her response and not the sound of her rummaging through her backpack as she looks for her artifact?" What we do not wind up asking is, "So, where does this microphone go? How do I plug it in? Is this the right cable? How do I upload it to the computer?" And so forth. We find these to be important questions eventually (as Bump detailed in Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action, 2013), but they are most often terrible questions to employ at the beginning of a course of inquiry as they attend to means, not goals.

The examples of pedagogical moves and activities described above, insofar as they are lessons in listening—and representing what is heard via practices of listening—are lessons in voice. They have the potential to move learning about the engagements of voice and voices experienced by researchers away from the abstract and into the domain of the embodied. In each activity above—the video/voice mashup activity and the human camera activity—the voices under study both involve and invoke the whole persons to whom the voices belong: those who embody the voices and those who come into possession of the voices. As such, students experience the indexical qualities of voice, the metaphoric qualities of voice, qualities of vocal products, the whole and synecdochic qualities of voices, and the emergence of what we have come to call the third voice—the voice of the text. In the curriculum described above (in which we begin with a look at the rhetorical products of research, published ethnographic texts), we begin with a move directed to calling attention to decisions around voicing by looking at representations of voices, and then move students toward further implication in these decisions—toward an invitation to feel them. A fully realized curriculum of this sort would create an even more deliberately scaffolded experience of attending, listening, and feeling, and would understand the opportunities for learning to be situated in the spaces between, and relationships among, these terms.