2. The Idea of Voice
The idea of voice has had an enormously productive life in writing studies. As a concept, it has enabled conversations about ethics, agency, and authorship in the teaching and learning of writing. Interest in voice was especially lively in the 1990s—when conversations about "voice" as an idea were frequent and robust. An edited volume published in 1994, Kathleen Blake Yancey's Voices on Voice: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, was an apt indicator of the fabric and texture of conversations around voice that animated disciplinary scholarship at the time. In her introduction to that volume, Yancey began her essay with a consideration of current (and competing) metaphorical uses of voice:
One of the more frequent metaphors employed in rhetoric and composition is voice. Working from an analogy to the spoken context, we use the metaphor of voice to talk generally around issues in writing: about both the act of writing and its agent, the writer, and even about the reader, and occasionally about the presence in the text of the writer. Sometimes we use voice quite specifically: to talk about the writer composing text, in the process addressing both a fictionalized audience constructed by the text and a human audience that is itself re-creating text and writer. Sometimes we use voice to talk specifically about what and how a writer knows, about the capacity of a writer through "voice" to reveal (and yet be dictated by) the epistemology of a specific culture. Sometimes we use voice to talk in neo-Romantic terms about the writer discovering an authentic self and then deploying it in text. These three specific conceptions of voice seem at odds with each other, and they are at odds too with still other interpretations of voice. Voice, then, can and does have several competing references, not all of them necessarily compatible with each other, nor with these three. (p. vii)
A quick survey of scholarship published more recently suggests that since the publication of Voices on Voice, our disciplinary fascination with the idea of voice as a generative concept would appear to be on the wane. While Keywords in Composition Studies (Heilker & Vandenberg, 1996), published in 1996, contained an entry on voice, the updated version of the volume, Keywords in Writing Studies (Heilker & Vandenberg, 2015), published in 2015, includes no such entry.
Now, at this moment, it seems appropriate to make an enthusiastic return to consideration of voice and to put the conceptual and metaphorical work it does in relation to the digitally enabled, multimedia work of composition now. Let’s look more closely at the uses of voice Yancey identified in 1994:
- "to talk about the writer composing text, in the process addressing both a fictionalized audience constructed by the text and a human audience that is itself re-creating text and writer"
- "to talk specifically about what and how a writer knows, about the capacity of a writer through 'voice' to reveal (and yet be dictated by) the epistemology of a specific culture"
- "to talk in neo-Romantic terms about the writer discovering an authentic self and then deploying it in text" (p. vii, emphasis added)
Notice that in each of these elaborations of what "voice" can mean, all specific attention to voice leads us directly to the voice—the presence and properties of the author. But when voices are made of other voices, and when auditory, embodied qualities of these "other" voices are present in an audio text, then it becomes necessary to understand and approach voice as a shared, mediated, and negotiated thing—not (only) as a thing that is about the relationship of an author to a self, in relation to a stable audience.
This seems to be an especially salient shift when those voices invoke the identifiable, embodied presence(s) of others. Qualitative researchers have ever-increasing capacities to make and manipulate audiovisual materials. These abilities may invite/demand that they also function as audiovisual writers and editors as they share products of their research. And if their research invites the participation of other human beings, and if those human beings are engaged by way of interviews, then a real, tangible asset of their research and writing and editing will be the recorded sounds of the voices associated with those human beings. This mediated, audible, partial-yet-indexical human voice belongs to both the speaker and the audiovisual researcher/writer/editor.
What Does it Mean to "Have" a Voice?
At the heart of our inquiry, therefore, is this question: What does it mean to have—that is, to be in possession of—an audible voice, one that is not your own but one with (and through which) you will speak? What does it mean to have a voice—not in Jacqueline Jones Royster's (1996) sense that the first voice she heard was not her own, but in the sense that the audible voice in question truly belongs to someone else? What does it mean to have a voice—in the sense that the first voice your readers hear is neither their own nor your own? What does it mean to have a voice—in the sense that this audible voice is both indexical and synecdochic of a whole, living human being who seems to show up in her entirety in the places where her voice is heard? Except, of course, that she doesn't.
This question of what it means to "have" (that is, to be in possession of) a voice is one that has fully emerged within and animated our research on LiteracyCorps Michigan, our long-term qualitative documentary study. (We have described the methodology for this project in "Time, Lives, and Videotape" [Halbritter & Lindquist, 2012].) The LiteracyCorps Michigan (LCM) project began with an impulse to learn more about students' lives beyond our classrooms, and it developed into a long-term research project that inquires into the in- and out-of-school experiences of Michigan State (MSU) students relevant to our understandings of literacy sponsorship. The methodology of LCM is scaffolded in what life-history researchers Ivor Goodson and Scherto Gill (2011) have called "pedagogic encounters": In the early stages of the research, we conduct a sequence of videotaped interviews with students recruited from first-year writing classes at MSU; in later phases, we enlist some of these students as collaborators in documenting community contexts that have emerged as significant in early interviews. Throughout this process, our approach to interviewing is in line with Jerome Bruner's (1990) observation that, since "people narrativize their experience of the world and their own role in it," the appropriate interview methodology is one that does not ask "respondents to answer our questions in the categorical form," but rather, to participate "in the narratives of natural conversation" (p. 115). The products of these interviews and collaborative documentary work of this research are edited video pieces that feature the stories of LCM participants.
The video piece in the next section, for example, features Liberty C. Bell, a Flint resident and former MSU student who became our long-time collaborator beginning in her first year at MSU. In the video, you will see the four phases of the research unfold as we meet and speak with Liberty in a first interview, meet with her again to do follow-up interviews in other locations on campus, and then are taken by Liberty to Flint via video footage that Liberty collected on her own. Finally, you will see us—Bump and Julie—go back to Flint with Liberty to see the places and meet the people who are significant in the story of her educational aspirations.