Wolves in Sheep's Clothing or Sheep in Wolf's Clothing? was developed from narratives collected through interviews, mail conversations and field notes. The text is written as an ethnodrama (Saldana, 2005) that consists of dramatised, significant selections of the dialogue between researcher and participant, accompanied with their inner monologues and the abstract, theoretical voice of a supervisor. The dialogue reflects a scene of the 'closing conversation' where the researcher explicitly announces that she has to end the weekly conversations in order to start a new phase in the research project. While the dialogue shows how researcher and participant interact, exchange thoughts and confront inter-personal conflicts, the inner monologues allow the audience to glance at that which is not explicitly being said during the conversation. The addition of a theoretical voice provides the audience with a contextual frame of the research project together with supplemental reflections and critical questions on issues that occur in the dialogue. Here questions arise about authorship and ownership, the possibility or non-possibility of equality in a research relationship, the difficulty in defining a relation-ship that is both professional and intimate, about friendship, love and falsehood, about intense rela-tional and identity work. By writing the text as a piece of ethnodrama, the primacy of experience is privileged and a 'performance-sensitive way of knowing' (Conquergood, 1998, p. 26) is evoked. It is a way of knowing which insists on immediacy and involvement and which incites to reflect on the presented themes and conflicts from the point of view of emotional attachment rather than from an analytic distance of detachment.

ResearchGate Logo

Discover the world's research

  • 20+ million members
  • 135+ million publications
  • 700k+ research projects

Join for free

A preview of the PDF is not available

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

In this article, the authors use the metaphor of the rhizome of the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari as an experimental methodological concept to study the narrative construction of the self. By considering the self as a rhizomatic story, the authors create a story structure that not only offers a useful view on the way in which people narratively construct their selfhood but also stimulates an experiment with alternative, nontraditional presentation forms. The researcher is no longer listening from a distance to the stories of the participant and subsequently represents these stories. She or he becomes a part of the rhizome. The authors illustrate this rhizomatic approach and its research possibilities by presenting story fragments from their research.

  • Gelya Frank Gelya Frank

PUBLISHER'S BLURB: In 1976 Gelya Frank began writing about the life of Diane DeVries, a woman born with all the physical and mental equipment she would need to live in our society--except arms and legs. Frank was 28 years old, DeVries 26. This remarkable book--by turns moving, funny, and revelatory--records the relationship that developed between the women over the next twenty years. An empathic listener and participant in DeVries's life, and a scholar of the feminist and disability rights movements, Frank argues that Diane DeVries is a perfect example of an American woman coming of age in the second half of the twentieth century. By addressing the dynamics of power in ethnographic representation, Frank--anthropology's leading expert on life history and life story methods--lays the critical groundwork for a new genre, "cultural biography." Challenged to examine the cultural sources of her initial image of DeVries as limited and flawed, Frank discovers that DeVries is gutsy, buoyant, sexy--and definitely not a victim. While she analyzes the portrayal of women with disabilities in popular culture--from limbless circus performers to suicidal heroines on the TV news--Frank's encounters with DeVries lead her to come to terms with her own "invisible disabilities" motivating the study. Drawing on anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, law, and the history of medicine, Venus on Wheels is an intellectual tour de force.

In this article, the authors use the metaphor of the rhizome of the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari as an experimental methodological concept to study the narrative construction of the self. By considering the self as a rhizomatic story, the authors create a story structure that not only offers a useful view on the way in which people narratively construct their selfhood but also stimulates an experiment with alternative, nontraditional presentation forms. The researcher is no longer listening from a distance to the stories of the participant and subsequently represents these stories. She or he becomes a part of the rhizome. The authors illustrate this rhizomatic approach and its research possibilities by presenting story fragments from their research.

  • Francesca M. Cancian

The feminist goal of challenging inequality requires distinctive methods such as combining social action with research and using participatory approaches. These methods strengthen scientific standards of good evidence and open debate, but they conflict with elitism and careerism in academia and hence are rarely used. Nonhierarchical structures must be created.