ABSTRACT
While qualitative research is a well-established disciplinary research orientation unto itself in education-related research (Hornberger, 2003; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; King, 2001; Kramsch, 2000; McCarty, 2002, 2005; Norton, 2000; Shohamy, 2006), with scholars addressing everything from the “how-to” aspects (Holliday, 2002) to those relating to its political nuances (Canagarajah, 1997; May, 2001; McCarty, 2002), it has, thus far, refrained from adequately and openly addressing texting tensions that the researcher has to contend with in the production of qualitative research texts.1 This is somewhat surprising, since such research texts – the writing and grafting of them and the reading and interpreting of them – are fraught with sociopolitical and cultural mores that we need to actively engage. In an effort to move the discussion about ethnographic research to this other realm – of the production of research texts – this chapter offers a discussion of particular textual concerns and tensions that I as researcher am able to speak about as I critically revisit aspects of the sociopolitics of English-and vernacular-medium education in postcolonial communities such as India. There were a number of issues that I could not openly write about, and the present endeavor allows me to open up and interrogate issues around my previous textual, meaning-making practices, the “presences” that governed them, and the entailing “absences” that I can now openly text (Derrida, 1981; Norris, 1987; Ramanathan, 2007; Sturrock, 1979). I orient the discussion around two key issues pertaining to data selectivity: (1) ideological conflict (what of the data the researcher chooses to build her texts around and with, and what she leaves out because of ideological differences), and (2) translation (what of her data the researcher chooses to translate and present for reception in the West). An appropriate theoretical point of entry by which to address the various latent and complex nexus of concerns underlying both issues is textual fidelity, a term that allows us to openly grapple with what it is we scholars are being “faithful” to in our writing-texting and revisiting processes. The present discussion is an extension of my previous thinking, where, in the contexts of teacher education, I have argued for potential teachers to become more metaaware of their engagements with various aspects of the discipline (Ramanathan, 2002), and where more recently I have engaged in unraveling some of my own knowledge-making practices (especially as they come through translations; Ramanathan, 2006a). While related, the focus of the present chapter is on the
relevance of revisiting and reinterpreting our previous research so to as move toward a clearer understanding of the local politics of governmentality (Foucault, 1978): what governs our immediate meaning-making processes, what our revisitations to these old, sometimes very diverse sites have to say about the discipline’s texts/meanings/knowledges, and how revisitations complicate our notions of textual fidelity by unsealing some of our researching-texting practices. The examples I draw from my research are, in a sense, secondary to the larger point I wish to make about researching ethics, texting dilemmas, and “sealed” thinking. As I have explained elsewhere (Ramanathan, 2006a), such cross-questioning of our researching-texting practices is not intended to take away from the first, “original” work, but to run parallel to our initial endeavors. This kind of work does not so much discredit researching frameworks as point openly to its limits, thereby prodding an acknowledgment and discussion of (the Derridean idea of ) what is “absent” in our current researching practices (since all presences are marked by silences/absences).
