ABSTRACT
The truly unfamiliar does not exist – not for long anyway. Magritte delighted in challenging the public through his art to defamiliarize familiar things. An everyday object, a pipe, say, is not what we think it is [ceci n’est pas une pipe]. To challenge our assumptions, he suggests, is to bring new depths of thought, if not knowledge (Cembalest, 2012). Mental model theory, which informs much of the analysis in this chapter, teaches us that both too much familiarity and too little familiarity can be blinding. This is a chapter about several ways that observers can work with the familiar without succumbing to the comfortable assumptions that can obscure what is in front of us to be seen and experienced. “Untamed subjectivity,” writes a sociologist of education “mutes the emic voice” (Peshkin, 1988: 21). As his work suggests, the literature on how we shape our research through the facts of our life experiences, is broad, not restricted to anthropology, and serves a range of topics and applications, from theory to increasing arenas of practice. In the arenas of practice is where this chapter is situated in hopes of stimulating a conversation about how to bring consumers more into the research and how to continue to engage clients as collaborators in research. The last twenty years have seen many breakthrough technologies and methods, from the simple pencil and paper to the sophisticated applications of information technology for bringing consumers and clients into research. Many of these state-of-the-art developments can be found in the proceedings of the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (see, for example, EPIC2013’s session, (Co)creation and (Co)participation: multiple actors in research epiconference.com, introduced by Ortlieb 2013).
