The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
assumptions and values. The question thus emerges, what are the aims and purposes of the social sciences? What do they value, and how are these values fulfilled by their forms of research and their languages of description and explanation? Often it is said that the aims of the sciences are ‘prediction and control.’ However, many researchers are alienated by this conclusion, and prefer to cast their work, for example, in the service of various liberal and humanitarian goals. We are then invited to ask: what methods, what forms of inquiry, and what forms of description and explanation may best suit such ends.
From these constructionist dialogues emerged three significant conclusions linking the social sciences with the arts. First, by removing the mantle of authority from traditional empirical science, social sciences were liberated to consider alternative methods of inquiry. One may trace the mushrooming of qualitative research practices – including the performative – to this line of argument. Second, because all accounts of the world- including the scientific – carry the values of those who espouse them, then social science researchers can make no claims to value neutrality. The door now opens to carrying out science not as neutral bystanders, but for the very purposes of realizing social and political ends. Finally, from a constructionist perspective, there is no privileged form of language for describing and explaining the world. Thus, in terms of truth posits, the various languages of the arts are equivalent to the languages (and statistics) of the sciences.
While the enormous range of performative and arts-based inquiry that subsequently emerged within the social sciences cannot be traced directly to these ideas, the indirect effects cannot be overestimated. Until such ideas began to ripple through the social sciences, there was no way to legitimate such inquiry. One could look back at many experiments created by social psychologists in the late 1960s and early 1970s as performative in character. For example, Stanley Milgram's (1974) famous studies on obedience, along with the well-known ‘Stanford prison study’ (Haney et al., 1973) were highly theatrical. However, the performativity was inadvertent, as the primary intention was to create empirically grounded generalizations.
More directly related, in my experience were a series of highly popular symposia presented at the American Psychological Association meetings from 1995 to 1999. Presentations included plays, poetry, film, painting, dance, mime, and multi-media presentations. Similarly important were the annual meetings of the International Conference on Qualitative Inquiry, hosted by Norman Denzin at the University of Illinois. Since 2005 they provided an inviting platform for performative work. Attracting over a thousand international researchers a year in the qualitative field, they highlighted the work of many well-known performance scholars, including Tami Spry (2001, 2011), Laurel Richardson (1997), Ron Pelias (1999, 2014, 2018) and Johnny Saldaña (2011).Also noteworthy in the direct linkages with constructionist ideas was the compilation by Kip Jones et al. (2008) in an edited issue of Forum: Qualitative Social Research (vol. 9), This special issue included 42 entries from authors in 13 countries, and featured 100 photographs, 50 illustrations, 36 videos, and two audio-recordings. Jones also was the organizer of a series of five exploratory conferences in 2006–07. These efforts allowed social scientists to identify areas of possible connections with each other as well as with practitioners from the arts (Gergen and Jones, 2008). Jones continues to advance performative social science through his blog Kipworld (2017), and his work at the Bournemouth University, Centre for Qualitative Research.
Attractions of Performative Inquiry
As we see, the constructionist dialogues provide strong arguments for social scientists to cast off the restrictions of positivist methodology, to give expression to their values in the aims and practices of their research, and to employ the full range of rhetorical skills in communicating their work. For those engaged in these dialogues, there was the additional advantage that performative inquiry avoided the kind of authoritative truth claims often associated with scientific rhetoric. When a message is carried through performance, an audience may be moved without presuming that it is scientifically certified. Performative work constitutes serious play.
Whether touched directly or indirectly by constructionist dialogues, social scientists have found performative inquiry appealing in many other ways. At the outset, such inquiry allows the researcher to address social concerns in ways that are far more accessible to public audiences than are the more antiseptic and abstract forms of professional writing (Finley, 2018). This also allows the researcher to avoid the common critique that scholarly work is elitist, that it is written for other scholars, while the public is shut out of the conversation that is often ‘about them.’
Also attractive is the invitation to personal expression. The researcher is not hamstrung by a cumbersome and formalized language of representation, as required in many scientific communities, but can draw from the full range of his or her potentials. This may mean, for example, drawing from folk traditions in one's life – woven into one's ethnicity, gender, or class. In a recent edition of the International Review of Qualitative Research, for example, one article features Anishinabe song and story (Pedri-Spade, 2016) and a second the craft of beading as a method of performative inquiry (Ray, 2016).
In contrast to traditional methods – in which one's life history is eliminated from view, a performative orientation also opens a space in which one's life experiences can become assets to expression. We shall return to this potential in a later discussion of autoethnography. And too, performative inquiry invites the researcher to explore or give expression to one's aesthetic potentials – in writing poetry, acting, playing an instrument, dancing, and so on.
Many researchers are attracted to performative inquiry because of its rhetorical power. Among the attributes of performative inquiry are its capacity to blend various forms of art together, thus ‘speaking in many voices’ at once. For example, in his analysis of Custer's ‘last stand’ against native American warriors, Norman Denzin combined autobiographical reminiscences, historical description, artistic representations, staged readings, and snippets of documents to produce a powerful, multi-layered ethnography (2011). This feature is especially attractive to activist researchers. While lines of careful reasoning may advocate social change, their temperate and measured form of logical argumentation often leave one in thought. Are there other arguments to consider; what is the history of this issue; and so on. By drawing on the full range of the arts, one's message can stimulate excitement, the emotions, and the impetus to action.
Domains of Performative Inquiry
Social scientists now draw from the full range of artistic traditions in their inquiries, and often combine traditions for particular purposes. The creative possibilities are limitless, and the mushrooming developments in digital technology open a vast new territory. However for analytic purposes it is useful to scan the work in three more circumscribed realms: textual, embodied action, and visual.
Textual Adventures
Because traditional scholarship takes the form of writing, the most attractive invitation into performative work has been furnished by literary traditions such as biography, fiction, and poetry. Constructionist ideas invite one to experiment with these traditional forms. In the case of biography, for example, in an exploration of her own eating disorder, Lisa Tillmann-Healy (1996) shows her hidden bulimia via short vignettes, from early childhood to her twenties. Karen Fox's (1996) juxtaposition of three voices was extracted from interviews to form a pseudo-conversation: the first voice was that of her client, who as a young girl, had been sexually abused by her grandfather; the second a man now in prison for sexually abusing his granddaughter; and the third, her own, commenting on her feelings. Kenneth and Mary Gergen (1994) composed a duography, that is, a double biography, which began with the voices of two independent individuals and gradually melded them together over the course of the text.
The logic inherent in this tradition also finds lively development in autoethnography (Bochner and Ellis, 2016; Sughrua, 2016), in which scholars use themselves as instruments for illuminating a particular socio-cultural condition. The shift from ethnography to autoethnography is an important one, as it replaces the authority of the outside observer with the voice of the person in-situ (Ellis, 2004). This work has frequently expanded to include novels and theatrical scripts (Ellis, 2004; Richardson,