Rachel Hurdley

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Epilogue: Encounter

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013

Making Home, Identity and Belonging in a Workplace

Histories of Domestic Fire

This chapter examines scholarly and expert writing about four developmental phases of domestic fi... more This chapter examines scholarly and expert writing about four developmental phases of domestic fire in Europe: the hearth, fireplace, mantelpiece and, finally, objects displayed on mantels. The first problem is material ‘evidence’: what has survived and, just as importantly, what has not. Stone and wood, rich and poor, male and female: what now can be seen of them? Second, I will stress how points of view re-emerge and transform, to demonstrate how ‘coherent’, taken-for-granted explanations fall apart under sustained scrutiny. This is not a ‘timeline’ of the mantelpiece, but a messy assemblage of diverse traces (Law 2004; Savage 2007). This ‘throwing together’ re-orders seemingly coherent historic narratives to highlight the gaps between them, where different interpretations become visible.

Telling Identities

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013

Using unconventional media to disseminate qualitative research

This article draws on a project (funded by the Qualiti node of the ESRC National Centre for Resea... more This article draws on a project (funded by the Qualiti node of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods) that investigated the implications of using non-conventional media for representing and disseminating qualitative research findings. It follows a series of previous, ESRC-funded projects investigating the methodological and empirical uses of hypermedia and multimedia for qualitative fieldwork-based research1. Following Weaver and Atkinson’s early work on hypertext for qualitative analysis (1994), in 2002-2005 the team constructed an innovative, digital ‘ethnographic hypermedia environment’ (EHE) containing an interactive multimedia dataset, analysis and authoring2 . This suggested further research was needed on the differences in meaning produced through mixed media digital authoring as opposed to traditional written print. Whilst scholarly dissemination is still dominated by print, the ready availability of new technologies allowing web-based audio-visual media and ‘hyperlinking’ (clickable text) invites questions about what roles different media can play in scholarly output today. For example, can edited video-sequences be used in ways analogous to a print article? And with what effect on the integrity and credibility of scholarly argumentation?

Book review: GILLIAN ROSE, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (Second edition) London: SAGE, 2007, 287 pp. ISBN: 978 1 4129 2190 9 (hbk) £70.00, 978 1 4129 2191 6 (pbk) £21.99

Qualitative Research, Apr 1, 2008

techniques in oral history again combines theory with a clear introduction to the technique, and ... more techniques in oral history again combines theory with a clear introduction to the technique, and is a welcome call for more work on this overlooked practice in oral history. The fourth section, ‘Applications’ illuminates the relations between autobiography, biography, myth and history, and the complex interactions of past and present. As such, this section argues both for the place and importance of oral history and the need for wide public accessibility in order for it to achieve its political potential. The exciting possibilities of hypermedia for both integrity and empowerment are a constant refrain in many chapters. This is revisited here with considerations of aural, visual and physical aspects of performance, and shared, yet sometimes conflicting interests of oral historians, journalists and documentary-makers. In sum, I would recommend this book for students and old hands of interview-based research, especially life history, since it is an excellent focus on the complexities of interaction, sound, writing and vision, and the painful difficulties of transcription, editing and authorship in knowledge production. The historical overview is vital for tracing the birth of certain assumptions and tensions, and the contributors’ reflections on the ethics of this type of research are timely, particularly with reference to hypermedia. Although some sections may retread old ground from a social scientific point of view, these are necessary for the book’s aim to articulate the crossdisciplinary nature of the debates, whilst providing a clear handbook of methods for the student.

Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013

Interactive science discovery: Communicating science?

Book Review: Mobile Methodologies

The Sociological Review, May 1, 2010

Drawing as a Research Method

SAGE Research Methods Foundations, 2020

Drawing by hand is a valuable method for four reasons: (1) ubiquity in everyday life; (2) histori... more Drawing by hand is a valuable method for four reasons: (1) ubiquity in everyday life; (2) historical importance in anthropology; (3) continuing prominence in natural sciences, architecture, physical geography, and associated disciplines; and (4) potential for opening up, augmenting, challenging, and transforming text-based and digitised research methods. The aim of this entry is to show how drawing, familiar to most people since childhood, is a radical, multivalent, and pragmatic research method. Recent research shows that “the production of visual art involves more than the mere cognitive and motor processing described. The creation of visual art is a personal integrative experience—an experience of “flow”—in which the participant is fully emerged in the creative activity (Bolwerk et al., 2014, para. 16)

Defamiliarising Home

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013

Focal Points

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013

Genealogies of Difference

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013

Chapter 1 narrated how Roman design, in the form of Italian neoclassicism, together with other Co... more Chapter 1 narrated how Roman design, in the form of Italian neoclassicism, together with other Continental trends, translated into a British idiom, attached always to the open flame and more recently, to the ‘garniture’ on the mantelshelf. In this chapter, two different genealogies of the mantelpiece, in China and the US, offer reflections upon the different ways of ‘history-making’ in Part I (to view images and websites relating to the Chapter, see Hurdley 2012). It explores how the absence of mantelpiece culture in China, and the careful preservation of New England fireplace practices, dig deeper at the foundations of home and identity – in the sense of homeland, or nation. I chose China as a country which until recently had very little cultural exchange with Britain, and New England precisely because it was an early colonial territory. I was also taken by the serendipitous discovery that a complete and exactingly researched traditional Chinese house now has its home in this US state. By looking at other countries, at how the ‘white middle-class Anglophone identities’ (Savage et al. 2010) have fared in colonialising domestic architecture, we can understand how the ‘universal particular’ makes its world everywhere (Savage 2003).

Conclusion: Culture, Clutter, Contemplation

One spring morning, a couple of months ago, I was back in the cottage where the house martin had ... more One spring morning, a couple of months ago, I was back in the cottage where the house martin had flown in through the window, as told in Chapter 4. While I was editing the final draft, I looked again at the ancient fireplace. The plaster above the hearth had been stripped back to reveal a worn wooden beam, twisted with age, set into the wall. No ornament could ever have rested on that; it seemed to be holding half the house up. I kept the window closed, to prop my iPhone against the frame, hoping for a glimmer of 3G to beam through the pine forests and mountains. An email arrived, asking me to contact a BBC researcher, to talk about Mass Observation Mantelpiece Reports (Chapter 2). I called her, my face and phone pressed to the window in a confusion of half-heard broken shouts. A fighter jet roared overhead. Later that week, I made the long journey to the MO Archive at Sussex University, to talk to a reporter from a popular current affairs programme.

Relating the Gift

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013

The last chapter focused on how relations between things and people are remade in social interact... more The last chapter focused on how relations between things and people are remade in social interactions, including talk, writing, dusting, commemorating the dead and the other work of home. It emphasised how seemingly static displays of objects can be understood as ongoing processes of identity, as both relation and performance, intimately connected with the politics of family, home and beyond. This chapter focuses on a particular sort of thing/process, the gift, since this allows close scrutiny of the frictions between the different demands of identity work. In late modernity, the aestheticisation of everyday life by individual consumers (Featherstone 1991) is a sociological concept embedded in, and also confirming the notion of the late modern individual. However, the ambiguous status of the gift-fordisplay is a dimension of domesticity that questions this. Working through the idea of the gift as a ‘structuring structure’ (Bourdieu 1977, 1979, 1986) also disturbs other ‘givens’, such as the mantelpiece and, in turn, the home as present practice.

Book Review: Identity in the 21st Century: New Trends in Changing Times

The Sociological Review, Nov 1, 2010

This edited collection draws on twelve British research projects from the recent ‘Identities and ... more This edited collection draws on twelve British research projects from the recent ‘Identities and Social Action’ programme, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. As such, it provides a series of snapshots of a ‘particular sample, site or context for identity making’ (p. 2). Broadly concerned with Judith Butler’s (2004) question of how people build ‘liveable’ lives, the collection addresses grand theories of social change – particularly those pressing the ‘individualization’ thesis (eg Bauman, 2001; Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Giddens, 1991) – through empirical studies of class and community, ethnicity and migration, and intimate identities. Ranging from large scale survey data to qualitative multimethods, a psychosocial case study and discourse analysis, it examines contemporary lives from a range of methodological perspectives. As such, it offers rich new interpretations of current intersections between identity, culture and power, and a stimulating challenge to dominant theories of late modern identity. In Part I, four chapters focus on Class and Community. In their study of white middle-class ‘against the grain’ school choices (pp. 76–94), David James et al. criticize the view of the individual ‘self-as-consumer’ (Rose, 1998) that dominates both social theory and policy. The researchers acknowledge the resonance with Giddens’s (1991) reflexive individual in a neo-liberal, globalized economy in the field of school ‘choice’; but by showing how middle class parents choosing ‘bad’ schools actually develop and confirm their ‘abundance of capital’ (p. 89), they argue that the individual is not the primary site for understanding identity. From a different perspective, Anthony Heath, John Curtice and Gabriella Elgenius interrogate subjective aspects of class to address claims by Beck (1992), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) and Bauman (2001) regarding the decline of collective class identities (pp. 21–40). Their meticulous analysis of survey data 1964–2005 qualifies the ‘compulsion on individuals to choose their own biographies’ (p. 38) with an historicallyinformed emphasis on the importance of political debate and development, namely the conscious move away from class politics by New Labour in the mid 1990s. In the second part, five chapters address the theme of Ethnicities and Encounters with studies of, for example, women negotiating post-colonial London, white British residents of provincial cities, and schoolgirls discussing a text message. Concerned with dominant themes in ethnicity theory, such as Gilroy’s (2004) ‘conviviality’ and Hall’s (1992) ‘new ethnicities’, the studies emphasize the necessity for close-up empirical scrutiny of spatialised, messy, shifting intersections of histories, race, ethnicity, faith, sexuality and gender within localized social networks. In Rod Earle and Coretta Phillips’s ethnography of a Young Offenders’ Institution (pp. 120–38), for example, the Book reviews

Book Review: Jean-Claude Kaufmann Gripes: The Little Quarrels of Couples Polity, Cambridge, 2009, £15.99 pbk, 224 pp. ISBN: 978—0—7456—4362—5

Cultural Sociology, Jul 14, 2011

27 Everyday Life: The Making of a Sociological Topic, Then Making it ‘Cultural Sociology

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, May 24, 2016

Book review: THOMAS L. CHARLTON, LOIS E. MYERS and REBECCA SHARPLESS (eds.), Handbook of Oral History. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2006, 625 pp. ISBN 0 759 102 295 (hbk) £90.50

Qualitative Research, Apr 1, 2008

ments are couched. The key point is, of course, that a great deal of anthropological thought is c... more ments are couched. The key point is, of course, that a great deal of anthropological thought is conveyed implicitly, through the forms of writing. Fortunately for the students required to read this, it is a sensible and practical guide. The authors do not engage in postmodern or deconstructive readings. Students are unlikely to be driven to the point of unproductive stasis and despair with this book in their hands. They will not feel paralysed by acute selfconsciousness about their own textual practices. They ought to feel empowered to work out how ethnographers construct their texts, how they inscribe implicit comparisons and theories within those texts, and how they transmute ethnographic fieldwork into ethnographic texts. Student readers will not be exposed to the whole story, however. On the basis of this book you would not know that anybody but a few anthropologists had ever paid any heed to ethnography and its texts. Completely absent, for example, is Martyn Hammersley’s Reading Ethnographic Research, or David Jacobson’s Reading Ethnography. No reference is made to John Van Maanen’s Tales of the Field. I need not have bothered to write The Ethnographic Imagination. In other words, there is one major textual convention of ethnography that this book exemplifies more than any other, while apparently completely blind to it. Anthropologists write, and they construct their collective identity by how they write. This is partly achieved through a common stock of taken-for-granted texts and references. It is largely achieved through the conventional tropes of ethnographic composition. It is overwhelmingly achieved by their collective refusal to acknowledge or write about anything or anybody that falls outside a tightlybounded definition of anthropology itself. Of course, all academic disciplines are defined more by what they overlook as by their overt content. But anthropology is an extreme case. It lays claim to the entirety of human culture and social organization by studiously ignoring the work of most social scientists. This book is a perfectly self-exemplifying text that may help to persuade young anthropologists that they and their mentors alone have done work and reflected on issues of this sort. It is an odd insularity that seems to furnish an abiding – if undeserved – sense of security and intellectual superiority.

Pretty Pants and Office Pants: Making Home, Identity and Belonging in a Workplace

This chapter is based on an ongoing ethnography of a British university campus. The principal res... more This chapter is based on an ongoing ethnography of a British university campus. The principal research focus is on rethinking and diversifying notions of openness, space and organisation, in terms of how formal and informal social spaces make, and is made by organisational culture. Themes of homely/personal spaces and intimacies emerged during the study. Production and consumption are not separate practices, nor are these monolithic terms helpful in understanding the processual, contingent character of relations and interactions between people and things. The ways in which people shape work, place, and time around them using varieties of materials to make, maintain and perform identities are probably infinite — since they can be the work of a moment. Rather than provide a summary, therefore, the chapter offers four accounts of making home, identity and intimacy at work. And as the research materials include field notes, lists, photographs, film, drawings, audio recordings (and later transcriptions) of interviews in offices, on walks and in ‘smokers’ corner’, the chapter also reflects these variations, rather than following a uniform pattern.

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