|
Where
Are You Comin' From, Where Are You Goin' To:
Research Design & Procedures The preceding sections of this chapter provide an explanation of the dialogical communication approach to research, as well as the relations of power circumscribing and permeating this research. In this final section, the design and procedures for this study will be explicated. The section begins with a chronological account of the research design and procedure, and is followed with specifics about the interviewees and the interviews themselves. The design for this study began in late 1994, when I was considering possible research topics. Several events inspired me to explore the activity of placing. On the first occasion, I was with a close friend, a Black woman, and we were standing in line at an upscale dance club. The White male bouncer asked my friend and me where we were from, and I replied: "Back east--originally." My friend said she was from Northridge. I was surprised, but said nothing, since my friend lived in "South Central" Los Angeles at the time, and had never lived in Northridge (but she was a C.S.U.N. graduate). Neither of us admitted where we currently lived, since I hated being associated with the politically conservative "valley" where Northridge is located. I realized at the time that my friend might not want to deal with any stereotypes this bouncer might have about residents of South Central, an area of Los Angeles often represented in news media as dangerous. On a separate occasion, I was introducing the same female friend to another female friend (also Black). When asked where she was from, my friend responded, "the Jungle"--a term she had never mentioned to me. "The Jungle" is a neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles that is officially called "Baldwin Village." When she had moved there, she had told me she now lived in Baldwin Village. After we became closer friends, and I had visited her neighborhood several times, she never referred to this area as Baldwin Village again. A third incident also caught my attention. Another close
friend, Olympia and I were discussing representations of the inner city.
She mentioned that among South Central residents, numbered streets are
associated with "tough" areas, as are particular named streets.
In other words, when someone says they live around, say, 55th and Manchester,
they are indicating that they truly live in "the hood." She
said that this is local knowledge that would probably not be disclosed
to someone who didn't understand the significance of the cross-streets. I recall more than one occasion when my friend would be asked where she was from, and she would respond: "South Central." When asked "where?" she would say "55th and [her street name]." The other person would usually nod, and sometimes make a comment such as, "now that's the hood." I never witnessed this exchange between her and someone who wasn't Black, and there never seemed to be any negative reaction to her naming of the cross-streets. In my impression, she named the cross-streets with a tone of pride. These incidents influenced me to explore the ways in which residents of South Central Los Angeles conceptualize the South Central area. Later, I wanted to focus on the ways in which Black students at California State University Northridge construct, maintain, or contest community ideologies. During the Spring semester of 1995, when I was working on a thesis proposal, I started reading about community, ideology, and the Black community, and decided to focus on the activity of placing and its relationship to community identity. I also started developing the specifications for the research. By May, 1995, I had decided to conduct in-depth, open-ended interviews with a then undetermined number of subjects, Black C.S.U.N. students who gathered in front of the C.S.U.N. Student Union. It was important to me that I understood the situatedness and context of community, and this is why I focused on the Student Union as a possible community hangout. During midday on Mondays and Wednesdays, I had noticed large groups of Black students gathering near the entrance of the Student Union. To me, this was a very visible gathering place for Black students, in that it was where many students on campus passed by. At the time, it was the gathering place for Black students that I was most aware of. I also wanted to look at how vernacular discourse, the everyday
speech used in the household, "on the corner," and at the barbeque,
articulated a sense of community at the Union, as well as how it constituted
the community itself. Instead of conducting a textual analysis of vernacular
discourse, as found in community-generated pamphlets, flyers, etc., I
wanted to focus on the "ritual oral discourse" of placing --
the phrases used on a regular basis in order to identify one's location
culturally, historically, spatially, and temporally. "'It's sort
of the in talk, the in joke, within the club, an acknowledgment of and
not an acceptance,'" said an upper-income Black man interviewed for
Newsweek, "'. . . of the effect of race on one's life, on where one
lives, on the kinds of jobs one has available'" (Cose, 1993, March
15, p. 56). I also wanted to identify how a marginalized community, in
this case the Black community at C.S.U.N., contested dominant representations
(i.e.., placings) through vernacular discourse. Next> Informants
Placing and Black Students' Discursive Construction of Community Copyright (c) 1996, Corinna J. Moebius |