A Reply to Martyn Hammersley

Abstract

I am persistently struck by how easy it seems in academic discourse to polarize positions and people. Ming-chu Hsu, a graduate student at Indiana University, recently wrote an essay discussing western academic discourse and its propensity to pit people's positions against one another as if this were the sole way to have a legitimate intellectual claim. I have worries about being a participant in an interchange with those rules because I do not, in the end, believe in them. In my paper, I am trying to explore what it means to have partisan (feminist) concerns and commitments in the world when I do ethnography. I am sure there is fallibility in my perspective and I welcome the dialogue on non-polarized grounds. My paper was an opportunity to reflect using Hammersley's position as a mirror for my own. And the mirror talked back! It is in this context that I offer the following comments on Hammersley's response to my paper.

Citation

Korth, B. (2005), "A Reply to Martyn Hammersley", Troman, G., Jeffrey, B. and Walford, G. (Ed.) Methodological Issues and Practices in Ethnography (Studies in Educational Ethnography, Vol. 11), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 175-181. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-210X(05)11010-9