After you did your analyses and interpretation you have to write them down. Well obviously you can do something else. You do not need to write. You can make a documentary or make some photos with which you try to say something about your material. But most often in science, we use written articles or written books. So you have to write. And why do you need to write? Well, according to Jean Pierre Gobo, you need to write for two of the reasons. First, you have to provide descriptions for people who weren't around when you did these analyses. For the people who didn't do these interviews, you have to present your material. And at the same time, you have to account for your own work as a researcher, as an author. So you have to legitimize yourself a bit. But for who do you write? Well, as a biologist, you're writing for a scientific community. You're not writing for the animals you're studying. Franz de Waal is not writing something about the chimpanzees, and they will not react. But in social science, you not only write for a scientific community. But also for a broader audience. People can have access to your material and actually, we love to have people have access to your material. So the broader audience. You write not just for science but also for a broader audience. And probably, in that broader audience, there are the people that you've studied. Now that's pretty hard. If you've ever tried to write a short piece for a blog for instance, it's really hard to imagine who you're writing for. Are these for colleagues, fellow students, the lecturer, someone else? It's really hard. So when writing about social science, at least you have to deal with three different communities or three different audiences. Many of my students really have issues after doing field work or after coding their material and analyzing their material. What to write out? What to write up? Who am I to present the other? Who am I to judge? What can I say? What is science? Are my findings not subjective? Or I want them to be subjective, but how subjective? So there's an issue in representation, and during the mid 80s, this came about, especially in the Writing Culture project and the Writing Culture book by Clifford and Marcus in anthropology, and their critique was in epistemology. They said well, an ethnography is also an epistemology. And with writing we are constructing science, with writing we are using rhetorics, with writing we are dealing with ethics. Because we are representing others, and we are creating them as others. And, with writing we use certain rhetorics. We use tricks. We use, like novelists, the same kind of narrative structures. We use all kinds of tricks in order to make our own work convincing. So, is that science or not? And these are very fundamental questions, so these students came from their field, they really struggled in how to write and what to write and how to do this. And not just students have this. All scientists working in social science, working especially with qualitative material, deal with questions like this. With how do I represent the other? What about my epistemology? What about the ethics? What about the writing? Is it just about the style or is it more? According to Van Maamen, there are different ways of dealing with writing. Different tales one can write. And this is a realist tale. You see? This is the Eiffel Tower, and it's pretty realist. It's pretty precise. And as an image, as a painting, it's a realist tale. And Van Monem says we have different kind of tales in writing and different ways of writing. And the first one he distinguished is the realist tale. In a realist offer distances him or herself from material and writes it down as if it's just there. And the almighty knowingly author wrote it, so it gives large privilege to the object of study. To the participant, and the focus is usually on concrete details of everyday life. It's on description. It's not so much on the author him or herself. The focus are on the thoughts and feelings and perceptions of the people in the study, not of the author. So, in the end, the author comes to a single interpretation of the live world, of the studied. So, it's not really a self portrait. A confessional tale, the second type of tale Van Maanen recognizes a confessional tale is much more about the observer, about the researcher. The focus lies on I came to the field and then this happened. So, as Gomer would say, this is about the accounting. It's about the author telling how he or she did this research. And, it demystifies the research totally. Because it will simply say how the researcher felt. And, why a researcher took certain decisions. And it can be combined with a realist tale, but it does not need to be, so autoadnographies are focusing a lot on the confessional aspect, and using the confessional aspect also to describe something. But there are also confessional tales that are pretty much combined with a realist tale. And Van Maanen says this about it, it's an unassuming style of one struggling to piece together something reasonably coherent out of displays of initial disorder, doubt and difficulty. Disorder, doubt and difficulty. In this is exactly what happens in this confessional tale. Beautiful writing about someone's own feelings. Much accounting. And Van Maanen suggests that there's another way of presenting your material. Not by just a realist description. Not by a self-focused, confessional description, but by a more impressionist tale. And then the privilege does not lie with the object, nor with the researcher. No, it lies between the observer and the participant, and it's often a more narrative form of description. Very often, it's presented in a chronological format, in a narrative, chronological format. And it uses lively details. It's impressionist, so there is description, there is confessional aspect and it's mixed together. So, what writing is about, what tale do I need to tell is you have to provide descriptions and you have to account for your work. And in this impressionist tale of a man you use reflexivity as a bridge between both. And this is also what I would suggest to you. Provide a description, account for your work. And maybe you're a bit more in the confessional corner or you're a bit more in the realist corner. But at least deal with both aspects of writing. And now, something else, or something really related, because of this crisis in representation, people started to experiment. Started to experiment in different forms of writing. How do I present my material better? How do I give voice to the people I studied? in a better way so people started to experiment in different forms of representation. And you can imagine scientists writing poems, or scientists making photo collages, or scientists doing dances or whatever kind of representation of their material. And there has been a large body of critique on that. Because doesn't this lead to bad science and bad poetry? Well, as others would say, well this is great, new, revolutionary work, and we should embrace this. I would say be careful in this, because you have to do two things in writing. Description and accounting. And in between is reflexivity, and if you're focusing so much on the former, usually it's not so descriptive or not so much accounting or not so reflexive. So experiment a bit I would say but not too much.
