Authoring Social Responsibility

Abstract

To better understand how researchers author social responsibility, the authors closely examined the “privileged” language in Mitchell Duneier’s and Carol Stack’s ethnographic texts and the ways that they transformed their positions without decentering the voices of those living in poor communities. The authors then describe how these texts consider a new ethnographic sensibility for economic injustice that forces ethnographers to assume responsibilities for intersecting social class with all other oppressive structures. This ethnographic sensibility involves ethnographers writing texts that broaden and transform standpoints of economically privileged persons living and working in our local communities. That is, when ethnographers position their texts from a social class standpoint, they automatically change the dimensions of how individuals interrupt and explain race, gender, and other social injustices. The authors propose that to better understand hierarchical structures that dominate society in today’s world, ethnographers must responsibly position their texts from this standpoint. Specifically, the language of the text visibly indicates the ethnographers understood (a) that they entered a field to work with their participants to transform public consciousness, (b) how to participate in an environment where people live on the social sidelines, and (c) their responsibility in writing a reflexive text from an antihegemonic standpoint that identifies the strengths and struggles of the participants.