Wolves in Sheep's Clothing or Sheep in Wolf's Clothing?: Scenes of a Dialogue

Abstract

Wolves in Sheep's Clothing or Sheep in Wolf's Clothing? was developed from narratives collected through interviews, mail conversations and field notes. The text is written as an ethnodrama (Saldana, 2005) that consists of dramatised, significant selections of the dialogue between researcher and participant, accompanied with their inner monologues and the abstract, theoretical voice of a supervisor. The dialogue reflects a scene of the 'closing conversation' where the researcher explicitly announces that she has to end the weekly conversations in order to start a new phase in the research project. While the dialogue shows how researcher and participant interact, exchange thoughts and confront interpersonal conflicts, the inner monologues allow the audience to glance at that which is not explicitly being said during the conversation. The addition of a theoretical voice provides the audience with a contextual frame of the research project together with supplemental reflections and critical questions on issues that occur in the dialogue. Here questions arise about authorship and ownership, the possibility or non-possibility of equality in a research relationship, the difficulty in defining a relationship that is both professional and intimate, about friendship, love and falsehood, about intense relational and identity work. By writing the text as a piece of ethnodrama, the primacy of experience is privileged and a 'performance-sensitive way of knowing' (Conquergood, 1998, p. 26) is evoked. It is a way of knowing which insists on immediacy and involvement and which incites to reflect on the presented themes and conflicts from the point of view of emotional attachment rather than from an analytic distance of detachment.