Basis for Methodology

I am passionately committed to equal rights and responsibilities for all people regardless of their various positioning within institutional discourses. I feel heartbroken when I think of the narratives, the words, the imaginary BS that controls and manipulates the choices of women, black people, people with warts, sex workers, academics, homosexuals, and people who like to read. I hate the fact that this short life in this huge world, blessed as it is with some degree of creativity and variety, can be so limited by forces that often seek only to increase their own power or profits. I hate the academy for defining intelligence and holding the big volume control knob for the world. I hate the media for being in control of the microphone. But I also realize that we have very little opportunity, if we want to continue to be social, to move outside of these limitations. Even though we are all stuck in metaphorical boxes of meaning making (and even though those boxes, even as metaphors, are always empty) I desperately want to make the boxes bigger.

So I would certainly say that my research project—an attempt to identify and describe the ways institutions leak into the language of commentary and criticism of those same institutions—is guided by an ideological thrust toward free expression and equality. I feel like I would laugh at anyone else writing this—such quaint ideas freedom and equality! My ideology, based somewhere between Marxism and the calls for justice I hear rattling around behind Foucault and Derrida (“You’re trapped,” the theorists say. “Break free!” rattles something somewhere…), asks for global equality when it comes to working conditions, environmental responsibility, gender relations, and the ability to assign meaning.

Because my work is so grounded in my ideological project, my methods are those which make my ideology the more rhetorically appealing. I will triangulate between qualitative, quantitative, and textual analysis, doing all I can before I fall short of my own ethical strictures by limiting or exploiting any of my respondents.