Publications Education & Experience Convention papers & Profession Service
Grants, Awards & Invited Lectures Work in Progress Research and Teaching: Narrative Account

Kristine Fitch
Research and teaching:
A narrative account

The intellectual questions I pursue revolve around how interpersonal processes and relationships are shaped by culture, and how culture is constituted through everyday talk and personal relationships. A shift in my approach to those questions began around 1991 and picked up steam from the effort to write a book about interpersonal ideology as a cornerstone of social life and relationships. The direction of change essentially involved finding a more interactive and negotiated view of culture. The impulse for making that shift came from postmodern challenges to ethnographic practice: questions about presuppositions of culture as a monolithic consensual system, changing notions about the reliability of observational reports, debates about the place of the researcher within a cultural scene under study. The conceptualization of culture that I began with (that culture is a system or code of beliefs and values that people bring to bear on interaction, and to which they are held accountable in their actions) has been usefully skewered on the horns of those dilemmas, and enriched through greater immersion in the theoretical literature regarding social construction of selves and relationships. In broad terms, my theoretical and methodological agenda is to refine understandings in the interpersonal field of how culture influences communication and relationships.
In my earlier work, I focused on specific forms of talk (personal address, directives, and narratives) and selections between alternatives within those forms, as resources that reflected cultural beliefs and values. I approached cultural meaning as something negotiated in everyday talk, emphasizing the analysis of those communicative forms to elaborate a specific cultural code, loosely defined as one pertaining to middle class urban Colombians. Theoretically, I have pursued the idea of a non-Marxist perspective on cultural ideology as a system of values enacted in interpersonal talk and relationships. I approach interpersonal ideology as a grid of intelligibility for rendering raw "experience" or even more or less refined "understanding" into something rhetorically viable, that serves as a basis for social action. I say non-Marxist in the sense that my theoretical commitments stop short of presuming that power and asymmetry riddle all discourse settings, but include the assumption that discourse settings organize, deploy and sometimes reduce power imbalances.
Methodologically, I have shifted my data collection and analysis from a reliance on observation-based fieldnotes and interviews to inclusion of transcripts of recorded conversation, in order to focus on sequential deployment of communication resources. Two common threads are, first, that I still rely on participants' reflections on interaction as a source of insight into meaning. Second, I continue to focus partly on the same kinds of language use I studied earlier, while paying closer attention to interactional sequences as themselves constitutive of meaning. A study I recently conducted with Daena Goldsmith (HCR, 1997)takes an ethnographic approach to the rhetorical and symbolic aspects of advice among U.S. Americans and draws primarily on observations (field notes) in which particular attention was paid to capturing interactional sequences, supplemented by interviews.

Coming to Iowa in 1995 built on a comparative study of directives as compliance-gaining (completed in 1994) to orient me to a new topic area: persuasion. I noticed that persuasive messages are composed of two major components. One is an internal structure of argument, proof, strategy selection and so forth as adjusted to the immediate audience and task at hand. The other is a social/cultural context of relationships and symbolic ideals about personhood, power, and communication within which persuasive appeals are negotiated. Plainly, traditional studies of persuasion have emphasized the former component and largely ignored the communal, situated (both within ongoing interpersonal relationships, and within cultural systems) nature of the process. Because my work is centrally focused on the communal nature of communication in general, directing attention to cultural aspects of persuasion has been a logical extension of my previous work. I am interested in formulating a cultural approach to persuasion that centers around the notion of "persuadables:" Within a particular cultural framework, what actions are so taken for granted that they do not require persuasive efforts to compel their performance? In what instances are unspoken cultural premises so persuasive in themselves that persuasive efforts are largely a case of invoking cultural meanings for desired or undesired actions? So far, I have been re-examining ethnographic case studies with an eye on this notion of cultural persuadables, and I'm still searching for ways to translate these questions into research projects.

My plans for the next several years involve developing these ideas about culture, relationships and persuasion through teaching and research. I take seriously the notion that teaching and research should enrich one another, and try to structure every course I teach to include some kind of field investigation of the phenomenon of interest. Students in my undergraduate Theories of Persuasion class, for example, collect, transcribe and analyze naturally-occurring compliance-gaining conversations and analyze them for cultural patterns in persuasive attempts. Students in my Intercultural Communication class have an intercultural encounter as one of their term paper options: a series of interviews with an international student, leading toward a report that compared communication in the students' cultures. Finally, I am currently either involved with or directing graduate students' research in advice, construction of sexuality among adolescent girls, and performance of friendship through public storytelling.

Publications Education & Experience Convention papers & Profession Service
Grants, Awards & Invited Lectures Work in Progress Research and Teaching: Narrative Account