This project, undertaken with Amber Gazso, examines various analytic strategies for being reflexive, i.e., for considering how, as knowers, we are implicated in the knowledge that we produce. These examinations have included (1) in Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences, looking at how narrative, conversation, and discourse analysts each conceive of reflexivity, (2) in a chapter in press, contrasting how standpoint theory and discursive positioning analysis help to make sense of an awkward moment in an interview, and (3) in a forthcoming article, reflexively analyzing the relation of emotions to ethics.

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Month: Jan   Year: 2016

Little known in the West, kindly and thrifty soldier Lei Feng (1940-1962) was established as a Chinese national hero by Mao Tsedong in 1963. The Chinese curriculum has since exhorted even its youngest students to “Learn from Lei Feng!” This project, undertaken with Zhipeng Gao, first used oral history data to examine how Lei Feng is remembered by different cohorts in China. Subsequently, we have contrasted how scholars and ordinary Chinese speak about China's generations, asked how the "truth" or "authenticity" of the Lei Feng stories is taken up in China and North America, and discussed the varied conceptions of "thrift" throughout contemporary Chinese history.

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This project in intertextuality involves visual sociology analysis of the covers of sociology's classics from around the world. A first inquiry, with R. Abdelbaki, K. Ahmed, K. Banasiak, and D. Gul Kaya, compared covers of Edward W. Said's Orientalism from Islamicate contexts with those from non-Islamicate contexts. A second inquiry, with S. Chapman-Nyaho and R. Raby, looked at how covers of Discipline and Punish can transcend a narrow focus on the prison and the Panopticon. A third inquiry will be on The Souls of Black Folk.

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