Investigating the Language Politics of Houselessness Policy in Portland
Field Commentaries

See also Tips on Fieldwork Tech and Writing Fieldnotes

Format: 250-400 words, well organized in paragraphs, with relevant links or media inserted, posted to your research pair's Moodle blog forum. These will be shared with the class.

Due:
1) Friday Feb 23, midnight, first Field Commentary
2) Friday Mar 8, midnight, second Field Commentary
3) Friday Mar 29, midnight, third Field Commentary
4) Friday Apr. 12, midnight, fourth Field Commentary

To help you keep track of what you observe and learn during your public meetings, volunteering, or online participation, your research pair should submit four total Field Commentaries over the semester, two of which should be fieldnotes, and two of which should focus on explicating a concept from the course reading relevant to issues you encountered in the field (that can also include fieldnotes!). Each partner will take the lead in writing two of the commentaries, one each on fieldnotes and concepts. Partners can decide how to schedule those for the 4 deadlines (best: each does one prior to and one after midterm). Note that for people working alone or in trios, all students should write at least two field commentaries, one focused on fieldnotes, and one focused on concepts. All students not working in pairs should schedule (using the deadlines above) one field commentary before midterm and one after.

A good field commentary (either fieldnotes or concept) should make explicit reference to course materials. You can do this in multiple ways: briefly describe and explain an author's argument about methodology you think will help you conduct your research, or define one or more key term used in the readings you think will help illuminate something you observed/will observe, or describe a scene from a film that illustrates a similar interaction or linguistic dynamic.

References to course materials and concepts should be more than just a quick shout-out; you will need to define and explain them briefly!

These commentaries should be collaborative: one partner takes the lead in writing it; the other comments, poses questions, and suggests additions, resonances with course materials, or other resources. Post your commentary to your research pair's Moodle Commentary Blog forum. Your partner should then comment by hitting 'reply'. Your commentaries and comments will be shared with the class. Trios should do "round-robin" collaboration: A comments on B, B comments on C, C comments on A.

To give you a sense of what a good Field Commentary looks like (though these do not include the partners' comments and suggestions), here are four sample commentaries, two on fieldnotes, and two that are concept-focused:

Field Commentary Sample 1 (Fieldnotes):

On Tuesday March 7th, my research partner and I sat in on the Lutheran Community Services citizenship class. This was the ninth of twelve class sessions for the cycle, meaning that students were expected to have completed a majority of their N-400 form, the application for naturalization from the federal government. These forms include words that are unusual for most English-learners to encounter early in their experience with the language, so the teachers and volunteers spent the majority of the class time unpacking difficult words and concepts. 

When the word “alimony” appeared on the forms, many students needed for this word to be clarified. Alisa, the main teacher, told them that it is synonymous with “child support.” For the sake of further elucidation, she organized the acting-out of what “child support” looks like. Later, the word “avoid” came up, and Alisa took this as an opportunity to connect two difficult concepts. She said that John, a volunteer and the other party involved in her acting-out of “child support,” was avoiding her by not paying alimony. She then said (to John) that if he had not paid child support, she would not avoid him, but that she would be, “all up in yo face.” 

A few minutes later, she performed the action of someone deserting an army before the class. She explained that deserting is like saying, “mmhmm. Nu-uh. No army. Buh-bye,” while waving her pointer finger in front of her face. 

This pattern shows that Alisa tends to switch out of her Standard American English dialect when she takes on different characters. When she is acting something out, she is no longer Alisa the teacher. She is someone whom is owed child support or has deserted an army. The dialect that she switches into is more characteristic of African American English. It is when she drops her role as a teacher and becomes more playful and casual that she switches. This potentially reflects Alisa’s language ideologies as she appropriates a dialect of a speech community of which she is not she a member. McCarty, in Ethnography and Language Policy says that linguistic ideologies rationalize the way that people speak, and that this ideology is not based off of beliefs about the language itself necessarily, but instead is a reflection of beliefs about the people that speak it. 

Field Commentary Sample 2 (fieldnotes):

Each time I attend a Portland Housing Advisory Commission (PHAC) meeting, I am taken by just how “corporate” of a space it is. The meeting takes place in an office building, most members are dressed in conservative business attire, and the conversation draws heavily on housing and fiscal jargon. For a public meeting space, the meetings often feel closed off to participants who are not fluent in this corporate lingo. At the April Meeting, the PHAC invited Martha McLennan of NW Housing Alternatives to address public testimony concerns that were made in prior sessions. Martha’s presence at the PHAC meeting alone was not notable; she was invited to speak on behalf of NW Housing Alternatives, a human representative for corporate interests. Surprisingly though, Martha’s address brought about the most “human” conversation I have seen at the PHAC.

Specifically, Martha used her attendance not only to address the negative testimonies, but to speak on the case of Ms. Batts, an evicted resident of a property NW Housing Alternatives monitored, who later died homeless. Ms. Batts case received a lot of media coverage, most of which was unflattering for Northwest Housing Alternatives. Martha began her address by talking about the testimonies for ~2 minutes. She never names exactly what the complaint was, but discredits it by saying the individual has not lived at the property for months, and that the materials handed out was outdated. It is notable that though Martha was invited specifically to talk about these testimonies, she spends the rest of her 25 minute speech discussing Ms. Batts, who was evicted from the same property that the testimonies referenced.

When Martha first brings up Ms. Batts, it seems as if she is anticipating negative reactions from the PHAC. Before anyone can voice concerns/reactions, Martha notes that “there was quite a bit of media you may have seen, and one of the things that’s true about the current media environment is that the story is rewritten, and rewritten, and rewritten, so your impressions may trace back to whether you read the final version of the story or the first version of the story.” Much in the same way Martha discredits the public testimonies by framing the accuser as illegitimate, Martha’s depiction of the media forces any uneasy feelings PHAC members feel to be directed at the newspaper story and not NW Housing Alternatives.

One of the things I found really significant about Martha’s speech choices was that though she describes Ms. Batt’s case at length, she makes it sound as if she is being intentionally vague. Early on in the narrative Martha pauses when she is describing Ms. Batts’ offenses, and says she is “hesitant to describe her specific issues because [she] wants to honor her privacy.” What follows is a list of ways in which Ms. Batts harmed the property and other residents, which seems to be contrary to her last intention of protecting her privacy.  Martha repeatedly uses words like “various” and “numerous” to describe the actions, which works both to obscure specific details but also still convey that Ms. Batts was a repeated offender and NW Housing Alternatives was in the wrong.

As the narrative continues, Martha successfully characterizes Ms. Batts as the offender, the public testimonies as illegitimate, and herself as compassionate. At the end of her speech, she is even thanked by the head of the PHAC for bringing a more “human” conversation to the table. I am interested in looking for this theme more in the literature we have read thus far, about ways in which people reclaim and change how they are perceived through narratives and oratory. 

Field Commentary Sample 3 (concept)

In my final paper, one of the themes I intend to explore is “narrative.” According to Key Terms, narrative is a genre that can be both created or elicited. I find this distinction really compelling, because it is defined by the roles of the speaker and the listener. I wonder how a narrative that is elicited differs in telling from one that is created; is the intention of the narrator more important in clarifying which kind of narrative it is, or the circumstances in which it takes place? Further, narratives can be both fictional and non-fiction. Part of the speech I intend to analyze in my own paper involves truth statements, and I am curious to see how that impacts the “fiction” or “fact” of the perceived narrative. Key Terms suggests that narratives themselves do not contain a measure for their truth- value, but rather that their truth is evaluated by their recognition “of the conditions of its own production”(163).  Key Terms also notes that narratives tend to have core structural features, namely introductions, permission to speak, overview, main body of narration, including divisions into episodes, conclusions, and codas. It is interesting to see how even in my own narrative of interest, the speaker seems to follow this format. I wonder how much of this is conditioned as the way we believe we are supposed to speak. One of the defining features of narratives is that they often exist in the face of preexisting, contradictory tellings. Of these different versions, some may be more valued than other, and the speaker works to promote their own.

Field Commentary Sample 4 (Concept)

As Parsons-Dick pointed out in the article we read recently for class, immigration debate in the United States has always differentiated among immigrant groups, considering some to be desirable contributions to the “we”, and others to be undesirable or inherently foreign. This differentiation relies on racial coding and racial hierarchies which prioritize whiteness as a neutral state, and non-whiteness as unassimilable. In the United States, immigrants of Mexican descent are particularly affected by these constructions, and the categories of Mexican and “illegal alien” are conflated as one and the same- an indexical link is created between those of Mexican descent, and the criminality of the illegal other. It is these processes of racialization and othering that immigrant speakers at the rallies we have attended are pushing back against. 

Particularly interesting to me was the claim that “Immigration policies function as racializing discourses primarily through the inherently interdiscursive activity of performative nomination (Silverstein 2005:11): the baptizing of categories of person that, in this case, take broadly circulating, informal us/them dichotomies and transform them into highly entextualized, codified lexical labels that carry the backing of the state, such as “illegal alien” and “immigrant harborer”” (Parsons-Dick 2011)  Beyond just legal policy, this process of nomination occurs especially in the ‘immigrant debate’ discourse of conservative talk radio/media, in congress and the recent presidential campaigns. And within these spaces, it seems like narrative plays a crucial role in spreading these ideologies. Stories and ‘statistics’ about crime are often used to conflate ‘immigrant’ and ‘criminal’, and fear incited through these stories is the tool used to spread this ideology. 

In nearly all of the speeches we have gathered from these rallies, there seems to be some reflexive impulse to address, whether explicitly or implicitly, these narratives with alternative narratives. Some speakers directly engaged with this interdiscursive process, as in these examples-

“And we know, we know that immigrants are not a threat. We know from research that migrants commit crimes in this country at a much lower rate across all age ranges than native born americans. So to protect DACA is to protect the very basics elements of human dignity… we know that there is enough in our society, there are enough resources, we know that stories of scarcity are narratives to divide us, and to disorient us. And we are not going to fall for it.” 

“I’m a US citizen but I support our immigrant communities, they’re the one’s who are actually supporting US citizens to follow their dreams… because of the immigrants, because of the undocumented immigrants, I’m still in school. I’m still following a path towards success through education. And I think uh, immigrants they’re not criminals. They’re-no one is illegal here. The immigrants are here to support everybody. They’re not here to cause trouble for the US they’re just here to support it as well as any other human being.”

But more generally, without citing the processes exactly, speakers resisted that process of nomination by crafting their own narratives of “American”ness while recounting their experiences. They often reference education, human/civil rights, family values, the ‘American Dream’, work ethic, and other images related to a nationalist conception of the quintessential ‘American Citizen’ in their speeches- connecting all of these ideals to their immigrant identity, and thus fighting the conception of the “unassimilable non-whiteness” with images of assimilation. 

McElhinny (2003) examined the ways in which narrative serves as an important tool to express and spread ideology, and, perhaps most significantly, as one way to make its meaning stick. I think in this scenario, the performative nature of the speech within the rally setting, and the relationships between speakers (immigrant/latino identified) and audience (mostly white), made narrative the genre of choice for this kind of ideological resistance. Also, despite the fact that these rallies were overtly political in nature, in that they were structured around specific responses to policy (DACA, ICE operations), speeches were structured around conceptions of immigrant identity through these various narratives and stories, rather than more ’empirical’ assessments of the politics at hand. This is in line with the Parsons-Dick article which stressed the ways in which policy is directly linked to social and racial ideologies about the immigrants themselves, rather than forming ex nihilo, and also acknowledges the comment made in the McElhinny article that ideological formation is like a novel which “may contain certain empirical propositions, but these statements are not usually present for their own sake; instead, they are selected and deployed to support certain views of experience.” 

In the context of these rallies, the narrative speech becomes an opportunity for the Latino speaker to place themselves within that American “we” they are typically excluded from, and to ‘prove’ in a performative way their belonging to the white audience via an appeal to their common ‘citizen’ characteristics. The performance of the rally itself as an event is also cited by some speakers as the exercise of an ‘American’.