Abstract Summary
This paper presents the outcome of a series of reflexive and/or field-based auto-ethnographic explorations of a number of media linguists in Belgium, the UK, and the US. We argue that schema-building reflexivity, incorporating the etic and emic, should be part of research practice.
Abstract :
In our globalized, digitized media landscape, news has changed such that non-specialists can contribute to its production. Communications research has also changed to better incorporate the “ethnographic I” (Ellis 2004). Like journalists, scholars incorporate more stories into their accounts of news practitioners’ work (Ellis et al. 2011). The researcher, in this mode, is the subject as much as the “non-journalist” is a co-creator of news text. Clearly, in both news media and academia boundaries are blurring. How can researcher reflexivity, or its more expanded form of auto-ethnography in the field, provide accountable judgments into the what and the why of news discourse?
In this paper, we present the outcome of a series of reflexive and/or field-based auto-ethnographic explorations of a number of media linguists whose background/research covers multiple aspects of news media practice in Belgium, the UK, and the US.
We start from the idea that going into the newsroom and combining ethnographic observations with an analysis of the news practitioners’ discourse outputs is insufficient. We argue that schema-building reflexivity, incorporating the etic and emic, should be part of research practice. This means foregrounding the challenges of an insider perspective, as anthropologists including Agar (1986), Bernard (2018) and Tedlock and Mannheim (1995) have emphasized for ethnographic research; for ensuring self-questioning and accounting for one’s own stance is part of the research design (Gillespie 2012).
Researchers’ reflection on their own ethnographic experience enriches the descriptions and explanations that come out of this etic-emic back-and-forth (Vandendaele 2017). By asking what and why of ourselves as well as of our informants, we aim to give an overview of the various stances taken in fieldwork settings, each an attempt to unveil an additional layer of the processes that shape the news. The back-and-forth is dynamic, critically assessable, and inscribed in our final published outputs.
