This is the thirteenth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5001: Ethnography and Participant Observation.
Transition notes

We started with the assumption that all that we observe as ethnographer is multiply constructed by our informants and partially by us as observers.

We proceeded to a deconstructive analysis intended to highlight what were the materials and elements used by our informants, how they are arranged and how they might make certain things easier or more difficult
  1. We now turn to the task of reconstructing part of what we deconstructed for particular purposes.
    1. As mentioned last week, any number of maps, models, "structures," can be drawn on the basis of our deconstructions.
    2. Which are we going to draw?
  2. Pure structural analyses remain detached from the struggles of everyday political life (even though, when well done, they are built upon on this life). What makes schools of education (and any other setting for applied research) necessary is the need to show also how people actually construct their lives within the constraints we identify in terms of a policy question of some sort.
  3. The important thing to remember is that one cannot move on to "experience" unless one has actually conducted a structural analysis (though it may remain hidden in the actual writing).
    1. Thus, in a research on hospital labor in the late 20th century one can move from
      1. a moment in a woman's labor
      2. to a model of the "canonical contraction"
      3. to a discussion of the negotiations possible within the contraction structure (e.g. the strength of the contraction, the pain experienced, and whether to administer more anesthetics) with an emphasis on what can disrupt it
  4. Schools, classrooms, "achievement" and reform: Structural contributions to a perennial policy discussion.
    1. McDermott on reading.
    2. Varenne and McDermott on the mutual social construction of success and failure across classes and races.