the Bournemouth University, Centre for Qualitative Research.
Attractions of Performative Inquiry
As we see, the constructionist dialogues provide strong arguments for social scientists to cast off the restrictions of positivist methodology, to give expression to their values in the aims and practices of their research, and to employ the full range of rhetorical skills in communicating their work. For those engaged in these dialogues, there was the additional advantage that performative inquiry avoided the kind of authoritative truth claims often associated with scientific rhetoric. When a message is carried through performance, an audience may be moved without presuming that it is scientifically certified. Performative work constitutes serious play.
Whether touched directly or indirectly by constructionist dialogues, social scientists have found performative inquiry appealing in many other ways. At the outset, such inquiry allows the researcher to address social concerns in ways that are far more accessible to public audiences than are the more antiseptic and abstract forms of professional writing (Finley, 2018). This also allows the researcher to avoid the common critique that scholarly work is elitist, that it is written for other scholars, while the public is shut out of the conversation that is often ‘about them.’
Also attractive is the invitation to personal expression. The researcher is not hamstrung by a cumbersome and formalized language of representation, as required in many scientific communities, but can draw from the full range of his or her potentials. This may mean, for example, drawing from folk traditions in one's life – woven into one's ethnicity, gender, or class. In a recent edition of the International Review of Qualitative Research, for example, one article features Anishinabe song and story (Pedri-Spade, 2016) and a second the craft of beading as a method of performative inquiry (Ray, 2016).
In contrast to traditional methods – in which one's life history is eliminated from view, a performative orientation also opens a space in which one's life experiences can become assets to expression. We shall return to this potential in a later discussion of autoethnography. And too, performative inquiry invites the researcher to explore or give expression to one's aesthetic potentials – in writing poetry, acting, playing an instrument, dancing, and so on.
Many researchers are attracted to performative inquiry because of its rhetorical power. Among the attributes of performative inquiry are its capacity to blend various forms of art together, thus ‘speaking in many voices’ at once. For example, in his analysis of Custer's ‘last stand’ against native American warriors, Norman Denzin combined autobiographical reminiscences, historical description, artistic representations, staged readings, and snippets of documents to produce a powerful, multi-layered ethnography (2011). This feature is especially attractive to activist researchers. While lines of careful reasoning may advocate social change, their temperate and measured form of logical argumentation often leave one in thought. Are there other arguments to consider; what is the history of this issue; and so on. By drawing on the full range of the arts, one's message can stimulate excitement, the emotions, and the impetus to action.
Domains of Performative Inquiry
Social scientists now draw from the full range of artistic traditions in their inquiries, and often combine traditions for particular purposes. The creative possibilities are limitless, and the mushrooming developments in digital technology open a vast new territory. However for analytic purposes it is useful to scan the work in three more circumscribed realms: textual, embodied action, and visual.
Textual Adventures
Because traditional scholarship takes the form of writing, the most attractive invitation into performative work has been furnished by literary traditions such as biography, fiction, and poetry. Constructionist ideas invite one to experiment with these traditional forms. In the case of biography, for example, in an exploration of her own eating disorder, Lisa Tillmann-Healy (1996) shows her hidden bulimia via short vignettes, from early childhood to her twenties. Karen Fox's (1996) juxtaposition of three voices was extracted from interviews to form a pseudo-conversation: the first voice was that of her client, who as a young girl, had been sexually abused by her grandfather; the second a man now in prison for sexually abusing his granddaughter; and the third, her own, commenting on her feelings. Kenneth and Mary Gergen (1994) composed a duography, that is, a double biography, which began with the voices of two independent individuals and gradually melded them together over the course of the text.
The logic inherent in this tradition also finds lively development in autoethnography (Bochner and Ellis, 2016; Sughrua, 2016), in which scholars use themselves as instruments for illuminating a particular socio-cultural condition. The shift from ethnography to autoethnography is an important one, as it replaces the authority of the outside observer with the voice of the person in-situ (Ellis, 2004). This work has frequently expanded to include novels and theatrical scripts (Ellis, 2004; Richardson, 1997; Richardson and St. Pierre, 2005). Excellent compendiums of this work are found in edited volumes by Ellis and Bochner, Composing ethnography (1996) and Bochner and Ellis, Ethnograpically speaking (2002).
More radical in its challenge to realist representation is the work of social scientists who have turned to fiction as a means of inquiry. The enormously expanded range of expression allowed by fictional traditions enable them to illuminate their subject matter in what are often seen as more effective and penetrating ways than traditional empirical study. Pfohl's (1992), Death at the Parasite Café was a courageous and innovative entry into the professional literature – at once serious and playful. Also adventuresome are dialogues between fictitious characters. For example, in Michael Mulkay's (1985) groundbreaking work, fictional characters, Marks and Spencer, along with inebriated participants at the Nobel ceremonies, dispute about chemistry, in a parody of issues in sociology. Exploration now abounds. For example, Diversi (1998) has used short stories to provide a glimpse of street life for homeless youth in Brazil, and Muñoz (2014) has employed fictional stories to explore dimensions of silence in interpersonal communication.
Poetry has long been viewed in the culture more generally as a way of communicating wisdom, insights, or passions in more powerful, economic, and more highly nuanced ways than prose. To explore these potentials in social science, for example, Mary Breheny (2012) has provided a poetic representation of aging; Anne Görlich (2016) has introduced us to the lives of adolescent dropouts, and Laurel Richardson has used experimental writing to illuminate her life in Fields of play (1997). As an alternative to authoring their own poems, other social scientists have drawn from the words of others – typically those to whom they wish to give voice – to form a poetic integration. For example, Steven Hartnett (2003) has provided insight into prison life through the poems of inmates. For more detailed accounts of the use of poetry in social research see Richardson and St. Pierre (2005), and Faulkner (2009). More on the performative use of text in general can be found in Pelias (2014), and Gergen and Gergen (2012).
Embodied Performance
The blend of activism and performance has a long history in the culture of protest. The Brazilian theater practitioner and political activist, Augusto Boal (1995), is noteworthy in opening the way to blending embodied performance with social theory, and he has inspired many to follow. For example, Jonathan Shailor in his work in prisons uses performative methods to create change in the lives of inmates (2010). Also illustrative is the theatrical work of Anna Deavere Smith on youth going to prison (2019), Mary Gergen on women and aging (2001), and Anita Woodley (2015), an inspiring storyteller and creator of ethnodramas, in her role as Mama Juggs on breast cancer and body image. Tami Spry, who has a special concern with Native American lives, also offers wisdom and guidance to those who may be drawn to the potentials of performance (2001, 2011). A major innovator in performance studies is the East Side Institute in New York City, where dramatic productions are integral to educational, therapeutic
