The surprising unpredictability of language in use






Great description of a census at Kakuma refugee camp



What is the What by Dave Eggers

What is the What by Dave Eggers




Probable even!

I said nothing.






—But how will they get away with it?

—That’s impossible, I said.

—Is it? he asked.—Was Rwanda impossible?


—Why the ink? Gop asked. I didn’t know.











2013-12-17 18.38.03








Here are a couple of mine to kick us off:


Charles Goodwin’s Professional Vision paper


It also has a deep analysis of the Rodney King verdict.


Revitalizing Chinatown Into a Heterotopia by Jia Lou



After method: Mess in Social Science Research by John Law



On Postapocalyptic Research Methods and Failures, Honesty and Progress in Research


How is the current research environment like a utopian society?





Is the Utopia starting to fall apart?


Building from ashes








Language use & gaps in STEM education

Today our microanalytic research group focused on videos of STEM education.


Watching STEM classes reminds me of a field trip a fellow researcher and I took to observe a physics class that used project based learning. Project based learning is a more hands on and collaborative teaching approach which is gaining popularity among physics educators as an alternative to traditional lecture. We observed an optics lab at a local university, and after the class we spoke about what we had observed. Whereas the other researcher had focused on the optics and math, I had been captivated by the awkwardness of the class. I had never envisioned the PJBL process to be such an awkward one!


The first video that we watched today involved a student interchangeably using the terms chart and graph and softening their use with the term “thing.” There was some debate among the researchers as to whether the student had known the answer but chosen to distance himself from the response or whether the student was hedging because he was uncertain. The teacher responded by telling the student not to talk about things, but rather to talk to her in math terms.


What does it mean to understand something in math? The math educators in the room made it clear that a lack of the correct terminology signaled that the student didn’t necessarily understand the subject matter. There was no way for the teacher to know whether the student knew the difference between a chart and a graph from their use of the terms. The conversation on our end was not about the conceptual competence that the student showed. He was at the board, working through the problem, and he had begun his interaction with a winding description of the process necessary (as he imagined it) to solve the problem. It was clear that he did understand the problem and the necessary steps to solve it on some level (whether correct or not), but that level of understanding was not one that mattered.


I was surprised at the degree to which the use of mathematical language was framed as a choice on the part of the student. The teacher asked the student to use mathematical language with her. One math educator in our group spoke about students “getting away with fudging answers.” One researcher said that the correct terms “must be used,” and another commented about the lack of correct terms as indication that the student did “not have a proper understanding” of the material. All of this talk seems to bely the underlying truth that the student chose to use inexact language for a reason (whether social or epistemic).


The next video we watched showed a math teacher working through a problem. I was really struck by her lack of enthusiasm. I noticed her sighs, her lack of engagement with the students even when directly addressing them, and her tone when reading the problem from the textbook. Despite her apparent lack of enthusiasm, her mood appeared considerably brighter when she finished working through the problem. I found this interesting, because physics teachers usually report that their favorite part of their job is watching the students’ “a-ha!” moments. Maybe the rewards of technical problem solving are a motivator for both students and teachers alike? But the process of technical problem solving itself is rarely as motivating.


All of this leads me to one particularly interesting question. How do people in STEM learning settings distance themselves from the material? What discursive tools do they use? Who uses these discursive tools? And does the use of these tools change over time? I wonder in particular whether discursive distancing, which often parallels female discursive patterns, is more common among females than males as they progress through their education? Is there any kind of quantitative correlate to the use of discursive distancing? Is it more common among people who believe that they aren’t good at STEM? Is discursive distancing less common among people who pursue STEM careers? Is there a correlation between distancing and test scores?


Awkwardness in STEM education is fertile ground for qualitative researchers. To what extent is the learning or solving process emphasized and to what extent is the answer valued above all else? How is mathematical language socialized? The process of solving technical problems is a messy and uncomfortable one. It rarely goes smoothly, and in fact challenges often lead to more challenges. The process of trying and failing or trying and learning is not a sexy or attractive one, and there is rampant concern that focusing on the process of learning robs students of the ability to demonstrate their knowledge in a way that matters to people who speak the traditional languages of math and science.


We spoke a little about the phenomena of connected math. It sounds to me very closely parallel to project based learning initiatives in physics. I was left wondering why such a similar teaching process could be valued as a teaching tool for all students in one field and relegated to a teaching tool for struggling students in another neighboring field. I wonder about the similarities and differences between the outcomes of these methods. Much of this may rest on politics, and I suspect that the politics are rooted in deeply held and less questioned beliefs about STEM education.


STEM education initiatives have grown quite a bit in recent years, and it’s clear that there is quite a bit of interesting research left to be done.

Revisiting Latino/a identity using Census data


  • Census must use categories from OMB
      o   Treated as hereditary (“perpetual foreigner” status)
      o   Self-id new, before interviewer would judge, record
  • In the interview context, macro & micro meet
    • o   Macro level demographic categories
    • o   Micro:
      • Interactional participant roles
      • Indexed through labels & structure
      • Ascribed vs claimed identities
  • The study: 117 telephone interviews in Spanish
    • o   2 questions, ethnicity & race
    • o   Ethnicity includes Hispano, Latino, Español
      • Intended as synonyms but treated as a choice by respondents
      • Different categories than English (Adaptive design at work!)
  • The interviewers played a big role in the elicitation
    • o   Some interviewers emphasized standardization
      • This method functions differently in different conversational contexts
      • Official discourses mediated through interviewer ideologies
      • Definitions vary
  • Race question also problematic
    • o   Different conceptions of Indioamericana
      • Central, South or North American?
  • Role of language
  • Coding process
    • o   Coding responses such as “American, born here”
    • o   ~40% Latino say “other”
    • o   Other category ~ 90% Hispanic (after recoding)
  • So:
      • People don’t read help texts
      • Leeman is not yet ready to believe this
    • o   The takeaway for survey researchers:
  • See also Pew Hispanic Center report on Latino/a identity







Digital Democracy Remixed


Here are some key points:









Still grappling with demographics

I think of it as an academic puberty of sorts.










Dispatch from the quantitative | qualitative border

On Tuesday evening I attended my first WAPA meeting (Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists). This group meets monthly, first with a happy hour and then with a speaker. Because I have more of a quantitative background, the work of professional anthropologists really blows my mind. The topics are wide ranging and the work interesting and innovative. I’ve been sorry to miss so many of their gatherings.

This week’s topic was near and dear to my heart in two ways.

1. The work was done in a survey context as a qualitative investigation preceding the development of survey questions. As a professional survey methodologist, I have worked through the surprisingly complicated question writing process many hundreds of times, so this approach really fascinates me!

2. The work surrounded the topic of childbirth. As a mother of two and a [partially] trained birth assistant, I love to talk about childbirth.

The purpose of the study at hand was to explore infant mortality in greater depth by investigating certain aspects of the delivery process. The topics of interest included:

– whether the birth was attended by a professional or not
– whether the birth was at home or in a medical facility
– delivery of the placenta
– how soon after the birth the baby was wiped
– cord cutting and tying
– whether the baby was swaddled and whether the baby’s head was covered
– how soon the baby was bathed

The study was based on 80 respondents (half facility births, half homebirths) (half moms of newborns, half moms of 1-2 year olds) from each of two countries. The researchers collected two kinds of data: extensive unstructured interviews and survey questions. The interviews were coded using Atlas ti into specific, identifiable, repeated events that were relevant to infant mortality and then placed onto a timeline. The timeline guided the recommended order of the survey questions.

One audience member shared that she would have collected stories of “what is a normal childbirth?” from participants in addition to the women’s personal stories. Her focus with this tactic was to collect the language with which people usually discuss these events in childbirth. She mentioned that her field was linguistic anthropology. The language she was talking about is referred to by survey researchers as “native terms-” essentially the terms that people normally use when discussing a given topic. One of the goals of question writing is to write a question using the terms that a respondent would naturally use to classify their response, making the response process easier for the respondent and collecting higher quality data. The presenters mentioned that, although they did not collect normative stories, collecting native terms was a part of their research process and recommendations.

The topics of focus are problematic ones to investigate. Most women can tell whether or not they gave birth in a facility and whether or not the birth was attended by a professional. Women can usually remember their labor and delivery in detail (usually for the rest of their lives), as well as the first time they held and fed their babies. Often women can also remember the delivery of the placenta or whether or not they hemorrhaged or tore significantly during the birth process.

But other aspects of the birth, such as the cord cutting and tying and the first wiping and swaddling of the baby, are usually done by someone other than the mother (if there is someone else present). They often don’t command the attention of the mother, who is full of emotion and adrenaline and catching her breath from an all encompassing, life changingly powerful experience. These moments are often not as memorable as others, and the mothers are often not as fully aware of them or able to report them.

I wondered if the moms were able to use the same level of detail in retelling these parts of their stories? Was there any indication that these sections of the stories they told were their own personal stories and not a general recounting of events as they are supposed to happen? In survey research, we talk about satisficing, or providing an answer because an answer is expected, not because it is correct. In societies where babies are frequently born at home, people often grow up around childbirth and know the general, expected order of events. How would the results of the study have been different if the researchers had used a slightly different approach: instead of assuming that the mothers would be able to recount all of these details of their own experiences, the researchers could have taken a deeper look at who performed the target activities, how detailed an account of the activities the mothers were able to provide, and the nature of the mom’s involvement or role in the target activities.

I wondered if working with this alternative approach would have led to questions more like “The next few questions refer to the moments after your baby was born and the first time you held and nursed your baby. Was the baby already wiped when you first held and nursed them? Was the babies cord already cut and tied? Was the baby already swaddled? Was the baby’s head already covered?” Although questions like these wouldn’t separate out the first 5 minutes from the first 10, they would likely be easier for the mom to answer and yield more complete and accurate responses.

All in all, this event was a fantastic one. I learned about an area of research that I hadn’t known existed. The speaker was great, and the audience was engaged. If you have an opportunity to attend a WAPA event, I highly recommend it.