positioning

Since it is nearly impossible to be absolutely objective in fieldworking and writing ethnographic paper, people tend to use the positioning method to state their background and perspective to make the readers understand that the paper is written based on certain perspective view points and the readers have to be objective about it. In my opinion, it is a good way to solve the problem. Instead of being objective, it is much easier to give out one’s subjective opinions and make the paper even clearer written than trying to be objective, which is nearly impossible.   

The handout paper states “Positioning: reading and writing about yourself.”(130) In essence, the method of positioning is to state how your subjective response influences you analyze your data (131). There are three different ways of positioning. They are fixed positions, subjective positions and textual positions. All of these ways of positioning have certain degrees of influence on how the researchers see the data. First, The fixed positions are one’s personal facts, which are unchangeable. For instant, class and nationality. The subjective positions are one’s life experience and past history. At last, the textual positions are the type of language the researcher use to present his data (131 & 132). I think it is important to share some researcher’s background information with the readers because it could build up the writers’ credibility and readers could also have general sense of what the writer’s belief is.

In the article “A Boy And His Wall”, Ralph uses all of the three positions to tell readers’ how his subjective response affects him analyze his data. He states his profession is a language therapist and he has worked with other LD children before. It builds up his credibility and also readers know that he is analyzing his data from a language therapist’s perspective.