"Pictures of Me? at Work?": The Case of the Declining Subject (1)

In this article, I reflect on a common, unsettling, yet seldom discussed occurrence in qualitative inquiry: the subject who refuses to be a subject of research. This challenge in my own work caused me to question my research assumptions and approaches, as well as the complex dynamics of human interaction found there. I argue that such moments must be examined as part of the overall inquiry, as sites of challenges to the coherency of research endeavours, in particular when they call into question assumptions underpinning the investigative research process itself. It was a dark and stormy night. The windows rattled in the gale. A good night to work, I thought. I sat at my computer, hammering at the keys, trying to make sense of the clues in front of me. It's a hard case. One I may never crack. Everybody had stories to tell and none of them added up. All I need, I thought, is the key.I am thinking here about refusal and puzzlement in the midst of my research on the Ladies' Cold Storage Workers Union (LCSWU) of St. John's, New-foundland. This woman-only union formed in a St. John's fish plant in 1948, and organized women plant workers there until 1967 when the plant was closed. The primary goal in my research has been to understand more about identity formation and (re)formation as an ongoing, and shifting, process in the domestic and waged-labour lives of working-class women. In the complex, intersubjective process of speaking with the fish plant workers, both women and men, issues of my own identity formation(s) arose. Women challenged my desire to speak with them, to hear their stories. I was often asked to account for my own family and work history in the midst of our conversations. Some women employed an intricate process of engagement and refusal in our talks. This paper begins to unpack one of the moments of challenge and refusal I encountered in my research.* * *I begin with a brief representation of the work site and the women workers, just to give you a certain sense of the terrain. As I write these words, I am creating the union and the women workers before you, raising specific meanings, constraining others. I am conjuring up certain images and understandings of the union and the women workers in various ways: through my particular reading and telling of one story, the mediation of my own interpretation, my use of language in that telling, and the inclusion or exclusion of narrative data. All of this is set up on the page in such a way as to underscore academic authenticity, in short, to make this writing a believable truth. As the reader, you too are making your own meaning from my written words. You bring particular knowledges, understandings and life experiences to your readings. These acts of writing and reading are not simple and straightforward, although they are seldom discussed or problematized in our academic work processes.This complex working is also accomplished in the interactive process of collecting narrators' stories about the Ladies' Cold Storage Workers Union, which I have been endeavouring to hear and read, and about which I am deeply puzzled. At each stage of telling and inscription, meaning-making is actively being accomplished by the teller, the listener, and the inscriber. In this meaning-making those present inhabit all of these positions at once. Ideas are being worked up between the two (or more) speakers/listeners, explanatory discourses being summoned forth by each. As Daphne Patai observes of her own narrative collecting, the particular life moment and the person inquiring about that life influence which stories, with which emphases, are told.(1)The research process usually requires a shift from one mode of telling to another -- from speech to written word. The inscription process of transcribing spoken words introduces another layer of meaning-making. Literary conventions structure the words on the page, imposing an order and a standard presentation which may, or may not, accurately represent the recorded voices or interactions. …

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