Juggling power: Performing ethnography in postsocialist Poland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is an autoethnographic account of my interdisciplinary Ph.D. research project - conducted in postsocialist Poland between May 2001 and June 2003 - which explored theatre performance as an ethnographic research methodology. I document and analyse the process through which the relations of power in the field challenged my original research field, plans, objectives, assumptions, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies that were to guide my fieldwork; and forced me to rearticulate and critically reflect on my role as ethnographer and theatre artist. At the center of my discussion are three ethnographic theatre projects -Dance as I Play You, Horses and Angels, and Hope - I developed in collaboration with my coinvestigator, Shawn Kazubowski-Houston, and with the research participants. The first two performances were created with student actors from the Cultural Centre for International Cooperation in the Arts in Elblag, and explored themes of intolerance, racism, gender and violence. Hope, created with student actors and five Roma women from Elblag, examined issues of racism, sexism, and violence in relation to Roma. This thesis analyses the relations of power as they were negotiated in the various stages of the project, including the building of rapport with research participants, my professional engagement with the Cultural Centre, the development process, the public presentation, and audience and participant responses to the performances. The participants' struggles over representation, resulting from disparate notions of aesthetics, ethnography, and the political, are the focal points of the study. My analysis draws from Antonio Gramsci's and Michel Foucault's conceptions of power; and Johannes Fabian's, Dwight Conquergood's, Jim Mienczakowski's, and Paul Stoller's approaches to participatory and performative ethnography. It also explores the Polish avant-garde theatres of Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Jozef Szajna; and the political theatres of Bertolt Brecht and socialist Poland, and their influences on my work. I discuss my re-conceptualisation of performative ethnography, and my roles as ethnographer and artist, as the outcomes of the study. To conclude, I consider an ethnography of discovery as the trajectory I envision for my future ethnographic journey, and for any study of this kind.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".