QRN 2022 Program

Qualitative Research Network

Wednesday March 9, 2022, 4:00 – 6:00 PM EST

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Zoom Conferencing

Michelle LaFrance is Associate Professor of English at George Mason University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on community writing, feminist methodologies, writing and rhetorical studies, and critical pedagogy. Michelle has published on institutional ethnography, the materialities of academic labor, e-portfolios, e-research, and writing center pedagogy. Her current work has her participating in urban communities, studying discourses of volunteerism and belonging, and treating the evolution of research practice and sensibilities in Writing Studies.

Her monograph Institutional Ethnography: A Theory of Practice for Writing Studies Researchers (Utah State, 2019) theorizes the institutional locations of writing and writing instruction, offering a new model for enacting ethnography and the study of writing, writers, and sites of writing. In 2021, this monograph was awarded the College Composition and Communication Research Impact award and received “Honorable Mention” in the 2021 Best Book category from the International Writing Across the Curriculum Association.

2022 QRN Schedule (DRAFT)

4:00 – 4:05 Welcome

4:05 – 4:30 Keynote Presentation

Institutional Ethnography:
How Do We Study Work and Why Does that Matter?
Dr. Michelle LaFrance, George Mason University

Though concerns about our labor and the value of our work have been central to conversations in Writing Studies for well over three decades, researchers in the field have only recently begun to theorize and develop qualitative models for studying “work.” In this talk, Michelle LaFrance argues that studying “work” as a complex of social relations offers a number of important insights to researchers, labor activists, and program administrators/advocates, particularly that “work” (in an office, program, classroom, or with students) takes its shape under the influence of a number of (often unrecognized) “ruling relations,” which are negotiated via uniquely personal understandings, preferences, identifications, and affiliations or “standpoint.”

This talk explores the framework offered by Institutional Ethnography for the study of “our work” in Writing Studies. Uncovering how work processes take shape—particularly tracing how things happen—reveals the influences, hierarchies, and organizing factors that coordinate the ways that people go about their everyday lives. Because so much about how people carry out their social lives is undergoing radical change in what has become an age of austerity (Scott and Welch 2016), those interested in how actual people are negotiating these emerging contexts have found the study of work via Institutional Ethnography an invaluable tool for uncovering how writing and writing instruction take shape within local contexts.

4:30 – 4:40 Break

4:40 – 6:00 Research Roundtables and Works-in-Progress Discussions (Zoom Breakout Rooms)

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2022 QRN Program (Google Docs link)

Facilitator Instructions

Presenter Instructions

2022 CCCC Accessibility Guide (PDF link)