Complications

I’m realizing that my initial goal for the dissertation — to examine how the socioeconomic class of students interacts with their experience in the wired writing classroom, probably focusing most on the writing itself — may be impossible. The reason is that class is a system that can’t be isolated just to students. Rather, the students in any wired classroom exist in a web of relations much like the one Bourdieu details in Distinction, one involving a multitude of overlapping factors and influences.

I originally split my classificatory system into four components: (1) tastes and values, (2) wealth and occupation, (3) relations of production, and (4) authenticity and lived experience. It’s clear to me now that tastes (one’s preference for one good over another) are hardly synchronous with values (abstract concepts such as the ones Lynn Z. Bloom describes), but may be connected to cultural practices (sports, violence, as discussed here recently). A student may class herself in preferring to wear Chucks over Nikes, in her homophobia, and in going bowling. Similarly, wealth and occupation are hardly synchronous, although both are connected to income; the student’s trust fund may obviate the need to work either as a greeter at Wal-Mart or as a summer intern in Washington, DC, both of which might pay roughly the same amount for a summer. Relations of production is a category I’m pretty happy with for the time being, and authenticity claims are usually based on lived experience, which subsumes factors such as tastes, values, cultural practices, wealth, occupation, income, and relations of production, as well as other markers of difference such as gender, age, race, and sexual preference. So I’ve got all these overlapping things to consider as — not sure what word to use here — vectors (?) of class.

But that’s just pretty much what I started with. The difficulty is that all these vectors move within a set of overlapping contexts: the student’s parents have their own class vectors that influence and are influenced by her class. In the classroom, so does the teacher. So does the school itself, and its relation to other schools. So does the student’s geographical location: when I was at Maryland as an undergrad, some “local” students sneered at the large population of students who came to Maryland from Long Island and from various parts of New Jersey. I’m not sure whether the student’s major counts as an institutional factor or not, but I think it’s in there too: while the Fine Arts and School of Management buildings are right next to one another here, there’s a huge cultural gap between them.

But my sense is that ultimately, what motivates me is the hope of some kind of improved economic justice, whatever that might mean. I mean, I said before that I wanted upward class mobility for my students, which — with its sense of “Every student a millionaire!” — feels kinda weird. Certainly it’s not a bad thing: living a life where one is less knocked about by one’s material conditions is something worth striving for, and worth striving to help other people do. If Darla goes to college and later gets a job making enough money to pay for her parents to move out of the shack in that mining town, that’s excellent. But when I frame it in the context of “class,” it implies an expectation on my part that something must be abandoned, which I’m uncomfortable with. And see, I just spent two paragraphs talking about being descriptive, and now I’m setting it up as serving a normative end, when my sense about research is that it should drive your conclusions, rather than the other way around. And I know this is a really old dilemma, but I’m trying to work toward an understanding of method — of what I’m going to look at and how I’m going to look at; again, those two paragraphs above — and I’ve been taught that when you think about method, you have to include ethics, or normative considerations. (But — to swing the pendulum the other way — the economist would call that unscientific.)

Anyway. It’s late; I’m tired. Not a terribly productive post, it feels like. Better tomorrow.