Black methodologies as ethnomethods: on qualitative methods-making and analyzing the situated work of doing being hybridly human

ABSTRACT

This paper describes qualitative methods-making informed by Black Studies and ethnomethodology. Specifically, I explore resonances and tensions between ethnomethodology and Katherine McKittrick’s theorization of black methodologies to describe an analytic approach to studying how language use and other embodied actions (re)produce humanizing and dehumanizing psychosocial dynamics. Blending insights from these perspectives, I argue for a radical respecification of black life in terms of the real-world practices for and constraints on doing being hybridly human and its associated genres of humanness. To demonstrate my approach, I offer an illustrative sequential-categorial analysis of a black story told in an affinity group for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Overall, I build a case for analytically divesting from biocentrism to surface the creative and unexpected ways people navigate and attempt to counter racial harm. Such an analytic view provides ways to source ideas about humanizing ways of living, interacting, and worldmaking together.

KEYWORDS:

• Black methodologies
• ethnomethodology
• qualitative methodology
• storytelling
• empathy

Qualitative researchers have long grappled with how to study black¹ life, black experiences, and antiblackness. In the late 19th century, historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois conducted his sentinel project, The Philadelphia Negro (Du Bois 1899/1967), the first documented systematic study of black life in the United States. His work exemplifies what scholars would now call a mixed-methods approach to urban ethnography, using participant observations, narrative surveys, and statistics to illuminate the humanity of black people as an alternative to the prevailing norm of scientific racism. Importantly, Du Bois (1935/1992) argued Western historical texts and academic research functioned as propaganda, perpetuating deficit and dehumanizing conceptions of black people, life, and histories. Further, he asserted because such works were considered neutral, legitimate, and authoritative accounts, they naturalized and reproduced colonial, capitalist, and racial logics. Though often excluded from the histories of qualitative inquiry, Du Bois’s groundbreaking works garnered international recognition, including his approach to autoethnography, visual representations, and storytelling (Battle-Baptiste & Rusert 2018; Duck & Rawls 2023; Ruiz‐Junco & Vidal‐Ortiz 2023). Qualitative methods (among others) – as approaches for unearthing and countering psychosocial oppression – were featured at the beginning of the academic study of black life.

The seeds for my current methodological thinking were planted during graduate studies when I participated in a Franz Fanon Study Circle while simultaneously learning about Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology. There, I learned about (and tarried with) Sylvia Wynter’s (Wynter & McKittrick 2015) notion of hybrid humanity alongside Garfinkel’s insight into the ordinary production of social order. I found Garfinkel did for social inquiry what Wynter did for the human; they troubled everyday people’s (and analysts’) neglected, taken-for-granted role in the production of social order, uncovering the self-organized, autopoetic character of knowing (Garfinkel’s ethnomethods) and how people make sense of each other as humans (Wynter’s bios-mythoi). Wynter, in conversation with Katherine McKittrick, argued,

Once you redefine being human in hybrid mythoi and bios terms, and therefore in terms that draw attention to the relativity and original multiplicity of our genres of being human, all of a sudden what you begin to recognize is the central role that our discursive formations, aesthetic fields, and systems of knowledge must play in the performative enactment of all such genres of being hybridly human. (Wynter & McKittrick 2015, 31)

Critically, Wynter foregrounded discursive practice as intimately linked to doing humanness. Likewise, Garfinkel (2002) posited that language use and other forms of embodied action played unavoidable roles in producing social life. These thinkers and ideas, among others, turned my analytic attention to language use and embodied activity as important sites for inquiry into humanizing ways of living and being in the world.

My work broadly explores what can be learned from examining how people produce, navigate, and subvert dehumanizing systems and dynamics, especially antiblackness, ableism, and adultism, within institutional settings. Informed by ethnomethodological sensibilities (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970; Garfinkel 2002, Potter & Hepburn 2008; Sacks 1995; Watson 1992), I study interactions in various institutional environments (e.g., clinics, educational settings) and how the local organization of humanizing and dehumanizing dynamics are consequential for institutional activities (e.g., caring for patients, learning). Garfinkel (1991) argued there is ‘no time out’ in the production of order, positioning the local organization of activities as the fundamental phenomenon of social inquiry (p. 11). In alignment with this view, I examine what Wynter (2018) described as the gaze ‘from below,’ or what Garfinkel (2002) called ‘shop floor’ theorizing, the situated ways of knowing and doing that locally and discursively produce, as normal and as natural (Garfinkel 1967), a particular sense of order that renders some people more than, less than, or naturally human. Significantly, I do not attempt nor desire to use ethnomethodology to show or prove antiblackness and related dehumanizing logics exists. We – those who experience, resist, survive, witness, and create otherwises within and beyond antiblackness – already know (McKittrick 2021). Indeed, ethnomethodological resources are unnecessary to make claims that could be stated plainly (Button, Lynch, and Sharrock 2022). Instead, I am curious about the quotidian, creative, provisional, collaborative labor of doing and undoing humanizing orders.

This paper describes my approach to qualitative methods-making informed by Black Studies and ethnomethodology. Specifically, I work with McKittrick’s (2021, 2022) theorization of black methodologies and ‘loose’ ethnomethodological sensibilities to examine the lived work of doing being hybridly human. Hybrid humanity refers to Wynter’s (2018) observation that humans have evolved into a narrative species by merging biological (bios) and storied (mythoi) understandings of humanness. She argued humans were now ‘storytellers who now storytellingly invent [our]selves as being purely biological’ (Wynter & McKittrick 2015, 11). Further, Wynter suggested this human hybridity made racial logics, categories, and oppressions appear as if they were natural aspects of human-human relations. Drawing inspiration from ethnomethodology, I argue the lived work of hybrid humanity is witnessable, analyzable, and contingently created within social interaction.

To develop my approach, I describe synergies between black methodologies and ethnomethodology. I begin by briefly tracing some of the histories of qualitative research about black life to situate my approach within the broader scholarly discourse. As praxis (McKittrick 2022), I take an ambivalent approach to knowing and knowledge to pursue curiosity as a mode of inquiry, entertaining ethnomethodology’s descriptive aims and analytical commitments for my purposes. In so doing, I embrace the inevitable contradictions of this methodological exercise as breaches, sources of wonder, and inspiration for qualitatively studying the details of doing being hybridly human in situ, in vivo. The rest of the paper presents an illustrative analysis of a black story to show the generative possibilities of qualitative methods-making informed by Black Studies and ethnomethodology.

An abbreviated history of qualitative studies of black life

In recent years, scholars have begun excavating and documenting the philosophies, theories, methodologies, and contributions of black intellectuals and activists (Bright 2024, Conner et al.2023, Duck & Rawls 2023, Luna & Pirtle 2021, Tillman et al. 2023). A widely acknowledged example is Du Bois’s (1903/2008 notion of double consciousness: ‘the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ (p. 6). Double consciousness characterizes both the psychosocial toll of chattel slavery and racism on black people in the United States and the distinctive point of view these harms engendered. More early black scholars and activists, Anna Julia Cooper, E. Frazier Franklin, St. Clair Drake, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to name a few, illuminated oppressive experiences and the resistance of everyday black people, as well as variation across, gender, class, and geographic location (Allen 2022, Blackman 2023; Connell 2024; Hurston, West, & Gates, 2022; Phillips 2023; Salerno 2023). The invaluable contributions of early Black psychologists Herman Canady, Mamie Phipps Clark, Kenneth Clark, Martin Jenkins, Inez Prosser, Francis Sumner, and later, Joseph White and contemporaries who established Black psychology fundamentally challenged the scientific racism entrenched in and enabled by psychological research (Jamison 2018). Critically, Black intellectuals and movements conveyed the importance of everyday and academic theorizing of black people, well-captured by the words of June Jordan: ‘It is not that we only believe Black people can understand the Black experience. It is, rather, that we acknowledge the difference between reality and criticism as the difference between the Host and the Parasite’ (cited in Myers 2023, 1). Like Du Bois’ double consciousness, the Host and Parasite distinction alludes to asymmetrical, situated analyses of the conceit of white supremacy and its influence on what people recognize and how they describe black experiences.

In the 1960s, Black Studies was formalized as an academic discipline to advance research and praxis, primarily focused on black people, communities, and anti-racist social justice aims. The creation of Black Studies engendered a proliferation of epistemological and ontological orientations to the study of black people and experiences, such as Black Feminisms and Womanisms (Collins 2022, Hudson-Weems 2020, Evans-Winters 2019, Overby and Platenburg 2024), Black Queer and BlaQueer Studies (Johnson and Henderson 2020; Taylor et al. 2023; Wilson 2020), Black Ecologies and Geographies (McKittrick 2021, Hosbey, Lloréns, and Roane 2022), Black Disability Studies (Bailey and Mobley 2019, Dunhamn et al. 2015, Schalk 2022), Black Male Studies (Curry 2017, Majors and Billson 1993), and Black Science, Technology, and Society Studies (Benjamin 2019, Brock 2020, McMillan Cottom 2017, Noble 2018). Across these varied perspectives, researchers reject individualized, Westernized, colonial conceptions of research and instead advance practices and accounts – as correctives, alternatives, or critiques – that affirm and illuminate the experiences, forms of being, and overall humanity of Black people and communities (Alkalimat 2021, McDougal 2014). Researchers in these areas have often leveraged qualitative methods and alternatives to empirical inquiry – narrative, textual analysis, historical interviews, visual arts, poetry, focus groups, analysis of digital interaction, mapping activities, participatory action research, organizing – to re-story and promote social change for black life. These diverse approaches to studying black life embody what Katherine McKittrick (2021) called ‘methods-making’ – that is, undoing and reinventing knowledge systems, including what it means to be human, through rebellious and relational modes of inquiry (p. 44). Further, McKittrick argued methods-making was rigorous² improvisational work that made knowledge, relations, culture, and social life anew.

Beyond Black Studies, scholarship about black life, experiences, and methodologies have often been under-considered or ignored, reflecting a longstanding struggle for and refusal of legitimacy within mainstream academic discourse (Alkalimat 2021, Myers 2023). At the same time, psychological research on race, racial identity, and racial inequality has increased in the last 30 years, yet black- and African-centered works remain underrepresented and marginalized in academic journals (Jamison 2018, Roberts et al. 2020). Further, because quantitative and experimental approaches have dominated psychological research, qualitative studies of black experiences have often been misunderstood or caricatured as ‘me-search’ (Devendorf et al. 2023, Lyons et al. 2012). Despite these misunderstandings, researchers in psychology have called for more qualitative research to generate transformative, liberatory, culturally congruent, and otherwise humanizing knowledge and praxes (Jamison 2018, Lyons et al. 2012). The Journal of Black Psychology has featured an over 800% increase in references to qualitative research in the last 20 years, as either empirical studies or recommendations for future research, from 29 ‘hits’ up to 2001 to 284 ‘hits’ in 2023. I searched Qualitative Research in Psychology in 2023,³ finding only a few hits for ‘black feminist’ (6 hits), ‘Black Studies’ (1 hit), ‘black queer’ (1 hit), and none for ‘black epistemology.’ These patterns are consistent with publishing trends in the broader field of psychology (Roberts et al. 2020), showing that research on race and black life have often been marginalized, thereby stifling innovation, generative critiques, and extensions of these areas within and across disciplinary communities.

I provided an overview of one version of the above intellectual histories to punctuate the fact that black qualitative traditions and qualitative approaches to studying black life are not new. Rather, researchers’ contemporary methodological praxes for and about black life, whether acknowledged or not, stand on the shoulders of many giants, of black and nonblack intellectuals, creatives, activists, and more. Alkalimat (2021) asserted that learning the intellectual histories of the Black Radical Tradition keeps scholars from reinventing the wheel, and more importantly, enables extending, unsettling, and creatively reimaging knowledge and praxis for black life.

Ethnomethodology and black methodologies in conversation

This section brings together the unlikely intellectual connections I make to study human-human interaction. My goal is to analytically divest from biocentrism, along with its ethnic absolutism that naturalizes racial (among other) genres of humanness (Gilroy 1995), and instead position it as my object of inquiry and curiosity. From ethnomethodology, I borrow insights into the contingent production of social order as resources for illuminating humanizing and dehumanizing dynamics. McKittrick’s (2021) text on black methodologies inspire me to attend to and learn from provisional worldmaking that invests in and affirms (or not) black life, liberation, and shared humanity.

Ethnomethodological analysis

Ethnomethodology was developed in the 1950s and 60s as a discipline focused on the production of social order. Ethnomethodology is not a method; it is akin to a worldview or a way of living. Its subject matter is ‘ethnomethods’: the interactive procedures (e.g., words, movements, silences) people use to coordinate their activities (e.g., talking, problem-solving), make sense of themselves and each other, and order their social world (Garfinkel 1967). Ethnomethodology’s practitioners use a range of materials, resources, sites, and analytic approaches to conduct studies tailored to their phenomena of interest.

Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, along with his students and collaborators, developed the discipline based on critical observations about traditional social science research (Garfinkel 1967, Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). Garfinkel and Sacks observed that social scientists and everyday people alike relied upon ‘natural language’ for social inquiry, whether in conversations with friends or in designing a survey. Informed by phenomenological writings about the ‘natural attitude,’ natural language refers to a common sense evident in how people (have learned to) use language to enable each other to recognize and understand what they mean when communicating (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). The procedures for using language and acting are ‘members’ methods’ (also ethnomethods). The term ‘member’ does not refer to an individual. Member describes the competent and learned ways of using language and embodied actions to achieve (or undermine) shared understanding (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970).

Relatedly, according to Garfinkel and Sacks (1970), natural language is inherently indexical. Resonant with Wittgenstein’s (1958) later language philosophy, ‘indexical’ refers to the fact that the meanings of specific words, and indeed particular actions and embodiments, depend upon their use in and for the circumstances at hand (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). Despite this contingency in uses, people can understand each other’s’ ‘glossed’ meanings, and they have methods for resolving potential misunderstandings. Garfinkel and Sacks demonstrated that surveys did not account for these glosses and traded upon research participants’ common sense and cultural knowledge. However, Garfinkel and Sacks did not consider these glosses shortcomings per se. They described them as unacknowledged irremediable features underlying the social scientific enterprise and social life more generally.

Garfinkel and Sacks also demonstrated that particular uses of language and embodied actions produced orderliness and that these practices were done just so, creatively and recurrently with the resources (e.g., aesthetic, cultural, embodied, linguistic, temporal, material) available at hand (Garfinkel 1967, 2002, Sacks 1995). Using an example of an occasion for cleaning, Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) described the orderliness of cleaning as a phenomenon in its own right:

If, whenever housewives were let into a room, each one on her own went to some same spot and started to clean it, one might conclude that the spot surely needs cleaning. On the other hand, one might conclude that there is something about the spot and about the housewives that makes the encounter of one by the other an occasion for cleaning, in which case the fact of cleaning, instead of being evidence of dirt, would be itself a phenomenon. (p. 347, emphasis added)

In this example, Garfinkel and Sacks shifted readers’ focus away from individualized aspects of the scene (e.g., dirt, housewives) to foreground the coordinated, occasioned, and situated activity of cleaning that made its occurrence appear as if the activity was naturally organized as it was (i.e., thanks to cultural knowledge and how the activities were described, readers are able to view the example as if housewives naturally, normally do cleaning). Centrally, they drew attention to the role of language use and interaction in the production, maintenance, recognition, and negotiation of socio-cultural order and phenomena. Critically, Garfinkel and Sacks rejected the privileged epistemic status of an analyst, a universal observer ideal, and established theories for defining culture and social life. Instead, they favored surfacing the ‘ethno-theories’ and ‘ethno-scientific practices’ produced in the very ways people interactively lived and conducted their work (Meier zu Verl & Meyer 2024, 8). These lived practices were conceived of as constituting, constitutive of, and constrained by the activities underway, timing, setting, and various aspects of particular circumstances (Garfinkel 2002, Smith 2021). Garfinkel (2002) also disavowed treating ethnomethodology as a ‘better approach’ or ‘corrective’ to the problems of conventional social theories and methods of inquiry. Instead, he described ethnomethodology as an asymmetrical, incommensurable alternate that could analytically attend to phenomena missed by and uninteresting to researchers using conventional approaches. By asymmetrical, Garfinkel meant ethnomethodology could generate insight into phenomena of interest in traditional research, but the reverse was not possible. By incommensurable, he suggested ethnomethodological analysis was incompatible with conventional theories and methods and vice versa.

These observations had significant methodological implications for studying social and psychological phenomena. Rather than using conventional, statistical, or theory-driven methods of inquiry, ethnomethodologists seek to describe members’ methods found in real-world activities, whether within social interaction, doing a professional job, or solving a problem, that produce order in situ (Lynch 2002; Sacks, 1984). Insights from early ethnomethodological works led to the development of cognate approaches for describing how ordinary and specialized ways of using language and other embodied actions produce order in and through mundane, disciplinary, and workplace activities and environments (Button, Lynch, and Sharrock 2022).

Sormani (2019) outlined three main strands of ethnomethodological analysis: (1) conceptual analysis, (2) conversation analysis, and (3) practical analysis. Conceptual analysis focuses on respecification – that is, taking abstract disciplinary concepts or phenomena (e.g., ‘human-computer interaction’) as objects of inquiry, and describing them in terms of the details of their organizational, coordinated, and practical work (e.g., situated practices for interacting with computers) (Garfinkel 1991). Aligned with this strand, membership categorization analysis is an approach to examining how people do culture using language and other embodied actions, assemble and use categories (e.g., ‘race,’ ‘ability,’) and their features, relations between categories (e.g., hierarchies, groupings), and the categorial orders they create in immediate circumstances (Hester and Eglin 1997, Fitzgerald and Housley 2015, Smith in press). The conceptual analysis strand also resonates with discursive psychology, a theoretical, methodological, and analytical approach that respecifies psychological phenomena (e.g., beliefs, identity) in terms of discursive and interactional constructions (Edwards and Potter 1992; Lester and O’Reilly 2021; see also Lester et al. in press). The second strand, conversation analysis, was developed by Harvey Sacks and collaborators, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson to study members methods for understanding each other through talking and the sequential organization of conversation or talk-in-interaction (Lester and O’Reilly 2019, Sacks 1995, Sacks et al. 1974, Sidnell & Stivers 2013). Analysts in this strand use a specialized form of technical analysis to examine single instances or collections of audio, textual, and video recordings of face-to-face and technology-mediated interactions in various settings. The outcome of these studies is detailed, technical descriptions of verbal, paraverbal, visible, embodied, or otherwise aesthetic conduct in the ongoing production of social interaction. Finally, the practical analysis strand comes from Garfinkel and collaborators’ later initiatives, namely ethnomethodological studies of work and hybrid studies (Garfinkel 1986, 2002). Ethnomethodologists engaged in practical analyses learn and become competent in a specialized skill or craft (e.g., learning jazz) to adequately describe the distinctive labor of a domain of work (e.g., Sudnow, 2001). The outcomes of these studies often double as ‘insider’ descriptions and useful instructions for the skillful tasks under study (Garfinkel 2002).

Black methodologies

McKittrick (2021) defined black methodologies as modes of living and an ‘enlivened’ analytic that embodies, engenders, and sustains curiosity and wonder. McKittrick argued these ways of being were evident, legible, and sometimes opaque, yet palpable in black intellectuals, theorists, creators, artists, activists, and everyday peoples’ methods, praxes, and aesthetic expressions. Black methodologies are primarily concerned with black life – not an individual, body, or concept, but as ‘a site (or sites) of sustained and/or provisional worldmaking activities that are invested in liberation’ (McKittrick 2022, 4). Notably, McKittrick drew attention to the academic tendency to exploit discourses of racial harm and violence for scholarly currency, and in so doing, positioning black life as wholly abject. She insisted black people were (are) wholly human. Black people and communities were (are) more than knowledge and experiences of racial harm and violence. McKittrick prompted scholars to recognize and refuse these dehumanizing tendencies to understand how black knowing, knowledge, and ways of living can and do invest in liberation within and beyond the constraints of white supremacy. McKittrick’s (2022) central premise was this: ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world, because thinking and writing and imagining across a range of texts, disciplines, histories, and genres unsettles dismal and insular racial logics’ (p. 5).

McKittrick’s ideas were anchored by and built upon Sylvia Wynter’s inimitable analysis of how biocentric logics pervaded knowledge systems and human-human (and human-nature) relations (Alagraa 2023, Wynter 2003, 2018, Wynter & McKittrick 2015). Wynter (2018) analyzed how knowledge systems encoded a colonial, Westernized, Eurocentric conception of the human in the sciences and humanities. Her argument was that humans could no longer understand themselves in purely biological terms; the human species had evolved into one of storytellers, and their stories made and remade the meanings of humanness. According to Vizcaíno (2022), Wynter explored how humans can/do materialize and self-replicate each other as a hybrid (bios-mythoi) species in ways that permit or constrain expansive understandings of humanness. Wynter called for a ‘science of narrative human systems’ that involved analyzing words as a storied existence functioning, dialectically, at the physiological and social levels of experience (Ibid, p. 84). This science made the story simultaneously a self-organizing system, a method, a theorization of humanness, a unit of analysis, and a worldmaking project. Further, Wynter’s ideas positioned stories and storytelling from ‘liminal’ perspectives, those whose way of being and living were implicitly or explicitly excluded from humanness, as subversive practices that unsettled the status quo (of knowledge, of humanness) and enabled a new humanism.

Black methodologies do not describe recipes for research or formulaic sets of techniques. Rather, McKittrick (2021, 2022) offered a set of observations about black methodologies, as liminal perspectives, that transformed knowing and knowledge about humanness. First, McKittrick observed that Black thinkers worked with and weaved together various texts to challenge racism. McKittrick argued race and racism were manifested and reproduced through knowledge systems because of the ways they normalized disciplinary and place-based taxonomies or classifications (e.g., racial categories, nation-states). Like ethnomethodologists’ observations about natural language, McKittrick brought to the fore the taken-for-granted racial and place-based logics that were consequential for knowing and the knowledge researchers produced. She argued black methodologies unsettled conventional knowledge systems by centering and legitimizing ways of knowing that were otherwise illegible or marginalized. Like how black artists creatively fashion critiques through paintings. Or how a child’s story crafts theories of social life and humanizing kinships. And how social movements create constellations of knowledge and praxes that enable mutual care. According to McKittrick (2021), centering and legitimizing other ways of knowing invented and reinvented knowledge.

Second, McKittrick found that black methodologies were not solely about what thinkers come to know but placed emphasis on how thinkers come to know black life. She proposed that working across various disciplines, genres, and texts demanded skillfulness, rigor, and creatively bringing together disparate ideas. According to McKittrick (2021), these practices illuminated unorthodox ways of belonging (intellectually, communally) and enabled thinkers to discredit racial and place-based fictions. Further, McKittrick observed that black methodologies brought together multiple texts, stories, music, ideas, places, miscellanea to know alternately⁴ and variably. She argued these practices enabled new stories and taught analysts and everyday people how to live differently within and beyond the realities of white supremacy.

My approach

Building upon the previous sections, I describe my approach to qualitative methods-making for studies of humanizing and dehumanizing interactions. It is not my goal to ‘coin’ a new methodology or lay out a programmatic agenda to stake out new methodological territory. Instead, I think with and apply old and new ideas from Black Studies and ethnomethodology to describe the work of doing being hybridly human. At times, I misread ideas from McKittrick and Garfinkel. Garfinkel (2002) suggested the term ‘misread’ should not be misunderstood to mean an incorrect reading. He noted,

I mean read alternately so that the reading, the second reading, if directions are available in the first reading, then in a second reading, an alternate reading, that the readings are incommensurable. They don’t translate point for point but instead they go together. (p. 112)

I take misreading to mean the practice of reading texts and ideas from McKittrick and Garfinkel, on the one hand, as instructions for studying black life and, on the other hand, as descriptions of black life in situ, in vivo. McKittrick (2022) claimed that black life is not a body or concept. She argued black life was instead a site or sites of provisional worldmaking invested in liberation. I misread this claim as an instruction for studying and learning from black life as the local production of and constraints on liberatory activities. These sites and activities are sources of wonder, inspiration, and clues about how to live and interact in more humanizing, life-affirming ways. Below, I discuss curiosities, inspirations from empirical studies, concepts, data sources, and tensions that inform my approach to qualitative methods-making.

Racial phenomena

I consider racialization – the production and negotiation of racial and hierarchical meanings – an element of hybrid humanity and a phenomenon that can be respecified⁵ ethnomethodologically. However, ethnomethodological research related to race, racialization, and racism is limited and contested (Button, Lynch, and Sharrock 2022, Crawley, Whitlock, and Earles 2021, Heritage and Maynard 2022, Shrikant & Williamson, forthcoming). This is likely due to ethnomethodological indifference, a principled disavowal of the phenomena, analytic methods, topics, or agendas of conventional social science (Garfinkel 2002). Garfinkel suggested ethnomethodological indifference has often been misunderstood as disinterest in societal issues (Ibid, see p. 171–172). He clarified that ethnomethodological indifference was better understood as a commitment to focusing on members’ conduct and their phenomena of order, which may or may not make societal issues, such as racialization, legibly or exclusively relevant to local activities.

Despite misconstruals of ethnomethodological indifference, ethnomethodological-inspired work on race has been gaining more traction in recent years (Rawls et al. 2020; Sciubba et al. 2021; Shrikant & Williamson forthcoming). For example, in their recent text, Tacit Racism, Rawls and Duck (2020) synthesized decades of research about Black-White interactional dynamics in the US. Based on their evidence and informed by Du Bois’ double consciousness, they built a case for the existence of Black and White Interaction Orders, or patterned and misaligned interactional expectations that constitute and are constitutive of the distinctive dynamics between Black and White research participants. In conversation analytical research, Kevin Whitehead and collaborators have examined how people ordinarily construct, use, and analyze racial categories, and how these categorizations are consequential for the organization of talk-in-interaction (Whitehead, 2015; Whitehead & Lerner, 2009, 2022). More scholars have borrowed analytical resources from membership categorization analysis to examine the creative, situated ways people assemble, use, negotiate, and resist racial categories, their features, and relations (Brohi 2023; Fox, Ramanath, and Swan 2023; Joyce & Sterphone 2022; Okazawa 2021; Shrikant & Sambaraju 2023). Works in these areas are still emerging.

In alignment with ethnomethodological sensibilities, I understand racialization and racism, like other social structures or institutions, as members’ ‘worded phenomena’ or ‘communicative orders’– that is, ways of speaking and interacting that display and constitute the distinctive character (e.g., attributes, entitlements, relations) of those institutions (Watson 1992, 260–261). As such, I seek to divest from biocentrism – narrow, pre-defined, racially-reified conception of human-human relations – to forward a situated analytic stance, much like the Host-Parasite distinction June Jordan described.⁶ This stance is not a mere difference in interpretation nor a rigid conception of ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ positionalities. Indeed, analysts, by their disparate and shared experiences, backgrounds, cultures, and disciplinary training, have unequal and varied access to different types of evidence for making analytic claims and adequately describing phenomena (Alcoff 1991, Chalmers 2013, Garfinkel 2002). Conversation analyst Emanuel Schegloff’s (1996) distinction between analysis and interpretation is relevant here. He described interpretation as inherently contestable and inviting alternatives that may or may not be settled with evidence. By contrast, Schegloff argued analysis ‘lays bare how the interpretation comes to be what it is—i.e., what about the target [observable, witnessable practice] provides for the interpretation which has been proposed for it’ (p. 26, emphasis added). Therefore, I attempt to offer a grounded analysis, albeit still subject to scrutiny, of the procedural work and activities that (re)produce and unsettle racial phenomena based on the ideas, materials, and analytic resources on hand, not just any old interpretation or commentary. Following ethnomethodological principles, I show my work to make analytic claims legible and available for alternative analyses (Sacks 1984).

Borrowed concepts

After noticing synergies between black methodologies and ethnomethodology, I began borrowing ideas from each approach, much like sensitizing concepts (Blumer 1954), to anchor my attempt to analytically divest from biocentricism. The following concepts piqued my curiosity and sometimes left me bewildered, wondering what I could do with what I read and learned from Garfinkel and McKittrick.

Three of Garfinkel’s (2002) notions inform my analytic approach: (1) the Shop Floor Problem, (2) endogenous populations, and (3) perspicuous settings. These terms figuratively and literally refer to various aspects of labor, ordinary or professional, and ‘staff’ that (re)produce or subvert the coherence of social facts, phenomena, and order. The Shop Floor Problem describes incongruities or practical problems that arise in courses of local action or work (Lindwall and Lynch 2023). Garfinkel (2002) suggested that to identify and appropriately characterize shop talk, shop problems, and staff, ‘you start with concerted things – traffic flows – not bodies’ (p. 93). The ‘staff’ of concerted activities, such as driving, are endogenous populations, not specific pre-assigned or pre-determined roles or groupings, but they are the situated groups (e.g., ‘fast’ drivers, ‘slow’ drivers) that coordinate traffic activities and thereby contingently create genres of drivers that could be categorized otherwise. To study racial phenomena, then, I source materials from activities that make the lived reality of race and associated endogenous populations. Such activities are perspicuous settings (Garfinkel 2002). A perspicuous setting is a scene that prompts or invites looking, seeing, and studying members’ phenomena. A perspicuous setting ‘makes available, in that it consists of, material disclosures of practices of local production and natural accountability in technical details with which to find, examine, elucidate, learn of, show, and teach the organization object as in vivo work site’ (Garfinkel 2002, 181, original emphasis). Analysts can find perspicuous settings for racial phenomena using Sacks’ gloss: find a setting where the ‘day’s work’ is to routinely do the work that gets race and racial logics (un)done.

These ethnomethodological concepts are points of departure for my approach to studying the labor of doing being hybridly human. But what is a perspicuous setting for black life? Recent ethnomethodological studies show people work to conceal the salience of and stances toward racial issues to avoid institutional or social sanctions (Watson 2023; Whitehead 2015). These evasive practices make finding sites and materials for study tricky. I have decided to study sites where the official institutional business is to implement anti-racism or where racial inequities impacting black people and communities are pervasive (Shrikant & Williamson forthcoming, Williamson et al. 2024). These sites reveal the unexpected, subtle, and surprising ways people orient to and subvert their shared humanity for various purposes, and myriad genres of being human they occasion for institutional activities. These topicalized sites and motivated inquiries fall short of the ideal of ethnomethodological indifference. Still, I argue the spaces where (anti-)racism is designedly salient are places and spaces to learn from the lived work of doing being hybridly human. These spaces are also sites where it is possible to learn new ways living and investing in collective liberation and shared humanity.

Two concepts from McKittrick’s (2021, 2022) theorization of black methodologies further influence my analytic approach: (1) diasporic literacy and (2) opacity (versus clarity). McKittrick found that black methodological rigor exhibited and engaged diasporic literacy, a term developed by VèVè Clark. Diasporic literacy refers to how everyday black people and intellectuals ‘already do, or can, illuminate and connect existing and emerging diasporic codes and tempos and stories and narratives and themes’ (McKittrick 2021, 6). According to McKittrick, these connections were evidenced in situated readings of various prompts – forms of humor, descriptions, half-told stories, ‘and I wonder if you know what it means’ (Siffre 1972, para. 2). She argued that diasporic literacy extended what a text did through prompts that ‘cue[d] what does not need explanation but requires imagination and memory and study’ (McKittrick 2022, 6). In other words, IYKYK. McKittrick suggested this meant black methodologies necessarily alternated between moments of opacity and clarity. Like Garfinkel’s perspicuous settings, McKittrick described moments of clarity as ‘pedagogical prompts’; they invited teaching and learning, they were occasions for critical insight, and revealed tensions (the Shop Floor Problem) engendered and embodied through black ways of knowing. By contrast, McKittrick described opacity as a politic, a method of refusal, and a practice of care. Drawing upon Édouard Glissant’s ideas, McKittrick cautioned scholars to work carefully with stories of blackness, which at times required refusing or obscuring knowability.⁷ She described her goal as an attempt to theorize harm and violence without making them synonymous with blackness. Black people and communities could be more than the documented products and processes of racial harm and violence. Black people have always been wholly human.

How might an analyst study, describe, and learn from black life without overinvesting in biocentric, colonial-capitalist logics? And how do researchers do so without erasing the lived reality of being racialized and, in so doing, constitute conditions for harm or healing? Is it possible to unsettle, or not settle for, the current descriptive statement (i.e., status quo understanding of humanness, Wynter 2003) in research processes and reports? These questions and ideas are starting points for my curiosity about human-human interactions and the psychosocial phenomena they produce. I entertain ethnomethodology as an analytic orientation capable of making biocentrism strange. An ethnomethodological analysis would take biocentrism (e.g., via racialization) to be a local interactional achievement, a phenomenon, that could be done otherwise. The achievement of biocentrism and its subversion are arguably exhibited features of black miscellanea (McKittrick 2022) – black stories, creative expressions, grooves, music-making, interactions, placemaking, processes, and products of collective human livingness.

Interactional miscellanea

A key aspect of my qualitative methods-making is the materials I collect and use for analyses, which I call interactional miscellanea. Interactional miscellanea are related and unrelated recordings and transcripts from interactions in multiple settings, with dyads or groups, and using various media for interacting (e.g., face-to-face, telephone) that are useful to illuminate humanizing and dehumanizing orders. These miscellanea are what ethnomethodologists have called ‘naturally organized activities’ or embodied actions and interactions that exhibit or make witnessable the production of order – meaning, analysts can recognize the orderliness of actions because they are made to be legible/recognizable (Lynch 2002, 534). Over the years I have compiled audio and video recordings of naturalistic stories, spontaneous or surprising narratives that arise in day-to-day institutional activities, as my black miscellanea (McKittrick 2022). According to McKittrick, black stories alternate between clarity and opacity, providing ideas, clues, and lessons about living and navigating harm. With ideas from ethnomethodology, I work with interactional miscellanea to learn how black stories work and their role in doing being hybridly human in local circumstances.

The inspiration for compiling and working with interactional miscellanea primarily came from lectures and writings by Harvey Sacks, one of the founders of conversation analysis and a methodologist of ethnomethodology (Fitzgerald 2019). Sacks (1984) claimed: ‘It is possible that detailed study of small phenomena may give an enormous understanding of the way humans do things and the kinds of objects they use to construct and order their affairs’ (p. 24). Further, Sacks (1995) argued that to understand how people ordinarily constructed and used concepts, categories, and organizing practices, it was necessary to ‘find them in the activities in which they’re employed’ (p. 27). In his lectures, Sacks often taught with the same pieces of interactional miscellanea to demonstrate various aspects of social order, such as procedures for doing greetings, situated uses of categories, practices for storytelling, and how people made inferences about each other’s talk based on what was said or unsaid. I learned from these insights that it might be possible to find the small phenomena of doing being hybridly human. I wondered what I might learn from the genres of humanness black stories make and unmake and the creative, provisional, procedural labor involved in doing so.

Resonances and tensions

Ideas from ethnomethodology and black methodologies resonate in at least three main ways. First, as Tressie McMillan Cottom (2017) put it, both perspectives supply the seemingly radical idea that black women (and all black people) are human beings and rational actors. Here, I mean ‘rational’ in the ethnomethodological sense: what people do in given situations, within particular constraints, and with the resources at hand makes or is made to make sense. At a basic level, a shared praxis of humanity is accorded to all people as members’ methods, as how humans ordinarily live, produce, and sometimes subvert order. My job as an analyst, then, is to surface and describe how doings make sense and the ways people subvert dynamics that create undesired or oppressive asymmetries between humans. It is in this way that members’ methods and black methodologies are co-related.⁸ Second, ethnomethodology resonates with Wynter’s (2018) challenge to biocentrism in human-human relations by focusing on human activities and human systems of (inter)action. Both perspectives begin with activities, texts, stories, and practices, not purely biological or material forms. This stance unsettles ethnic absolutism and can reveal how the way people do society shapes how they orient to each other and themselves as humans. Third, black methodologies and ethnomethodology emphasize contingency or provisionality in worldmaking. This emphasis means that at every turn, the ways people do social life and interact with each other could be otherwise. Systems of knowledge can and do change. However, this view also invites a commitment to unsettle a fixed, categorial sense of self-other asymmetries (e.g., racial hierarchies) and attention to the constraints that reify social order. Racism is ordinary (Delgado and Stefancic 2023, Essed 1991, Rawls & Duck 2020). Rather than conceiving of the ordinariness of racism as enduring, all-encompassing, and inevitable, black methodologies and ethnomethodology raise questions about how the contingent order of things make anti-black racism, and its subversion, possible.

The tensions between ethnomethodology and black methodologies lie in their analytic pursuits and ends. Ethnomethodology aims to provide careful descriptions of the production of order (Garfinkel 2002). McKittrick (2021) rehearsed: ‘description is not liberation’ (p. 39, 44, 45). She argued, ‘the goal is not to find liberation, but to seek it out’ (p. 48). As a politic, liberation is not an ethnomethodological agenda (Lynch 1993, 2008). However, according to Rawls (2002), ‘Ethnomethodology cannot be indifferent to political, ethical or theoretical critique because that is essentially what it is. Ethnomethodology seeks to reveal the way in which taken for granted social practices maintain the appearance of things’ (p. 54). Furthermore, Garfinkel (2002) claimed, ‘Ethnomethodology is applied ethnomethodology’; its descriptions illuminate the nature of problems of practice that people and practitioners can learn from (p. 114). If learning is conceived of as a liberatory practice (Freire 1970, hooks 1994), then ethnomethodology and its instructions can become resources for seeking liberation. Another tension relates to my focus on racial phenomena and black life. Ethnomethodologist Watson (2015) warned about the problem of reification, where researchers treat racial categories and systems as enduring, stable, all-encompassing phenomena rather than understanding them (ethnomethodologically) as contingent, occasioned uses for the interactional circumstances hand. Watson’s concern captures precisely what I seek to keep open – the lived and unsettled work of making, parsing, and marking humanness. Still, researchers may miss the unexpected, creative practices of doing being hybridly human by ignoring (designedly) racial phenomena or reducing matters of (anti)blackness to instances with explicit or obvious relevance. I have not found a good solution to these problems. These problems are the object of my methodological curiosity.

Illustrative analysis

As noted above, I collect interactional miscellanea and compile exchanges that reveal the creative ways people produce or undermine humanizing orders. Using a black story from my miscellanea, this section presents illustrative analysis to demonstrate how I work with and between ideas from ethnomethodology and black methodologies. The black story comes from an audio-recorded affinity group meeting for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (henceforth, WIS). I collected this recording for doctoral research that was approved as exempt by the Indiana University Institutional Review Board (Protocol #: 1901325899, Williamson 2020). WIS aimed to foster solidarity among women graduate students interested in developing teaching, science communication, and outreach skills. I was one of the lead facilitators of WIS and participated in this storytelling activity along with 14 other group members. As a regular component of meetings, WIS did a Roses & Thorns activity to facilitate community-building and create opportunities for doing empathy. During this activity, facilitators invited group members to take turns sharing high points (Roses) and low points (Thorns) from the weeks prior. The story features a ‘thorn’ about a racialized teaching experience.

Coparticipants in this scene collaboratively produce the story (i.e., an account) about a racialized experience as a perspicuous setting, making visible the social, practical, and embodied work of producing social facts and genres of doing being human. The story does not pass as ordinary. Instead, coparticipants trouble the story, and they make it accountable (i.e., a witnessable production problem on the shop floor). I use a black methodology (McKittrick 2022) to surface the creative provisional labor (i.e., the day’s work of telling and hearing stories) involved in the local production of this storied, racialized experience. My participation in this scene as a lead group facilitator figure into the analysis, especially concerning how the activity ordinarily unfolds and the noticeable absences (and presences) when sharing ‘thorns’ or stories about troubling experiences. I selectively draw upon analytic resources from conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to describe the unfolding sequential-categorial practices that order and disorder the story. The story transcript includes Jefferson (2004) conventions to support analytic claims and represent speech delivery (see Appendix A). All group members were assigned pseudonyms. I have organized the analysis into parts of the story and distinctive problems that arise.

When reading analytical descriptions, Garfinkel (2002) prompted ethnomethodologists to consider: ‘What did we do? What did we learn? What can we do? And what can we learn?’ (p. 114–115). McKittrick (2022) encouraged scholars to pay attention to the creative practices of wavering between opacity and clarity, how black stories provide clues about how to navigate harm, and the subtle, unfinished work of investing in liberation. Attending to these prompts, alongside the analysis, can make aspects of doing being hybridly human legible in the following exchanges.

Excerpt 1

Prior to this exchange, two group members took Roses & Thorns turns. A facilitator (Ariel) then prompts group members to self-select a next turn.

Ariel’s prompt does not receive an immediate response (Lines 110–113).

Excerpt 1

This delayed response could be because of ambiguity about who of the 12 remaining members should take the next turn. The delay could also reflect potential hesitance about sharing positive (Roses) or negative (Thorns) experiences with mostly strangers. Teryn self-selects a Roses & Thorns turn and uses institutional language (‘low point,’ line 114) to pre-announce a trouble (‘thorn’) as a forthcoming discussion topic. Gail Jefferson (1988) defined trouble or trouble talk as a way of talking about the negative experiences impacting one’s life. Troubles talk includes various recurring practices, such as members’ methods for testing whether the people they are conversing with are open to discussing troubles and strategies for ending troubles talk. Teryn’s pre-announcement (‘I had a low point’) is an example of testing an audience’s receptiveness to hearing about a trouble. Pre-announcements also prompt audiences to listen closely to the nature of the trouble so they can respond appropriately (Jefferson 1988). Teryn continues her turn by initiating a story about a teaching-related activity (i.e., student evaluation) that becomes racialized: students complained about her talking about race too much (Lines 114–122).

Teryn frames the story through a teacher/student categorization, which links the students’ complaint to a potential violation related to her role as a teacher. But I know this story. I have not experienced this kind of complaint, but I know the point of the story and trust readers will too. I read Teryn’s categorial framing as embodying opacity and institutional constraints – telling a story about a racialized experience in this setting seemingly shaped and was shaped by the fact that the institutional space (shop floor) and its activities (shop talk) were intimately, though still contingently, tied to teaching. Teryn’s teacher/student categorization was taken up in multiple ways. To start, there’s an interruption – ‘what’s the class’ – by Gilia (Line 124). Jefferson’s (1988) empirical studies of troubles talk demonstrated that following the presentation of a trouble, coparticipants typically offered affiliative responses and intensely focused on each other. Conversation analytic studies have also shown that empathy is a preferred or relevant response to troubles and advice-giving is dispreferred, depending on the situation (Frankel 2017, Jefferson 1988). In this instance, Gilia’s question disattends to the inferable negative emotion (‘I have a low point’) and racial nature of the trouble conveyed in Teryn’s story. This conversational move delays a relevant empathic response and signals a potential issue with the legibility of the point of the story. In Lines 125–132, Teryn responds by providing the course name and curricular details that furnish an explanation for why it makes sense to talk about race. Described this way, Teryn’s story makes available a hearing (a prompt!) that she reads her students’ complaints as unreasonable. Thus, Teryn treats Gilia’s talk as a request for a justification for talking about race and defends herself from the implication that students’ complaints may be warranted. Gilia’s interruption also does some tacit categorization work. By asking, ‘what’s the class,’ Gilia’s talk presupposes that complaints about an instructor talking about race too much may be appropriate for some classes – likely the ones she knows about – compared to others. Gilia’s question marks Teryn’s trouble as abnormal and could be an early display that group members may not all be ‘in the same boat.’

Excerpt 2

After explaining herself, Teryn continues with her Roses & Thorns turn.

Excerpt 2

Compared to the opacity observed in Excerpt 1, this stretch of talk exhibits clarity. Teryn shares that and how she knows (‘some of the excepts I read’) students often complain their instructors are biased because of their identities as faculty of color, as black (Lines 134–144). Teryn bookends this talk with clear emotional stances (‘frustrating,’ line 133 and ‘it bummed me out,’ line 145–146), demonstrating (instructing!) the kinds of empathic responses appropriate for her story. Along with the rest of Teryn’s story, the utterance ‘I’m a African American. I can’t be anything else’ (Line 160) is hearably/legibly an account of the ordinariness of racialized experiences and an opportunity for empathy. ‘I’m a African American. I can’t be anything else’ is also indicative of ‘troubles-receptiveness’ on Teryn’s part (Jefferson 1984, 351). Through this utterance, Teryn acknowledges (accepts rather than denies) the reality of racism and its negative implications for how she is racialized (i.e., African American, a genre of humanness). Jefferson (1984) found that troubles-receptive tellings are rare. However, when a troubles-receptive telling does occur, it typically produces trouble-resistant recipients, often evidenced through laughter or other interactional misalignments (Shaw et al. 2013). Elina takes the conversational floor and treats the utterance ‘so yeah’ (Line 161) as projecting the end of Teryn’s story. Given Teryn’s troubles-receptiveness, it is possible to read Elina’s response as a display of the discomfort that typically follows a storyteller’s troubles-receptiveness, as well as evidence of her uptake of the preceding talk. Here, I draw attention to how coparticipants treat the use of the category ‘woman’ following the conclusion to Teryn’s story.

Three pieces of evidence show coparticipants treat the use of ‘woman’ as problematic in the response to Teryn’s story. First, Elina displays an orientation to the prior talk through how she delivers her talk. The faster pace and smiley voice in lines 161–163 may be evidence of issues with the preceding talk (Schegloff 2007). Second, Teryn’s delayed response and laughter (Line 32) may indicate that she treats the ‘woman’ category as improper even if it is, by virtue of their participation in WIS, a fact. Laughter such as this can be a prompt, a clue, or subtle resistance against question marks on black humanity (McKittrick 2021). Third, noticing that Teryn makes Elina’s use of woman a source of trouble, Elina repairs her response (Line 33) to ‘someone of color’ (another genre of humanness). Elina’s repair produces the ‘someone of color’ category as if it is congruent with the racialized description in Teryn’s earlier talk. However, Teryn does not endorse this repair (Line 166), further indicating that she treats both categories – ‘woman’ and ‘someone of color’ – and advice as improper responses to her story.

An alternative analysis of this exchange is that Elina and Teryn’s talk is constructing a two-part list. Jefferson (1990) observed that people recurrently treat lists as conventionally ‘three-parted’ (p. 68). Jefferson found that listing three items can mark the talk as complete, that coparticipants monitor list construction to achieve the third item (e.g., requesting a third item), and that two-part lists are accountable. When coparticipants produce a list without exhausting the ‘listables,’ the list itself may explain why the conventional third item is missing (Jefferson 1990). With common listing practices in view, an alternative analysis of lines 163–166 is that Teryn and Elina are orienting to a missing third list item (could it be what they both heard and know, but do not say?).

Coparticipants show that not just any item could complete this list. The list items display what they appear to know as observably valid membership categories. Nevertheless, these named categories delete the specificity in Teryn’s storied claim: ‘I’m a African American. I can’t be anything else.’ Since Elina’s turn offers advice instead of empathy, she also claims proper authority for her suggestion. Elina’s use of a misaligned category (‘woman’) likely illuminates institutional constraints (i.e., WIS’s shop floor for WIS’s shop talk) that delimit the range of troubles in human experience that can be discussed in the group. Sacks (1995) described attempts to background potentially troubled category relations a ‘cover.’ A cover is a practice of selectively using or foregrounding one category (e.g., ‘woman’) to manage co-membership (e.g., woman/woman) and cross-membership (e.g., black/nonblack) dynamics. According to Sacks, covers permit interactants to minimize or conceal cross-memberships and keep conversations going. Together, the conventions for listing and what appears to be a cover leads me to believe that Elina’s use of the ‘woman’ and ‘someone of color’ categories is not constructing two items of a list. Instead, I propose the two-part category list in this case is a misaligned categorization that includes a cover (i.e., ‘woman’) and a repair (i.e., ‘someone of color’) in an attempt to reestablish congruence with the interactional project underway.

Excerpt 3

In the analysis of Excerpts 1 and 2, I described members’ methods of alternating between opacity and clarity to do the procedural work of telling-hearing a story about a racialized teaching experience. When speaker transitions occur during the Roses & Thorns activity, the next speaker typically weaves an empathic response into their turn by doing a ‘second story’ (Sacks 1995, 765, see Appendix B). Sacks (1995) described a second story as a practice of tying or fitting a prior story to the current speaker’s next story. Second stories make sequences of stories aligned topically and they often do agreements with prior stories. Tying stories this way also keeps conversations going and allows speakers to introduce other relevant stories and new topics. A second story does not come after Teryn’s turn, which may provide evidence of issues with aspects of coparticipants’ rights or ability to tell similar stories, the topic (racialized experience), or whether they agree with stances and claims laid out in the story. These storytelling activities created endogenous groups, including a ‘troubles-receptive teller’ and multiple ‘troubles-resistant recipients’ who, despite attempts and repairs, do not hear/treat the story as an opportunity for empathy. Coparticipants worked through cycles of troubles-receptiveness, troubles-resistance, and failed Roses & Thorns turn transitions. These practices interfered with the continuity of the Roses & Thorns activity and extended Teryn’s turn.

After two failed turn-endings, Teryn shifts from discussing her racialized experience to discussing a concern about failing students. Teryn’s talk then initiates a new project under the teacher/student categorial frame.

Excerpt 3

There is more here to address than what I analyze. I delimit the analysis to the storytelling’s production problem (failure to achieve empathy and transition Roses & Thorns turns), aspects of doing being hybridly human (via categorization), and members methods for uncovering noticeable, consequential absences.

The first piece of evidence of the story’s production problem is the topic shift. Teryn uses the teacher category to initiate a new categorial project and thereby deliver a new topic. Through a topic shift, Teryn reformulates her trouble from a racial concern to a failure (self-deprecation) in her institutional obligations as a teacher. This shift seemingly provides a cover that can background the racial categorial frame alluded to and surfaced in Excerpts 1 and 2. Teryn’s turn constructs the ‘failing teacher’ categorization that delivers and re-emphasizes negative emotions related to a teaching experience (Lines 267, 268, 272). Together, the cover, a self-deprecating assessment (Line 268), and negative emotional displays produce a new opportunity for empathy. Although this new story-category package does not produce a next speaker as it ordinarily would at the end of a Roses & Thorns turn (gap, Line 274), it does yield an empathic response (Lines 275).

The second piece of evidence for the story’s production problem relates to how group members characterize Teryn’s experience. Gilia develops a response by proffering a candidate characterization of Teryn’s story as an experience with racism (Lines 283–290). The sequence of the categorization shift (i.e., teaching failure → racism) between Teryn’s and Gilia’s turns provides additional evidence of what Teryn’s reformulated trouble was covering. However, Gilia’s characterization of racism was delivered through advice-giving, which Teryn treats as inappropriate (Lines 319–321). As noted above, empathy is usually a relevant response to troubles and interactants recurringly treat advice-giving as dispreferred (Frankel 2017; Jefferson 1988). In this case, Gilia advises Teryn to tell her students: ‘if I was a white man teaching about white male sociology that comment never would have come up’ (Lines 283–286). Here again, a coparticipant makes a gender category relevant, but this time formulates the ‘white male’ category as part of the source of Teryn’s trouble. Gilia’s talk further develops the advice-giving sequence through additional categorizations for ‘woman’ and ‘black woman,’ at multiple points contrasting them with the ‘white male’ category (Lines, 299–305). Built this way, Gilia’s response concedes to the reality of racism, but Teryn treats this response as insufficient.

In Lines 306–321, Teryn responds to Gilia’s advice with description of the course like Excerpt 1 and includes another justification for talking about race. Teryn’s talk, thus, treats Gilia’s advice as implying she did something wrong. Teryn’s turn also treats Gilia’s talk as covering the ‘white woman’ racial-gender category, revealing the cover through a three-part list of perspectives included in the course (‘of views not just a black woman but you know being a white man or a white woman et cetera et cetera,’ lines 320–321). Teryn’s construction of this list functions to reject Gilia’s advice and points to an issue with the named categories. Teryn’s hearable/legible emphases in her listing of racial-gender categories – ‘being a white man or white woman’ – indicates that the source of the problem in Gilia’s advice is the absence of ‘white’ in her use of the ‘woman’ category. The secondary position of ‘white woman’ in the list may also indicate the delicacy of the exchange between speakers. Thus, Teryn’s talk provides a social buffer for what they treat as an inadequate analysis of the point of the story about students’ complaints, while still noticing Gilia’s gender cover.

Following the exchange with Gilia, Teryn doubles down on her attempt to end her Roses & Thorns turn (Lines 323–326). However, a new Roses & Thorns turn still does not come. Instead, a new speaker, Jenni, takes the conversational floor to offer another response to Teryn’s concern about failing students (‘And you’re really not failing your students,’ line 330). Jenni’s turn reopens and extends the conversation about Teryn’s trouble, further marking prior responses to Teryn’s trouble as inadequate. Coparticipants repeat cycles of retelling-rehearing until the facilitator eventually interrupts and redirects the conversation.

To summarize, the above storytelling activities revealed how coparticipants managed a black story and multiple opportunities for empathy. I did not assume, a priori, that coparticipants’ social- or group-defined membership categories would determine how they responded to the story. Indeed, there is more than one way to respond to a trouble, and doing so with empathy is a skillful practice (Frankel 2017). To surface those skills-in-action, I privileged coparticipants’ analyses of the story and examined how they treated each other’s responses. Further, I argued black stories and liminal perspectives, such as Teryn’s ‘thorn’, could make witnessable the exhibited features of everyday black methodologies – the mundane, provisional worldmaking that invests in and affirms black humanity, as well as local constraints on doing so. The storytelling activities featured endogenous groups—’trouble-receptive tellers’ and ‘troubles-resistant recipients’ – who were unsuccessful in getting the story about racialized complaints to be heard/treated as an opportunity for empathy. Throughout the interaction, coparticipants discursively constructed and used categories (genres of humanness) to create and undermine the possibility of empathy. Notably, as shown in Excerpt 2, coparticipants’ conduct revealed that the facts of social categories (‘African American’ and ‘women’) were insufficient resources for achieving empathy. Coparticipants mobilized and negotiated multiple categorizations to explain, transform, and instruct empathetic responses to the story. In so doing, they tailored genres of humanness and their relevance to the local circumstances. Coparticipants also produced and were attentive to noticeable absences (‘white’ from ‘white woman’) in responses to the story (Excerpt 3). These storytelling activities demonstrated that people monitor and resist making particular versions of social life (of racism, of failed teaching), moment by moment. Importantly, this analysis revealed that the way coparticipant produced and managed the black story interfered with their ability to achieve the institutional goal of empathy (the Shop Floor Problem).

Conclusion

This paper aimed to describe my approach to qualitative methods-making between black methodologies and ethnomethodology. Anchored in the intellectual histories of black qualitative traditions and qualitative approaches to studying black life, I have explored Tressie McMillan Cottom’s (2017) practical insight: ‘no one knows best the motion of the ocean than the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream’ (p. 212). Specifically, I considered what researchers might learn through turning analytic attention to the provisional, creative, mutually constitutive work of doing being a fish whose story is to swim upstream (i.e., doing being hybridly human). To do this, I brought together tenuous connections and resonating ideas from Garfinkel and McKittrick. I offered a misreading of black methodologies and ethnomethodology as co-teaching a mode of analysis for studying humanness-in-action and the endogenous genres of being human it contingently creates. Using an illustrative analysis of storytelling, I brought into view one way to apply black methodologies’/ethnomethodology’s lessons to examine the lived work of doing and undoing humanizing orders.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to EMCA4RJ for technical assistance with transcription. I am indebted to students, collaborators, and colleagues who participated in multiple data sessions and offered insights that refined my ideas and analysis of this story. A special thanks to the brilliant students in my Spring 2023 Black Methodologies course for pushing my thinking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca A. Williamson

Francesca A. Williamson, PhD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Learning Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and qualitative methodologist whose work engages the fields of Black Studies, education, ethnomethodology, and health equity and justice research. Dr. Williamson leads the HEIRS Lab, a multidisciplinary collaborative that interrogates how real-world educational, healthcare, and research practices reproduce and subvert (de)humanizing social orders. She is currently co-editing an edited volume entitled Classical Writings and Contemporary Responses in Qualitative Inquiry with Sage publications.

Notes

¹ Throughout the manuscript, I alternate between uppercase and lower case Black and black, variably referring to (1) people of African descent, (2) people racialized as Black/black, (3) ideological processes and products that place a question mark on the humanity of people of African descent and those racialized as Black/black, and (4) ways of living and being that affirm the humanity of people of African descent and those racialized as Black/black. My direct quotes from texts include the case conventions and uses of the original authors. I understand race as a fiction lived as reality (McKittrick, 2021). The production of lived reality is the focus of this manuscript, not the precise meanings, if they were possible, of the term Black/black.

² McKittrick (2021) used the term rigor to refer to laborious study that accumulates psychic, economic, and time costs. She noted, ‘It is enveloped in long lists of books, extensive notes and songs, and layers of intellectual histories and theories by black and nonblack thinkers’ (p. 35). Books, papers, and notes scattered on the floor, as it were.

³ I conducted these searches on November 18, 2023.

⁴ Here, I use ‘alternately’ in an ethnomethodological sense (Garfinkel 2002). Black methodologies are fundamentally linked to conventional methodologies because they reveal what traditional ways of knowing miss. Black methodologies do not replace Western, Eurocentric knowledge systems. Black methodologies are unsettling: ‘not replacing or occupying – Western conceptions of what it means to be human’ (McKittrick 2015, 2).

⁵ Garfinkel (1991) described respecification as ‘discovering and identifying issues of the problem of social order, and grounds [claims] in the real-world practices of their craft’ (p. 17). From my perspective, Garfinkel’s notion of ‘craft’ relates to the embodied, creative, skillful practices for doing ethnomethodological inquiry and doing being hybridly human, such as doing race, racialization, racism, et cetera.

⁶ Similarly, Lynch (1993) described a host-parasite relation between conventional science (host) and ethnomethodology (parasite). He wrote: ‘In a sense, ethnomethodology is a parasite of the host discipline of sociology, but unlike a parasite that reduces its host to a lifeless host, ethnomethodology tries to reinvigorate the lifeless renderings produced by formal analysis by describing the “life” from which they originate’ (p. 38).

⁷ Another way to say this is all knowledge is partial and limited. Black method leverages this partiality as care and to reclaim, honor, and affirm Black life and collective humanity.

⁸ Wynter (2018) wrote about co-related humanness as the relationships between genres of being human. Similarly, I position black methodologies and ethnomethodology as genres of related, though still distinct, approaches to inquiry.

Appendix A

Jeffersonian Transcription Symbols

Based on Jefferson (2004) and contemporary transcription conventions developed by Hepburn and Bolden (2017).

Table

Symbol	Description	Use
((laughter))	Transcriber comments	Double parentheses are used to note transcriber comments (e.g., laughter).
(work)	Uncertain hearing	Single parentheses are used to mark uncertain hearings for specific words.
()	Unclear speech	Single parentheses are used to make talk that is difficult to hear or understand.
[talk]	Overlapping speech	The left bracket ([) indicates the beginning and the right bracket (]) indicates the end of overlapping speech. For example, overlap between the words “to” and “oh” below: ABI: I was going [to] IYL: [oh] it’s okay
> talk <	Faster paced speech	Talk enclosed in greater than and less than symbols indicates that the speaker delivered their talk at a faster pace than before or after the symbols.
< talk >	Slower spaced speech	Talk enclosed in less than and greater than symbols indicates that the speaker delivered their talk at a slower pace than before or after the symbols.
Underline	Underline	Underlined text is used to indicate hearable emphasis on specific words.
:	Stretched sounds	A colon is used to represent stretched delivery of portions of talk (e.g., oka:y)
=	Latching	An equal sign is used to represent instances when speaker transition turns without audible silences.
ta-	Cut-off sounds	A hyphen is used to mark instances when a word is cut off in talk.
↑ or ↓	Rise and fall of pitch	Upward and downward arrows are used to indicate the rise and fall of pitch, respectively, in the delivery of talk (e.g., okay↑)
:	Slight rise in pitch from down to up	Artic:le
_:	Slight fall in pitch from up to down	Arti:cle
°talk°	Lower volume	Single degree signs represent decreased volume compared to surrounding talk. Additional degree signs can be added to represent significant decreases in volume.
(.) or (0.5)	Gaps or pauses	Single parentheses are used to indicate gaps or pauses in the talk. Gaps are silence between turn constructional units (TCUs) and are noted a separate line of transcript. Pauses are silences within TCU and are placed in line with transcribed speech. The symbol (.)is used to represent brief or micropauses. Single parentheses that include a number represent the length of silence in seconds (e.g., 0.5 seconds).
$talk$	Smiley voice	A $ is used at the start and the end of instances when a speaker sounds like they are smiling while talking.
#talk#	Creaky voice	A # is used at the start and end of instances when the speaker’s voice is creaky or cracking.
.hhh	Inbreath	Add or take away letters to indicate longer or shorter inbreaths.
hhh	Outbreath	Add or take away letters to indicate longer or shorter outbreaths.
ta(h)lk	Breathiness or laughter while talking	Often markers of mid-word laughter.

Appendix B

Example Roses & Thorns Turn Transition with a Second Story

Key aspects that tie the first and second stories are bolded.