In July, 2012, my family and I took a deep breath, said farewell to our life in New York, and moved to Austin, Texas. We are closer to my family here, and we were ready to try out life in a smaller city, at a slower pace. With the exception of my maternity leaves, this is the first time I haven't been employed since graduating from the RHSOE in 1996.
For 16 years, I have been blessed with wonderful jobs: congregational educator at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, consultant and researcher at the Experiment in Congregational Education, and, most recently, faculty positions where I had the privilege of teaching future Jewish educators - first at the Jewish Theological Seminary and then at HUC's School of Education in New York. During our first year here, I am not working and focusing on getting our family settled: choosing a school for our oldest child to start kindergarten in next fall, getting to know the neighborhoods and the (very warm, thriving, fast-growing) Jewish community.
Partly as a way to keep connected to the field and colleagues during this time of transition, I agreed serve as the newsletter editor for the Network for Research in Jewish Education. When the time came to write my editor's column for our fall newsletter, I felt a little bit awkward, since I had no professional byline to attach to my name. I had to decide how to present myself, and what voice to use. It occurred to me that I was doing that in my personal life here in Austin, as well, and that in some ways I was conceptualizing the whole experience in the same way that I had approached doing ethnography, my preferred research method, where I studied culture in action.
What follows is the column I wrote for the NRJE community. I share it with you here, realizing that many of you may also be in moments of transition, and welcome your comments.
Recently, I was revisiting a course I taught a few years back to doctoral students at the Davidson School at JTS. The course was a study of ethnography, the third in their required sequence of research methods classes. A few of the topics we addressed in class were entering the field, “insider research” and the researcher’s stance, the nature of inductive research, and being willing to follow the data and have faith that there will be a compelling narrative that emerges.
When I created the course, I was a full-time assistant professor in New York City, busy with teaching and anticipating my next research projects. In recent months, I have relocated with my family to Austin, Texas, and I am taking a temporary hiatus from working while we all transition to our new life. As I reviewed the materials from that ethnography course with my colleague Dr. Meredith Katz, who is teaching her own version of it this year, I saw those same topics through a different lens.
In my current situation, I am a preschool parent at the JCC, a New York transplant, a Texan coming “home” after a long absence, and a not-currently-employed academic and Jewish professional. When I introduce myself to people, I am usually aware of which parts of my identity I am presenting, and which I am leaving for a later conversation. When I reviewed my ethnography course materials, I couldn’t help but think that I am in the period of “entering the field,” navigating relationships and trying to manage issues of power and role as I do.
I’ve also noticed that in my daily life, I have a habit of analyzing the culture around me. My interest in cultural analysis is probably what led me to be an ethnographer in the first place; now, I realize that I am using the ethnographer’s mindset, tools, and questions to make sense of the new organizations I encounter and the larger culture in which they operate.
If a key feature of ethnographic research is the commitment to letting the narrative emerge from the data and then seeing what there is to learn from it, I will try to heed my own advice to be patient as I explore professional opportunities. In the meantime, I will try not to compulsively take notes in the JCC parking lot.