Paper short abstract:

William James called for more analytic weight to be given to the ephemeral, the indefinite and the irregular. Drawing on studies from education, disability and my own work, this paper explores why this matters at the policy edge in healthcare.

Paper long abstract:

Auto-ethnography has always lacked academic and policy credibility. The criticisms are familiar enough: practitioners are seen as self-regarding, lacking in methodological rigour, guilt-ridden, theoretically primitive.

The difficulties of practising it may have intensified recently, particularly in policy science and applied anthropology: namely the rise of high-speed, drive-by ethnographies, the deference to multidisciplinary team work, and demands for 'socially relevant knowledge'. Increasingly journals subscribe to a trendy style of power-writing, requiring authors write in the active voice only, and use Heminway-esque sentences - criteria that might disqualify some of the best works in the English language.

While conventional social science methods are often good at what they do, this paper argues that they're poorly adapted to studying the ephemeral, the indefinite, the irregular. William James, for example, gave the hopes, fears and fantasies that often disappear in policy science the same analytic weight as the fixed. Some of the most illuminating studies relating private lives to public issues have come from ethnographers' intensive analysis over time of their complex engagement with others.

Drawing on studies such as Harry Wolcott's tale of a 'Sneaky Kid', Gelya Frank's cultural biography of Diane de Vries, 'Venus-on-Wheels', and my own work, I want to show why these intangibles matter at the policty edge, and what policy-makers might gain from our search for perspective by incongruity. Only then can understanding move beyond common sense in a way that is relational and humanitarian.