Composition Forum 49, Summer 2022
http://compositionforum.com/issue/49/

Understanding Multilingual Migrant Writers in Disaster Recovery through Discourse-Based Interviews

Soyeon Lee

Abstract: In this article, I describe the challenges I encountered and the process I navigated in conducting discourse-based interviews (DBIs) with multilingual transnational participants in disaster recovery in the context of community-based research. Attending to the messiness and complexity of community-based research in the aftermath of human-induced climate change disasters, I created a revised form of the DBI by adding phenomenological and ecological approaches. In global contexts, transnational or language minority writers in community-based contexts often have limited rhetorical choices. By using two case studies from my larger datasets, and adapting DBI procedures with contemporary methodology in mind, I suggest how researchers can be more culturally sensitive to affective dimensions around interview situations and more ethically informed when they interview writers from marginalized communities and in post-traumatic situations.

Introduction

Scholars and teachers in the field of rhetoric and composition have used discourse-based interviews (DBIs) to illuminate the rhetorical strategies of writers in academic and non-academic contexts. DBIs can reveal the writers’ rhetorical performance in making their discursive decisions with texts, and this method is recognized as a strategy that can promote “meta-reflective capacities” and “genre-based sources” of rhetorical judgements (Lancaster 120) in articulating writers’ prior experiences and discerning their rhetorical divergences across writing contexts. In their 1982 research article, Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami explained, “we have limited information about the variety of tasks adult, non-professional writers must perform and still less information about the types of stylistic and substantive choices writers make or the reasons that govern a writer’s choosing one alternative in preference to another” (202). Paying attention to the consequences of writing, they emphasized that while “school-sponsored writing” and non-academic writing have “apparent” similarities, non-academic writing has differences in that it has “immediate economic as well as personal consequences” (202). Although researching writing outside of academia has been increasingly engaged in the fields of composition studies and technical and professional writing, writers’ rhetorical choices in community-based contexts pressured by climate change need more attention—especially when those contexts include multilingual and migrant writers.

Community-based research entails unique challenges in terms of methodology, methods, and ethical considerations. In this article, I describe the challenges I encountered and the process I navigated in conducting DBIs with participants in the context of community-based research. As many scholars argue (Grabill; Walton et al.), in the rhetorical context of community-based research, “messiness is not (necessarily) a sign of improper rigor or a poorly designed study” (62). For example, Rebecca Walton, Maggie Zraly, and Jean Pierre Mugengana explain that the strengths of community-based research such as “being well suited to pursuing empowerment and contextualized understanding” may lead to messiness including being “unpredictable, mutable, contingent, serendipitous, complex, and challenging” (45). Attending to this “messiness” of community-based research, I explicitly described challenges arising throughout the research process. More practically, embracing the complexity coming from community-based research study, I created a revised form of the DBI by adding an extended and culturally sensitive approach to the DBI. While empowering marginalized communities, I rhetorically adopted the DBI method to better serve the participants, respond to the complexity of research contexts, and meet the research goal, from which my participants can benefit from the study.

In this article, I reflect on my experiences in engaging DBIs in my one-and-a-half-year ethnographic community-based research{1} in the aftermath of a disaster and examine the experienced scope and complexity of DBIs in these community-based research contexts. I first describe my positionality in the research study and then explain my revised DBI method in a holistic view along with other methods I adopted. To fully elaborate this revision, I will discuss how I extended the discourse-based interview method, what changes this extension created, and how I as a researcher negotiated the discourse-based interview method to better explore disaster-stricken multilingual writers in transnational contexts, and my role as a researcher to prioritize participants’ rights to their own stories in post-disaster contexts. Finally, I will provide methodological implications for researchers, scholars, and teachers in composition studies and other relevant fields.

Specifically, by using two case studies from my larger datasets, I capture the complexity of post-disaster research contexts, my adaptation of the DBIs, and the implications of this adaptation. I argue that the complexity of community-based disaster research provokes ethical questions that were not explicitly elaborated in the traditional DBI method. As a strategy to address this complexity and messiness, I used phenomenological (Seidman) and ecological approaches (Cooper; Dobrin and Weisser; Jordan) to DBIs to address this specificity and emerging dilemmas in doing DBIs in disaster literacy research.

Research Design and Contexts

The research context in which I conducted interviews including DBIs was different from Odell, Goswami, and Anne Herrington’s more typical setting. I acknowledge that in a relatively stable research site where typical rhetorical activities occur, DBIs can help writers be more rhetorically conscious of what languages and resources they have leveraged, what other choices they originally had, and how they came to arrive at a particular option among other generic conventions and writing practices. However, as will be explained with examples, the entanglements of the lived experiences of the participants, in which all material aspects including social stigma, language ideologies, emotion, and affect are accumulated and interrelated with each other often do not align with traditional DBIs. Disaster-stricken writers’ shifting needs and physical and emotional status interacting with material environments needed to be attended to by modifying the original method.

My research study was conducted in response to an unprecedented human-induced natural disaster. In August 2017, the Houston, Texas, metropolitan area was hit by heavy rainfall associated with the devasting Hurricane Harvey. The associated flooding, often labeled a five-hundred-year flood, and the ensuing dam release executed by the US Army Corps of Engineers resulted in more than 40,000 victims (Blake and Zelinsky 9) and damage to the physical, emotional, and economic status of community members, particularly to those who lived in the neighborhood close to dams. Although the water receded, many survivors had to be relocated for six months up or even more than two years until they rehabilitated their homes.

As many scholars note, the impacts of natural disasters and floods more disproportionately affect the lives of newly arrived migrants and economically modest residents. Multilingual migrants have unique challenges in navigating increasing human-induced climate disasters. Marginalized communities, particularly those who use minority languages, have encountered barriers in accessing information, social networks, and financial assistance in the aftermath of a disaster (Jafry et al.; Jerolleman). In the fields of rhetoric and composition, the interconnections of environmental crises and rhetorical activities in community settings have been increasingly studied. Transnational approaches to risk communication at a global scale have expanded on justice-oriented efforts in the field of technical communication (Ding; Frost; Hopton and Walton). For example, in her 2009 article, Huiling Ding examines alternative risk communication employed by Chinese publics in the aftermath of SARS: “Blurring the line between workplace and private life, they empower professional communicators with the means to circumvent institutional control of risk information while exposing them to personal consequences if they choose to speak about risks as unauthorized insiders” (347). However, the experiences of multilingual transnational community members and workers have been understudied in climate justice-related technical communication. Joining justice-oriented scholarship on marginalized communities in climate change, I aimed to examine how participants navigated disaster recovery processes and tensions with institutional literacies and automatized bureaucratic systems. However, the tensions, conflicts, and discordances with disaster-governing bureaucracy often necessitated a new perspective of agency. Through the lenses of environmental justice and ecological approaches to language and writing, I investigated networked and distributed literacies and rhetorics of multilingual migrants.

During the spring semester of 2019, I did fieldwork in the communities located in Houston neighborhood areas that were impacted by the floods and dam releases in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Actively integrating the environmental disaster as a nonhuman factor on migrants’ literacies and communicative performance, I intended to offer empirical insights to the fields of literacy education, rhetoric and composition, and technical and professional writing. Indeed, I was a resident of the neighborhood severely damaged by this flood and dam releases, although I was not directly affected by the flood, and I volunteered to offer my house as a shelter for immigrant neighbors. Based on my initial observation in my neighborhood and pilot fieldwork, I started to investigate the lived experience and literacies of multilingual transnational migrants, who are often considered language minorities.{2} In this research, I adopted a series of three interviews, that is, literacy history interviews, discourse-based interviews, and reflection-based interviews, as a modified form of Irving Seidman’s three-part series of “in-depth, phenomenologically based [interviews]” (14), to investigate multilingual migrants’ literacies and rhetorics in the aftermath of an unprecedented disaster.

Methods

To explore the empirical findings grounded in the guiding questions, I used a wide range of ethnographic methods including semi-structured interviews, neighborhood site visits, collecting writing artifacts (e.g., memos, journal entries, charts, photos, social media postings, and written conversations via mobile instant messaging), and participatory observations (e.g., observations of community center-based public events, nonprofit organization-based community meetings, disaster-preparedness information events, ethnicity- or faith-based regular meetings relevant to disaster recovery, and occasional social gathering upon participants’ consent). I recruited thirty multilingual-transnational participants consisting of twenty survivors and ten community organizers who worked as first responders in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and the ensuing floods. I recorded interviews for more than eighty hours. In addition, I observed more than six literacy events, approximately fifteen hours in total. Four out of twenty participants allowed videorecording.

Through these methods, I have learned about participants’ experiences and the role of literacy and other semiotic resources across languages, modalities, and repertoires, in their recovery process after Hurricane Harvey, hoping to empower my participants who come from disenfranchised communities and to pursue social and environmental justice with them. The multilingual migrants I worked with spoke mostly Korean, and these participants had varied age ranges, educational backgrounds, migration histories, and socioeconomic statuses. Despite differences across individuals, the participants have common experiences as language minorities. In their interviews and my observations, my participants often suggested that they belonged to marginalized communities with little political power in US-based monolingual paradigms and shared everyday encounters with Eurowestern norms that led to their self-perceptions of ethnically, racially, and linguistically minoritized identity development.

Researcher Positionality

Overall, my positionality in research sites is complex. As a first-generation multilingual migrant who spoke the same language and belonged to Korean-American immigrant communities in the same neighborhoods, I thought I had an advantage in accessing potential participants and noticing cues of emerging significant patterns. Mostly, as an insider, I have gained a more nuanced understanding of participants’ literate activities with an emic perspective, which helped me access their languages and cultural differences. However, I was aware of how I as a researcher from the university might be viewed in the traditional ethnographic researcher/participants hierarchy and I came to realize how my insider position might not guarantee access. Indeed, the researcher’s insider status does not ensure “instant access to informants and interview subjects” (Kusow 594). My apparent insider position and a non-white insider status seemed to complicate the relationships with participants and even disrupted them due to my position as a potential “suspicious insider” status (Kusow 595). For instance, when I approached the research site and shared a copy of the recruitment flyer at the community center-based flood recovery event, some respondents shrugged away or shared uncomfortable reactions. These negative reactions were understandable. At the time of the start of the study, only one year had passed since the flood and a number of survivors were still displaced, reconstructing their houses and/or waiting for the results of requests for financial assistance. The uncertainty and unpredictability observed in disaster recovery processes administered by government agencies aggravated their anxieties and irritations. Indeed, I knew that many of the survivors had lived in temporary housing and suffered from financial, physical, and emotional distress, and based on pilot interviews and observations, I was able to understand that they might have irritation due to my presence as a researcher and doubts about the purpose of the research study I explained.

Culturally specific factors also played a role in the interactions between participants and me. My participants were mostly aged and more experienced in immigrant lives. Some senior survivor participants and community worker participants regarded my status as a woman international graduate student who was less experienced in living in America at that time of the interview as more unstable and premature than theirs. Thus, my presumed insider status was often dismantled, and I realized that there was no static divide between the insider status and the outsider status. As Abdi M. Kusow demonstrates, the insider/outsider boundary is not pre-determined by the researcher’s backgrounds, but is situational and socially constructed (592).

Observations

To situate my three-part interviews in their lives and triangulate interview data with other materials, I documented my observations by using ethnographic field notes after observing participants in occasional social gatherings and Harvey-related meetings in community literacy sites, including local community centers and faith-based social events. On some Thursday or Friday evenings, I came to be part of some participants’ faith-based gathering. In many cases, I was part of their literacy events. Mostly, I did not record their words and interactions with others during these events. If I needed to document their words, I memorized them or quickly captured them temporarily in a notebook. My participants knew that I was there as a researcher. However, once I started taking notes, I sensed that some tension arose because they seemed to filter their words, looking for the ones that they thought would be the right answer to my question. In the same way that Odell and Goswami endeavored not to be viewed as English teachers who have correct answers (204), I wanted my presence to be perceived as participatory, rather than authoritative. To reduce this tension, I stopped using paper and pencils and tried to be part of the informal helpers or participants in the events. Mobile outreach events associated with the Harvey Recovery Survey, which occurred at the Korean Community Center based on self-sponsored requests for outreach help from the City of Houston, provided one of the major observation sites and helped me triangulate interview data including literacy history interviews, discourse-based interviews, and reflection-based interviews, across sites and modalities (speech activities, written documents, and interview data). I further collected participants’ artifacts, application materials, to-do lists, photos, writings, and letters prepared for insurance companies, federal agencies, municipal agencies, and non-profit agencies. While collecting their texts, I also came to know government agency-based forms including Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) application forms, and survey forms for the Harvey Homeowner Assistance Program (HoAP) that required the participants to react to exigencies in constrained timeframes and long-term email exchanges with officials at FEMA and the Small Business Administration (SBA).

Discourse-Based Interviews in Post-Disaster Contexts

Considering these disaster-specific contexts and complexity of community-based research, the discourse-based interview methods are complicated, extended, and adapted in my research. To better respond to post-traumatic contexts, I used materialist perspectives to investigate multilingual migrants’ writing in emergencies. These materialist perspectives were employed not only in interpreting datasets but also in constructing relationships with participants and conducting interviews including discourse-based interviews. I was helped by theoretical discussions on methodologies such as posthumanist and new materialist perspectives (Barad; Braidotti; Bennett; Coole and Frost) and the notions of “affective attunements” (McCosker 385). These notions helped me reflect on what Nancy H. Hornberger calls “methodologically rich points,” that is, “those times when researchers learn that their assumptions about the way research works and the conceptual tools they have for doing research are inadequate to understand the worlds they are researching” (102), in which researchers transform methodological challenges to in-depth innovative and reflective moments and spaces.

For doing interviews, I took well-informed approaches toward participants and carefully developed a rapport with them, as the interview process might evoke and repeat traumatic or unpleasant experiences. Given the specificity of disaster studies, I was more judicious about my words, tones, and body gestures during the interviews. Trauma can be described as any internal and external event that can bring “an emotional response to the disruption that manifests in different ways and may continue long after the crisis has ended” (Clinnin 130). As a relevant term, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is indicated “by experiencing and repeating a traumatic event, avoiding situations reminiscent of that event, and predisposition to changes, including hyperarousal and reactivity following the event” (Prohaska 142). Although this definition of PTSD relies on the US Department of Veterans Affairs (Clinnin; Grant), PTSD can be relatable to people who did experience trauma or similar situations in natural disaster-impacted contexts, given that disasters often bring long-term impacts on survivors’ physical and emotional statuses.

Embedding discourse-based interviews in the aftermath of a post-traumatic disaster in Seidman’s three-part interview series structure is part of my strategy to carefully approach participants in this difficult situation. I asked participants semi-structured questions over long-term timeframes, and their involvement in consequent interviews are based upon their preference and willingness: literacy history interview, discourse-based interview I, and reflection interview (discourse-based interview II). The first interview was focused on the life histories and experiences prior to the disaster while the second interview was focused on their textual and visual artifacts. I carefully asked participants to send photos or texts or any types of writing via email or screenshot at the end of the first interview. The questions for DBIs were shaped after collecting the participants’ texts. Often, their texts were photos, photo journals on blog posts, emails, business letters for communication with government agencies, charts, tables, and writings through social media. The three-part interview series are as follow (see Table 1).

Table 1. Interview structures modified from Seidman’s three-part interview series

Interview Questions for Adult Writers in Transnational Families
Interview I (Literacy History Interview)	Interview II (Details of Experiences/Discourse-based Interview I)	Interview III (Reflection/ Discourse-based Interview II)
How did you choose to live in this neighborhood? What kind of languages do you use? What kind of writing activities have you been involved in prior to Hurricane Harvey? How long have you lived in the area? Can you describe how you came to the US?	How would you describe your experience during or in the aftermath of Harvey? How was your family or your life affected by Harvey? How would you describe the role of your communities you are involved in the aftermath of Harvey? How would you describe the role of your language and literacy skills in the aftermath of Harvey? How did you communicate with others who were affected by Harvey? What technologies and tools did you use in communicating with others in the aftermath of Harvey?	Is there anything you would like to add in the previous interviews? In the previous interviews, you mentioned…. Can you elaborate a little bit more about that? Is there anything I missed to ask you in the previous interviews?
Phase I: Literacy history interviews are important in understanding participants’ language ideologies and prior experiences before the disaster.	Phase II: Discourse-based interviews are conducted in this phase if textual artifacts are collected.	Phase III: Reflection interviews can include discourse-based interview II questions, as an extension of the first discourse-based interview.

In his phenomenological interview method, Seidman identifies four themes: (1) “the temporal and transitory nature of human experience;” (2) “subjective understanding” of experiences; (3) “lived experience as the foundation of ‘phenomena;’” and (4) “the emphasis on meaning and meaning in context” (17-19). Combining these themes from phenomenological interviewing with discourse-based interviewing, I selected those who completed the first interview and shared their textual artifacts as group interview participants and invited them to the phase II and III interviews. While the first interview aimed to trace their previous life history and literate trajectory before the disaster hit, in the second interview, I included the questions about modalities and technologies as part of discourse-based interview questions in order to investigate whether they were aware of their rhetorical choices of modalities and technologies and how their writing varied according to different technological environments.

In my study, I defined tacit knowledge as a “communicative repertoire” (Rymes; Zentz) deployed across languages, registers, and contexts, which are often fluid and dynamic across borders with varied self-awareness. As many scholars point out, this understanding disrupts structuralist models of languages in which languages are separately contained. Emphasizing the difference between “languages” and “communicative resources,” Lauren Zentz explains, “An exploration into the multitude of ways of looking at language and situating communicative incidents within people’s past and current biographies and future desires, and within scales of social, political and educational context and opportunity, begs for an ethnographic approach” (70). I find this concept useful in understanding writers’ activities in community-based contexts.

Extending this notion, I stress that communicative repertoires not only operated holistically with writers’ conscious or unconscious awareness but also were affected by the entanglements in which the writer, intended audience, diverse material factors such as sensorial components (e.g., molds, smell, air, and submerged homes) and sociomaterial aspects (e.g., time constraints and lack of the Internet access) are interrelated. These entanglements affected their rhetorical choices and decisions more powerfully than their discursive judgement and reasoning in disaster recovery-specific rhetorical contexts. Zentz aptly notes that the levels of awareness vary in deploying communicative repertoires (71), and building on this notion, I emphasize that this variation on the level of awareness is interlocked with material and affective factors. This material and ecological component of the entangled environment in which the writer is situated resulted in ambiguity and the ensuing difficulties in reasoning the process and rationale of their specific rhetorical choices. In that sense, I adopted the notion of communicative repertoire with a more ecological and material orientation to describing writers’ tacit knowledge. To leverage specific resources is often contingent on or attuned to (Rickert; Lorimer Leonard) dynamic interactions among writers, audiences and diverse social, historical, political, sensorial, ecological, and material factors, and this complex interaction often creates challenges in the researcher’s understanding of alternative rhetorical choices and the writer’s retrospective reasoning of their decision-making processes.

During each interview session, I adopted literacy history interview methods (Vieira). In the first interview, participants were asked about their lived migration history and their experiences in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. In the second and third interviews, I asked more specific reflexive questions on their responses and conducted discourse-based interviews based on the collected texts and artifacts. Mostly, in the second interview, they allowed me to turn on a video recorder along with a digital audio recorder. I tried to capture participants’ paralinguistic signs. If participants were not comfortable with audio recording or video recording, I adopted a note-taking method with their permission.

As explained, during this serial interview process, I became to realize that this interview series added complexities to the traditional DBIs. These complexities were related to the multimodal and multilingual aspects of textual artifacts and trauma-relatedness of the collected texts. I helped writers to broaden their understanding of what is meant by texts and textual engagement. Their writings in the aftermath of the disaster were not typically repeated forms in many cases. In this context, mostly, the textual forms the participants encountered were new or unfamiliar genres to navigate. In what follows, I will discuss the challenges or “methodologically rich points” (Hornberger 102) I experienced in conducting this interview and the strategies I adopted in response to the differences. I will use two cases from a larger data set because those two cases evidence how I complicated the DBI in response to the complexity of post-disaster research contexts and linguistically minoritized participants in multilingual and transnational settings.

Challenges and Adaptations

One of the challenges that arose in the middle of the interview was that many participants reported that they did not see themselves as writers. When asked about their writing experiences during the aftermath of Harvey, many of my participants reported that they do not write much. Interestingly, some participants reported that they had no “writing” in their life either prior to the disaster or in the disaster recovery context, when I carefully asked them to share any written materials from that period. They sometimes even suggested fraught reactions to my request. For participants, writings and reflections or even quick recalling could have been their lowest priority due to the more urgent literate tasks they needed to complete and financial burdens they needed to handle. For example, Hajun{3}, a self-identified male participant in the age range of 45-54, responded to my request for textual artifacts: “You know, I am not a writer” (first interview, July 12, 2019). His first interview suggests that his everyday writing across different devices in his workplace and real-life setting is not “writing.” This perception gap offers a snapshot in which people connect writing to something about an individual who does creative or aesthetic work.

For most of my participants, writing activities were performed mostly on mobile devices, due to their displaced situation and lack of reliable Internet access at home. This situation led them to consider their writing transactional and functional, and thus their activities around those texts were not real “writing.” To have enough conversations what textual and communicative artifacts took time. Often, I perceived their “records” and “documents” as genre (Schryer). However, when Hajun and other participants shared their laptop screens and relevant file folders to explain their literate processes after experiencing the floods, I started noticing emerging patterns in which they had developed systemic ways to replicate, store, categorize, organize, and archive application-related materials, which could be equivalent to what Stacey Pigg et al. refer to as activities laden with “transactional value” or as “coordination” defined as “the role texts play in bringing people and organizations into alignment” (101). In many cases, my participants preserved application materials and documents they submitted to agencies with their own rhetorical agency.

Hajun’s Case: Shifting and Unstable Rhetorical Ecologies

The instability of multimedia data from rapidly changing social media ecologies and application infrastructures added complexity to the DBIs. While my participants did not see their video-recordings, photos, and journal posts on digital platforms as writing in that they were not creative things or that they were not alphabetically written, I took time to co-construct artifact collections by discussing what materials can be included as texts for discourse-based interviews and if alternative rhetorical choices could have been made. In this sense, in many cases in my study, alternative questions were not about replacing certain words or phrases with others. Rather, following Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s approach (223), those questions were about the modality they have chosen: “In your previous interview, you chose X application to write this information. You might have chosen Y or Z applications or other ways to write this information. Can you elaborate on that?” I did not literally follow the same words shown above but generally used this rhetorical structure in creating questions. For example, when asked about how he communicated with others who were affected by Harvey, Hajun offered snapshots of discrete applications ranging from US-based mainstream platforms to ethnicity-based social media platforms, including Facebook, SMS (Short Message Service), Whatsapp, and KakaoTalk (an instant messaging application widely used in Korea). His media use reflected his social networks in his professional workplace, which is culturally diverse as his colleagues came from Venezuela, Columbia, Chile, and other countries according to his interview, and reflected his everyday social writing practices with his co-nationals in the US and left-behind family in Korea. Hajun explained his different awareness and media ideologies of each platform:

I don’t know much about other people, but here [in my workplace] we use Whatsapp. I think people in my office are mostly immigrants, so maybe that’s why people use Whatsapp. … I use Whatsapp with my current colleagues or former colleagues and KaTalk [the abbreviated term of KakaoTalk] with Koreans. (first interview, April 4, 2019)

His media ideologies were based on material realities and changing digital technologies. Hajun’s case shows a telling example of media convergence, which refers to the observed reality in which users of smartphones are able to “simultaneously engage in different media forms” (Yoon 228). In the second interview, in response to my question about alternative rhetorical choices in selecting tools, he compared the message on Whatsapp to his colleague and different messages on KakaoTalk. While the traditional DBIs focused on encouraging writers to consider alternative lexical or syntactical choices, the DBI questions I invented included questions about modality choices, which led to important questions that could illuminate their literate ecologies that affected their writing in the disaster recovery context. Moving beyond the traditional concept of writing, I devised questions that asked about their choices among modalities.

This shifting between modalities related to the characteristics of writing in disaster recovery contexts is divergent from writers with whom Odell, Goswami, and Herrington worked. Unlike writers in academic settings or in business writing contexts, my participants often faced uncertain situations due to changing policies and programs and needed to navigate modalities, genres, and new writing contexts. Considering this fluid situation, questions about their tacit and contextual knowledge often aimed to compare their technological and modality choice in communicating to their previous writing practices choice in everyday situations prior to the disaster. To do this, the first literacy history interview was considered very important to understand what other rhetorical modality choices they had. As demonstrated, Hajun compared his writing on Whatsapp to his other writings on KakaoTalk and suggested that this technological choice reflected his previous practice and media awareness in converged media ecologies.

In response to this materially constrained context, my strategy was to bring forth the literacy interview (first interview) and understand participants’ prior experiences. I had to consider material and environmental factors that were not often controllable, which may have affected interactions between their rhetorical agency and their discursive choices. As demonstrated in Hajun’s case, post-disaster recovery brings unexpected and shifting writing contexts. Their rhetorical choices often reflected the interactions between material environments and their prior experiences. That choice was not contingent on their rhetorical agency in a traditional sense, which is often reason-based and less attentive to material environments. My guiding framework drawn from posthumanist and materialist approaches to literacy and language, which “reconfigure human agency as a meshwork of relationships between the human and the nonhuman” (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. 12) and helped me revise traditional DBI questions.

Minji’s Case: Ethical Dilemmas and Embodied Intersubjectivity

In revising the DBIs, ethical dilemmas and embodied intersubjectivity experiences also guided me to consider interactive, emotional, and dynamic interactions among the researcher, the participant, and other material factors. At the time of the research, one year had passed since the floods hit the area. I often asked myself if this research was started too early or too late. In some cases, my participants said it was too late to share their writing as they had already changed or updated their phones and had nothing to share with me. On the contrary, some participants said that it was too early to say or share anything. While nodding to these divided reactions, I carefully started asking about how language minority survivors navigated intricate recovery processes and understood their formal and informal textual engagement in this recovery process. My participants were in the middle of a very slow process in the wake of the disaster, and “Harvey” was one of the words that people were not comfortable using.

Minji, a female Korean-speaking migrant who had lived in the US for 13 years at the time of the interview, was one of the participants severely affected by Hurricane Harvey. After her one-story home was submerged under floodwater and sewage for about two weeks after the reservoir release a year before the time of the interview, Minji’s family had temporarily lived in her uncle-in-law’s house and then moved into a rented apartment. At the time of the study, although media coverage and governmental support had started to dwindle after one year passed, my participants were still in stressful situations physically and emotionally. After I ordered coffee and sat at the table with Minji at a coffee house for the first interview, I noticed her eyes becoming red and watery: “While struggling for self-control, she said, ‘I’m like this. I’m likely to be bothered by petty things like this, but feel calm about big things. I know it is funny’” (field notes, September 19, 2018). I imagined that she had envisioned talking about the flood and even that mere thought brought a burst of feeling and emotion. At that moment, my audio recorder was not yet started, and I did not ask her a question or talk to her. For a while, I simply nodded and sat in silence instead of asking if it was okay to turn on the recorder, which was the usual next step in my research interview. Although I did not catch the first part of her interview on my audio recorder, her unexpected affective responses and words were recorded in my field notes. In retrospect, this moment is similar to what Z. Fareen Parvez called “revelatory moments” (457) in which the emotions of the researcher and the informant are part of the “corporeal and embodied” process (458). Her burst of feeling offered me an important moment that guided my interview questions and directed me to attend to the affective dimension that those interview questions might bring. It is because this emotional reaction suggested that her recovery was not just a one-shot process from a disaster, but a reprocessing of her holistic embodied experiences, complicated sense of place, and identity constructions.

Minji shared one of the texts she preserved, which was an inquiry email, written to a government official at SBA. In her email, Minji writes, “I am not good at English, email communication is more easy for me. If you are fine, please email me. If not I will try by phone. Min [her husband’s name].” In this inquiry email, she notes that she prefers written communication as she can navigate materials with more flexibility and has room for extra time and space compared to verbal communication, which requires spontaneous and extemporaneous responses. At the end of her email, she adds her husband’s name “Min.” As DBI questions, I asked: “How did you come to use your husband’s name ‘Min’ instead of using your own name ‘Minji’? What would have been possible if you choose your name as you usually do in your other emails?” She said,

I take care of all of the things. Utility and electricity bills are all mine. I do all the details. My kids’ dad [her husband{4}] often goes on business trips, and there’s something he can’t be trusted, and he always says, “I’m not curious about those bills, no matter what they are.” I do everything under his name because I’m annoyed. I do everything regarding electricity and the Internet bills. (second interview, May 2, 2019).

She explained that she was representing her husband on written documents as her husband was the main applicant, although it was she who maintained and operated household tasks. At face value, it seems that she acknowledges in this email her lack of English proficiency by revealing the level of her ability to use English. Although she seemingly undervalues her communicative repertoire, her response seemed to reflect that she was aware of the modality, bureaucratic writing contexts, and her right to speaking her preference, as she articulated her agency by attempting to reposition herself not as a mere recipient in a one-direction communication, but as an equal interlocutor. By adding her husband’s name and the sentence indicating her preferred mode of communication, she attempted to navigate bureaucratic application systems and cultivate a reciprocal meaning-making process.

Rather than focusing on lexical or grammatical choices through US-based Standard English norms and epistemes, I paid attention to how Minji negotiated her rhetorical agency in navigating high stakes writing activities that are likely to result in significant economic consequences, through ecological approaches to methodologies and methods. As a strategy to attend not only to the participants’ texts but also to their multifaceted emotional and affective dimensions, I tried to prioritize the meaning-making process of the participant and its uncertainty and fuzziness.

This finding aligns with the existing discussions on gender and disaster recovery that point out that women “are likely to put the needs of others before theirs in the aftermath of disasters” (Prohaska 141). Many scholars indicate that females tend to have more mental distress in the aftermath of disasters than men and be overburdened by pre- and post-disaster obligations, as they “put the family needs before their own” such as “the requirements of childcare” (Fothergill 42–44). Minji’s embodied experiences, bodily, material, and corporeal reactions urged me to transform the DBIs to be more focused on texts, affect, distress, and intersubjective process. Facing ethical dilemmas, I embraced them in discourse-based interviews with populations with post-traumatic distress and carefully used that methodological messiness to transform the DBIs into a more ethical process that attends to the entire entanglement around texts beyond the interviewer/interviewee binary or traditional model of three parts (interviewer, interviewee, and text).

In retrospect, this strategy was similar to what Michael Polanyi calls “indwelling” (17). Citing German philosopher Lipps, Polanyi describes indwelling as a way of “tacit knowing” (17), which is close to empathy, in which the person entered into the other’s “world” and “dwell in the creator’s mind” (17). If I asked more specific questions about her rhetorical choices, it might trigger more anxiety and distress that were already experienced in the email exchanges with the SBA official. It should be noted that this question could provoke intense encounters, affective moments, and the ensuing questions about research ethics.

Furthermore, I was aware of cultural differences in interview procedures in doing discourse-based interviews. My participants including Minji might feel the emerging emotional fear of “losing face” when asked about their specific rhetorical choices and attribute questions about their writing to self-critiquing language competency, rather than to unequal language access and a lack of culturally responsive resources. Upon the participants’ preferences, I conducted group interviews as an alternative option for discourse-based interviews if they felt more comfortable in discussing their writing that occurred in the FEMA disaster assistance application process with other participants, such as church group members at events or their co-national neighbors, to provide the participants with “familiar, natural contexts” (Odell et al. 227). Indeed, the traditional DBI interview contexts that discuss specific options (i.e., “do[ing] Y or Z rather than X” (223), to borrow Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s words) might not be suitable for the researcher to examine language minority participants’ rhetorical decisions because participants from non-US-based cultures or non-English speaking countries might be unable to consider diverse rhetorical choices and conventions or might be unwilling to discuss difficulties. To better elicit information from language minority participants who applied for the FEMA disaster assistance or SBA low-interest disaster loans, I asked participants in a group setting, using “your family,” “your couple,” or “your group” instead of “you.” For example, “Your family did X while your family did Y in other sections in the form. Could you tell me a bit about why your family preferred doing Y?”

This group interview might not be ideal in obtaining participant’s individual rhetorical choices, but was still useful for me to help participants feel more comfortable and talk about their challenges in natural settings. For example, often, a female participant asked me to interview with her in a group setting, with her spouse, as they applied to government-led programs or wrote an email together on behalf of their spouse and felt unclear whose decision was finally reflected in the FEMA disaster assistance or SBA disaster loan application processes. When they were asked about specific rhetorical choices, such as my questions about checking or unchecking a question about their hardship (e.g., lack of access to food), they seemed to feel more comfortable when they were in group settings, as they could help each other recall their rhetorical contexts and better support their rationales behind their choices, or explain why there were no choices other than their original choice.

Discussion and Implications

As shown above, ecological approaches to DBIs valorize human and nonhuman components and their complex entanglements. This approach centers on the ethicality of the research process and pays critical attention not only to mutual relationships between the researcher and the participant but also humans and nonhumans such as material and environmental factors, participants’ emotion, affect, and cultural differences. Insights and experiences I gained through the three-part interview series that included discourse-based interviews guided me to devise ecological approaches to DBIs as a way of engaging more trauma-informed, intersubjective, culturally responsive approaches in conducting DBIs. This revision suggests that in doing interviews we can move from the extractive approach, which is based on monolingual Western normative and reason-based rhetorical agency to a more transformative approach to the traditional DBI, which is more attentive to participants’ material conditions, prior lived experiences such as experiences related to their language ideologies, and affective dimensions. Although my research study was not designed as action research, this transformative approach to DBIs in community-based research might help community members, community workers, and government officials to find better ways to implement and support writing processes in post-disaster contexts in the future. Indeed, the DBI method emphasized the importance of ethical and eclectic approaches to developing methodologies and methods in composition studies by suggesting “a repertoire of research strategies” (Odell et al. 235).

My reflections on the methodological revision I adopted in doing DBIs offer implications for researchers and scholars that it is important to acknowledge vulnerability and socially situated and shifting positionality of the researcher in the intersubjective process with the participant, so that the researcher can better embrace and ethically incorporate what Parvez calls the “emotional vulnerabilities” of the informants (455) of participants in doing interviews. Scholars who discuss ethnographic methods recently started paying more attention to emotion and affect in “achieving ethnographic depth, or thick description” (456). This attention to affect, emotion, and visceral experience can lead to “genuine understanding” (458) of the writing practices of the participants. Often, I intentionally prioritized the participants’ emotion and affective layers and attempted to understand emotions as “corporeal and embodied” (458) reactions, instead of offering alternative rhetorical choices and forcing them to operate discursive self-judgements.

As Seidman demonstrates:

[I]nterviewers are a part of the interviewing picture…. They ask questions, respond to the participants, and at times even share their own experiences. Moreover, interviewers work with the material, select from it, interpret, and analyze it. Though they may be disciplined and dedicated to keeping the interviews as the participants’ meaning-making process, interviewers are also a part of that process. (26)

Phenomenological and ecological approaches to DBIs in the disaster recovery contexts in particular suggest that the interview process itself needs to be considered porous, fluid, and interactive among humans, nonhumans, and diverse environmental factors to better examine what Polanyi calls “tacit knowledge” and “tacit knowing” (55). When Polanyi proposes “indwelling” as a way of tacit knowing, he reminds us of the importance of intersubjectivity in phenomenological interviewing suggested by Seidman: “[T]he most profound knowledge can be gained only by the deepest intersubjectivity among researchers and that which they are researching. Such a discussion suggests that neither the vocabulary of ‘validity’ nor ‘trustworthiness’ is adequate” (Seidman 27).

My three-part interview design, based on the layering of literacy history interviews and culturally sensitive discourse-based interviews, suggests two things: first, DBIs need to further consider the intersectionality of the researcher and the participants who are diverse across gender, class, age, and educational backgrounds; second, given “methodologically rich points” (Hornberger 102), my participants who came from disenfranchised or unfranchised language minority communities urge the researcher to broaden the scope of “discourse” in DBIs by paying more attention to diverse languages, repertoires, modalities, and multisensorial components including seemingly non-discursive contexts observed in participants’ discursive activities. Concrete strategies to better elicit non-discursive contexts in discourse-based interviews can include:

• Literacy history interviews can be set up to better investigate participants’ linguistic backgrounds and lived experiences.

• In global contexts, transnational or language minority writers in community-based contexts might have different rhetorical choices in modalities and materially constrained discursive choices, compared to other monolingual writers who are more familiar with rhetorical options that correspond to monolingual norms.

• The researcher needs to be more sensitive to affective dimensions around interview situations and ethically informed when they interview writers from marginalized communities and in post-traumatic situations.

Still, there are remaining questions in my DBIs. For example, my role as a translator in representing participants’ interview materials needs to be more considered. As I worked as a sole translator and investigator who accessed interviews and analyzed data, the multilingual dataset could better illuminate participants’ tacit knowledge if the research process were added with more alternative questions, back translation, and cross-coding process with other collaborators beyond member check processes. Also, my journey as a researcher cannot be generalized in other research contexts that adopt diverse research methods such as non-ethnographic methods or other transnational community-based research contexts or other locale-specific disaster rhetorics research. Yet, my reflection on this revision suggests that complicating traditional DBIs would provoke questions about the ethicality and responsibility of the researcher who adopts DBIs, and would enrich its implications in more practically feasible and ethically informed research methods across diverse writing modalities, languages, and contexts.

Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to all research participants as well as to the editors of the special issue and the anonymous reviewers. This study received the Research Incentive Cullen Fund from the University of Houston Graduate School in fall 2018.

Notes

1. This research study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Houston (STUDY00001068). (Return to text.)

2. I use the term language minorities to refer to unequal power structures and deficit-based assumptions about non-dominant language speakers, rather than the small numbers of speakers. However, I simultaneously use the term multilingual transnational migrants to refer to my participants, when I discuss migrants’ rhetorical agency and their literate activities. (Return to text.)

3. All participants’ names are pseudonyms. (Return to text.)

4. Koreans generally use titles rather than names in an indirect way when they refer to their spouses or elderly family members in conversations with third parties. (Return to text.)

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