Oak Park's proximity ot Chicago, as seen in this photo, has always been a defining characteristic of this village. But other more recent factors also combine to make this community unique. Let me elaborate. It has a considerable range of housing stock from condos selling for less than $100,000 to huge Victorians that are offered for close to one million. Until recently 50 per cent of the housing was rentals. While the growing trend toward condo conversions has reduced that figure to about 35 per cent, renters make up a significant part of Oak Park's population. Approximately 70 per cent of the African-American community are renters. Oak Park's 30+ years of deliberate efforts at obtaining and maintaining integration is a success story often recalled. The complex of non-profit agencies and governmental regulations needed to keep the village open to all is unparalleled. Oak Park's lesbian and gay community has become noteworthy in its size and prominence. Planetout.com voted Oak Park one of the most gay friendly small towns in the U.S. Finally the small size of the community, its political independence and affluence all combine with a high degree of citizen involvement in public life to make this a very proactive place where problems are defined and actions taken at relatively rapid rate. This particular combination of factors makes Oak Park a unique suburban community.
I was absent from Oak Park for more than half of the month of December. I first went to a conference at Oxford University where I delivered a paper, Some Oak Park Stories: Experimental Ethnographic Videos. On the way to England I stopped at Temple University to give a Ph.D. examination and to counsel some of my graduate students. Shortly after I returned my wife and I went to Santa Fe for a family Christmas. As a consequence little ethnography was realised. The most important thing that happened this month was my realization about how I will deliver my ethnography to an audience.
Giving an academic paper in
the midst of doing the research may seem premature and certainly
it is not a time in which one can draw any significant conclusions.
My purpose in presenting this paper was to provide me with a
chance to think out loud; to force me to pull together what I
know and reflect on it; and most important to have the chance
for some critical feedback from colleagues. Ideally the fieldwork
accomplished after this event will benefit. I have been struggling
with the problem of how I will "publish" the results
of my research. I have the videotapes but I also have a significant
number of audiotape interviews and notes from my observations
and participation in the life of the community. Originally I
had thought to produce a series of videotapes - I called it a
"video book" and publish the other material in print
form - academic articles and book(s). I was disturbed by the
artificial separation but resigned to it. The response I got
at Oxford clarified things. On the one hand there were those
to argued that with a little effort I could make the work accessible
to the general public and seek to broadcast it on public television.
I am certain that I do not wish to do that for two good reasons.
First, the general "look" of the material will not
be like other documentary/ethnographic films audiences are used
to seeing. Therefore the work stands a good chance of being dismissed
as merely incompetent. I would have to invent some means to make
it abundantly clear that the work was designed to look the way
it was. It is asking a lot to expect a public television audience
to stop assuming good television should look a certain way when
the vast majority of public television shows are overwhelmingly
conservative in style. What I wish to convey cannot be understood
in the one viewing an airing on television provides. I had hoped
to convince the viewer(s) who would have looked at the work on
a television set but via a VCR to break the narrative flow by
stopping and repeating passages that were too dense to understand
with one viewing. My experience with my own graduate students
suggests that even seriously interested viewers remain passive
and seldom engage with videotapes the way they do printed material.
The more I talked about it the less I thought I could use a videotape-VCR-television
delivery system. Fortunately one of the participants remarked
that he assumed I would produce the "videobook" in DVD
form and that the audience would be the single individual in front
of his/her computer monitor. Once spoken the solution seemed
obvious. A DVD format would allow me to combine text, still photographs
and videotape in complex and interwoven ways. As this point I
know little about DVD authoring software except that it is expensive.
I plan to explore this apparent solution to my problem over the
coming months and will report my findings in a future update.