Arthur P. Bochner

Arthur P. Bochner is an American communication scholar known for his research and teaching on intimate relationships, qualitative inquiry, narrative, and autoethnography. He holds the rank of Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida and is an Honorary Professor at the Communication University of China. Bochner is the former President of the National Communication Association and Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Among his publications are two books, two edited collections, and more than 100 book articles, chapters, and essays on communication theory, family and interpersonal communication, love and marriage, and the philosophies and methodologies of the human sciences, especially narrative inquiry and autoethnography.^[1][2][3]

Early life

Bochner was raised in Pittsburgh. His father was a sign painter and his mother worked as an editorial assistant at The Jewish Chronicle. Bochner’s interest in existential philosophy began at Taylor Allderdice High School where, in his senior thesis on Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrote, “All that was real—all that could be known—was what one could feel in his heart or touch through experience in the world. There is no truth beyond experience.”^[4] After high school he attended California State University in Pennsylvania where he participated in debate and extemporaneous speaking. He graduated with a B.S. in Speech Communication, then taught English and Speech at East High School in Auburn, New York. He earned an M.A. in Speech from Syracuse University and Ph.D. in Communication from Bowling Green State University. His doctoral dissertation was an experimental study of social relations entitled, A Multivariate Investigation of Machiavellianism and Task Structure in Four-Man Groups.^[5]

Research and teaching

Bochner’s early research focused on interpersonal and group communication in the empiricist tradition using experimental design and multivariate statistics. He spent three years as Assistant Professor at Cleveland State University and ten years at Temple University where he ascended through the academic ranks, achieving promotion to professor in 1982.^[4]

In 1976, Bochner published “Conceptual Frontiers in the Study of Families: An Introduction to the Literature,” a foundational essay for which he later received NCA’s Brommel Award for distinguished contributions to family communication. He also received awards for foundational essays on interpersonal competence (with Clifford Kelly)^[6] and autoethnography (with Carolyn Ellis). Bochner has been honored with numerous awards for career achievements in research and teaching including The Michael Osborne Teacher/Scholar Award, The Charles Woolbert Award (with Carolyn Ellis), Ohio University’s Elizabeth Andersch Career Achievement Award, and the McKnight Foundation’s William R. Jones Award for mentoring minority graduate students.^[1] Bochner acknowledges he is influenced by the communication theory of Gregory Bateson and R.D. Laing, the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Rollo May, and the fieldwork of Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, and Clifford Geertz, inspiring him “to break away from received traditions—to innovate, create, and experiment with new or different methods of inquiring into and representing lived experiences” (p. 297).^[5]

In 1984, Bochner joined the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. He became Chair of the department in 1985, guiding the department’s creation of the first Ph.D. program exclusively devoted to qualitative research in communication. In 1990, he left administration to collaborate with sociologist Carolyn Ellis, and become Co-Director of the Institute for Interpretive Human Studies. In 1996, Ellis and Bochner co-edited, Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing, a book widely recognized as the first volume to promote forms of autoethnographic inquiry designed to bridge humanities and social science research. Bochner and Ellis teamed up as editors of two book series emphasizing autoethnography and personal narrative, which have yielded more than thirty books representing evocative and novel forms of representing lived experience, bringing attention to emotions, subjectivity, embodiment, and personal storytelling. He chaired the department for another two-year term in 1992. By 2004, the department had achieved distinction as a center of excellence in narrative and autoethnographic inquiry. In 2008, Bochner served as President of the National Communication Association.^[4]

In 2014, Bochner published Coming to Narrative: A Personal History of Paradigm Change in the Human Sciences, an autoethnographic story that layers theory and story, weaving his professional and personal life with the social and historical contexts in which they developed. NCA’s Ethnography Division presented their 2014 “Best Book Award” to Bochner and their “Legacy Award” for distinguished lifetime achievement in ethnography. The National Communication Association also named Bochner as a Distinguished Scholar. In 2015, Coming to Narrative was honored with a "Best Book" Award by the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry. Bochner made numerous innovations in the teaching curriculum of communication studies. He introduced courses on marital and family communication, and inaugurated undergraduate courses on Love and Communication, Writing Lives, and Relationships on Film, and graduate courses on Communication As Social Construction, Writing Workshop, Close Relationships, and Narrative Inquiry.^[1]

Notable Concepts

Dialectics of interpersonal communication: The ways talk between people may inhibit what it exhibits, e.g., revealing necessitating concealing; weakness used to dominate.^[7]

Warm Ideas: Ideas compelling us to move closer to our subject matter; cast new rays of insight; open up new lines of thought; extend into new avenues of inquiry, and amplify our understanding beyond what we knew before.^[8]

Epistemology of interactive communication: A conversational model of inquiry privileging the ways in which we are part of the world we investigate, and the communicative ways we make the world and change it.^[9]

Institutional depression: A pattern of anxiety, hopelessness, demoralization, isolation, and disharmony circulating through an organization.^[10]

Self-narratives (autoethnographies): Existential stories reflecting a desire to grasp or seize the possibilities of meaning, moving readers and listeners to understand and feel the phenomena under scrutiny.^[11]

Memory as ethical inquiry: An interrogation of memory central to autoethnographic research, one recognizing the important connection between the present in which we remember and the past of which we remember.^[12]

Vulnerable medicine: A reflexive relatedness making it possible for a physician to be vividly and ethically in the presence of a person (patient) on the edge of oblivion, at the end of life.^[13]

Genre-bending narration: In the human (interpretive sciences), forms of storytelling – dialogues, metalogues, performative or poetic representations – that enact experiences while reflecting on them.^[5]

Awards in his name

The Arthur P. Bochner Award is given annually to the top doctoral student in Communication at the University of South Florida.^[1]

The Ellis-Bochner Autoethnography and Personal Narrative Research Award is given annually by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction affiliate of the National Communication Association for the best article, essay, or book chapter in autoethnography and personal narrative research.

Personal

Bochner resides in Tampa with his partner, Carolyn Ellis, and their two dogs, Buddha and Zen. During summers, they live in the mountains of North Carolina. They enjoy hiking, reading, gardening, and writing together ^[5]

Selected publications

Bochner, A. (2014). Coming to Narrative: A Personal History of Paradigm Change in the Human Sciences. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Bochner, A., & Riggs, N. (2014). Practicing narrative inquiry. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Handbook of Qualitative Methods (pp. 195–222). New York: Oxford University Press.

Bochner, A. (2012). Bird on the wire: Freeing the father within me. Qualitative Inquiry, 18, 168-173.

Bochner, A. (2009). Warm ideas and chilling consequences. International Review of Qualitative Research, 2, 357-370.

Bochner, A. (2001). Narratives Virtues. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 131-157.

Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. (2000). Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Handbook of Qualitative Research (2ND Edition)(pp. 733–768). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bochner, A. (1997). It’s About Time: Narrative and the Divided Self. Qualitative Inquiry, 3, 418-438.

References