The purpose of this article is to describe a new coding and data analysis method for qualitative and evaluation researchers. We label this method Environmental Coding, an adaptation of Schmieder-Ramirez and Mallette’s (2007) text, The SPELIT Power Matrix: Untangling the Organizational Environment With the SPELIT Leadership Tool, into the frameworks for qualitative data analysis outlined in Saldaña’s (2016) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Environmental Coding employs an eclectic combination of coding approaches in hermeneutic cycles to generate a multidimensional analysis of an environment’s culture and its drivers. This article uses one of Donald Trump’s initial candidate speeches for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign to illustrate Environmental Coding in action.
This article introduces the reader to the work of Australian verbatim playwright Alana Valentine and examines the ways she raises the issue of veracity or truthfulness in her 2016 verbatim play Ladies Day. The article begins with a brief description of verbatim theater and the importance of veracity in verbatim theater and research-informed theater. It then moves to an analysis of the way Valentine takes up issues of veracity in Ladies Day. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications Valentine’s work has for research-informed theater practitioners in the social sciences.
In a recent article published in this journal, Atkinson and Morris explore the kinds of expertise and competence needed by ethnographic researchers. In doing so, they refer to the work of Collins and Evans and, in particular, the idea of interactional expertise, which they dismiss as largely unhelpful to their project. In this response, we show that the Atkinson and Morriss miss-represent this work in important ways and that, if these mistakes are corrected, interactional expertise provides a useful way of addressing the methodological concerns they identify.
This article includes autoethnographic vignettes that explore the emotional, embodied, relational, communal, and ritualized aspects of sleeping. As a Western, White, upper-middle-class professional woman in a long-term relationship with a partner who has similar characteristics, I describe sleeping in the familiar environment of our primary and vacation homes, where we both define ourselves as sleeping well together. To tease out important aspects of what counts as a good night’s sleep, I contrast sleeping at home to sleeping in other places, such as in an airplane, hotel in a foreign country, and a hospital, and then compare my experience of sleeping in a modern Western environment with sleeping practices in preindustrial society. I examine my definition of "a good night’s sleep" and how it is affected by historical and cultural narratives of normative sleep. Questioning my original conceptions of good sleeping and sleeping ritual, I explore and put into practice alternative storylines regarding how to accomplish a good night’s slumber.
In this article, the author has renamed the complicated conglomeration of the lived experience of the body-space as an "embody." An embody includes a body schema, extensions to that body schema, peripersonal space, space, and more—a sort of working map of self and world. An embody continually changes definition in interaction with culture, (architectural) habitats, clothes, tools, vehicles, others, and so forth. Multiple embodies are often simultaneously deployed. Through vignettes and poetic prose, this project explores how the embody of daily experiences is composed. What is this embody of embodied experience? What forms of bodies and spaces does it take up? How are they constructed? What can they do?
In the early stages of research into the life of my great-great-grandfather, George Graham, I have repeatedly come across scraps of his life story relating to trees in various central city locations in Auckland, New Zealand, locations now abutting and on the university campus at which I work. These trees and places directly link me with George in powerful ways, becoming channels into affective responses of pride and excitement that also connect me viscerally to George’s role in the colonization of Auckland and dispossession of Māori. Here, I explore these affective states and the ways they provoke my thinking about being a descendant of settler colonizers and about my relation to my settler homeland. These material connections to colonial history "thicken" my relationship to Auckland and to the colonial story, and I use these experiences to point to the possibility of a different, "alter-colonial" form of settler relation to place.
In the summer of 2015, I lost my relationship (of four years) and then my Grandmother passed away, one after the other. Judith Butler says there is no ready vocabulary to describe the bonds by which one is connected to another, the ties by which we are "differentiated and related." Those ties constitute what we are, they compose us. This is an autoethnographic bricolage that examines those affective bonds that stand revealed when you lose someone. Pain results from their being severed, but as Butler points out, grief is also transformative. I argue that performance (auto)ethnography is perfectly sited to examine these affects because it can evoke that which remains unlanguaged.
This article discusses the possibility that Western theory, with its ghostly apparition of power, is dead. Suggesting that Indigenous and quantum thought erase the difference between the measuring object and the object of measurement found in traditional Western theory, this article argues that Indigenous and quantum thought may change the narrative structure of traditional Western theory, allowing for qualitative research in/through being. The author concludes with a prayer and coda to a practice of qualitative inquiry beyond Western theory.
A series of four poems were generated as a result of McMahon’s reimmersion into an elite swimming culture where she purposely revisited emotional and mental pain experienced 15 years earlier. Her reimmersion resulted in the re-engagement of torturous training and bodily regimes that other swimmers were subjected to and subjected themselves to. By presenting four evocative poetic representations, McMahon empowered and expressed her 40-year-old body’s sensations and experiences as she resubjected it to a culture that continues to torment her. These four poetic representations indeed assisted her to sort, ponder, and acknowledge her body’s experiences, voices, and her ever-evolving embodied consciousness. It is hoped that the audience will think and feel with McMahon’s bodily encounters, reflecting on them and drawing their own conclusions and understandings.
In this article, we offer a critical reading of the increasingly popular "post-qualitative" approach to research. We draw on insights from postcolonial theory to offer some provocations about the methodological and conceptual claims made by post-qualitative inquiry. The article considers how post-qualitative inquiry opens up possibilities for post-humanist social research. But, our critical reading of these "new" approaches argues that such research needs to attend to political and historical relations of social power, both in the worlds it constitutes and in the processes of its knowledge production. Without explicit attention to power and history, the (non)representational logics of post-qualitative inquiry risk operating less as "new" mechanisms for generative and subversive post-humanist research and more as processes of closure and erasure: closed-off from the worlds and people being researched.
Becoming-city explores the encounter between Self and Other in Hanoi, Vietnam, through Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Theory, experience, history, literature, language, and data are combined in order to ask what it is that individuates subject and object. Deleuze’s philosophy of difference is used to explore and push problems of difference and identity to their limits through writing of the encounter between individual and city. This encounter is employed not as metaphor but as the actual process of movement through which events take place and thinking is engendered, leading to possibilities of thinking differently about difference.
This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or deconstruct the poem, but thinks it in an alternative way, as a broader collaboration, or intra-action between entities, both human and non-human. We avoid determining how our purported individual voices merge to form any united voice. Rather, we are alert to agencies and flows that complicate understandings of us as three rational, discrete, fully formed human figures articulating coherent narratives. We therefore offer a response to theoretical calls to explore collaborative writing as inquiry, through sharing our practice.
This article discusses a filmic research methodology that notices the tangible aesthetic affective entanglements of entities. It explicitly notices traces of self as discernible in others as mattering and is understood as an affirmative movement that may enable an uptake of equal opportunity in education. This filmic work with former Australian schoolgirls expands on Bill Nichols’ framing of performative documentary by drawing on Karen Barad’s new materialist theory of intra-action, during the making and multiple re-presentations of the research. This phenomenon demonstrates the political power of the named "re/active documentary" as a perpetual and co-created intra-action with participants, image, "things," and virtual audience. Difference in this research is not exterior but a movement of connections where the entanglement of participants, researcher, film artifact, and audience are fluid emergent parts co-constituted within the world.
When cancer took my dad’s last breath, I was left with the fear that all the dark memories of our relationship might crowd out and overshadow some of my delightful son–father memories. Haunted by the fear of forgetting all those "good" memories, focusing on where they were created, I write into being some of the beautiful moments I want to preserve. Providing examples from my work of memory, the purpose is to show that we do not need to start with dark backgrounds before brighter futures can emerge. What happens when only mundane, beautiful memories are preserved is also considered.
Asking for personal accounts of fieldwork forces a consideration of two important issues in anthropology: author-presence in ethnographic and analytic accounts and forms of ethnographic representation. Addressing both, I offer here an historical overview of my 1960s and 1970s fieldwork in the Pacific Islands country of Tuvalu in relation to (a) what I tried to accomplish at the time; (b) what actually worked out, what did not, and why; (c) what I have learned in the long run about the prospects of succeeding in those pursuits, including a sample of principles governing such narratives and how attention to them might facilitate the development of more robust and satisfying ethnographic accounts, especially when bound up in a mixed genre form I describe as an analytic memoir; and (d) comparisons with the fieldwork of Mariko Toshida, an award-winning current-generation researcher in the area.
In the "Consciousness in the Study of Human Life and Experience" articles, longer passages in interviews where the participant sincerely tries to make a sympathetic investigator understand her are considered as showing part of the participant’s current consciousness in her life (part of her "consciousness-and-‘I’"). The present article argues that a critical element in such passages is that the participant is involved in trying to make herself understood "with her (whole) ‘I,’" "her whole self." This represents a particular kind of (spontaneous, nonverbal, "inner") engagement of the single consciousness-and-"I." The article argues using an example that "being involved with one’s self, one’s ‘I’" in the higher aspects that one is pursuing in one’s life is a fundamental type of phenomenon/experienced reality which is sui generis, and represents in the unfolding of the person a factor in its own right.
This essay considers Billie Holiday’s performance of "One for My Baby," as an affective lamentation that both moves and creates movement—into another kind of relation, another kind of loving, another kind of bodily intensity. When Billie sings to the bartender, a proxy for an absent other and lost love, "I’m kind of a poet/And I got a lot of things to say/And when I’m gloomy, you simply gotta listen to me/Till it’s all talked away . . . So make it one for my baby and one more for the road/That long, long road," we experience self-storytelling that creates a relation marked by an a sense of vitality, dependent on mutual vulnerability, and animated within a field of power. Holiday’s "One for My Baby" becomes an occasion for performing queer affective intensity—a corporeal and emotional embodiment that leaves us feeling alive, open, and possible.
I would like to contribute to the "songbook of our lives" inquiry through a performance which takes two perspectives on songs. The first of these is from the perspective of an individual who is moved by songs, the second, as a songwriter/researcher/autoethnographer moved to write songs from my research. In the former, I share story fragments that reveal how my life, body, and story has been touched, shaped, and moved by music and lyrics and through narrative fragments trace some of the beginnings of this journey. In the latter, story fragments reveal how song writing has become a way to counter silence, lack of knowing how to respond, and as a way to stand with participants where together we might find a voice of resistance, communion, and transcendence.
In this bluesy poetic prose, the author engages poetry, personal narrative, and performance to reflect on how hip hop served as a soundtrack for her transition to womanhood in the rural south. She uses lyrics from Killing Me Softly (originated by Roberta Flack in the 70s and repopularized by The Fugees in 1996) and other songs from the 90s to tell stories about growing up, love, loss, depression, and abuse situated within her race, culture, sex, and social class. She muses how the cadences of sound and the words of songs helped her become a writer and feminist. She also reflects on how her formal and informal education has informed and been informed by her relationship to hip hop, which at times has fluctuated from fixation to disillusionment.
In this article, we examine the love–death dialectic through a mosaic of story and song. Layering personal narrative and musical chronicles about love, life, and death—from the heroic to the tedious, the passionate to the mundane, the tragic to the contented, the transgressive to the faithful, and fantasy to reality—we consider the marriage of love and loss in narratives where multiple instantiations of the truth mix and mingle. We use these disparate creations to evocatively dramatize the magnetic allure of endless, inexhaustible love in light of our inevitable extinction. The love impulse, says Becker, is the antithesis to the fearful losses that mark our long descent to the grave. Following Becker’s lead, we take the measure of idealized passion in enduring relationships and assert the catalytic dynamism of heroic transcendence in everyday intercourse. From the storybook tales we author with family, lovers, and other close conspirators, sagas of romance, lasting companionship, marriage, hearth and home, birth and death; to the songbook—with a focus on splatter platters—the trite songs of teenage tragedy and mayhem produced in the last half of the 20th century and still popular into the 21st—juxtaposed with German Romantic opera, we examine how celebrated artists, Brill Building songsmiths, and everyday dreamers aestheticize love, life, and death. In pillow talk, in conversational idylls, and in song, what we say about love tells us what it means to live, to desire, and to die.
This autoethnographic performance life piece captures my early adolescent dilemmas with my Black-queer-Christian identities. Told through five flashbacks, I conjure critical moments turned critical memories to explore and unpack my struggle with the dichotomy of secular versus sacred and the holy versus profane. Ultimately, this life piece seeks to excavate the remnants of my humanity that are buried deep within my memories to tease out what it means to live forever between oppression and liberation.
This autoethnographic performance uses the lyrics, mode, and performative stylistic of Barbra Streisand’s famous song as a provocation for exploring the ways in which young adoptees sometimes idealize an imaginary love that is not limited to parent–child but rather floats out like a lyrical overture into the broader landscape of "misty watercolor memories" of a wish for the way things might have been. When Barbra asks Can it be that it was all so simple then?, the adoptee answers no, and lives the need in families that What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget. Adoptee consciousness, like Braidotti’s nomad, abandons any "nostalgia for fixity" and in so doing is able to cultivate an "intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing" for survival and "thrival." In this way, Streisand’s song represents a critical moment of letting go within my own developing nomadic queer and adoptee consciousness—a letting go of an idealized "way we were" and a redirection toward a future-looking nomadic subject. Through this queer lens, Barbra’s nostalgic lyrics might be considered a "queer retrosexuality" for a time, place, and kind of love and belonging that has never existed and is increasingly culturally crippling.
This autoethnographic performance interrogates the centrality of music to queering Black masculinity. Theorizing from my lived experience, I highlight how Black girl hand games, countertenor performances in Soul music, and male vocalist performances in Gospel music intervene and provide alternative entryways to understanding Black masculinity. Three pivotal moments from the authors’ life, which span the aforementioned genres of music, are explored to elucidate the subtle and direct messages Black men and boys receive about "proper" gender performance. Through critical engagements with performance theory and Black queer theory, this performance illuminates the multiple and at times contested meanings of Black masculinity as navigated by the author within familial, educational, and religious settings. Moreover, this performance highlights the creative interventions and transgressive alternative masculinities necessary for the survival of Black queer individuals and communities as offered through music.
The following autoethnographic duet by faculty advisor and professor creates a dramatic and evocative account of the personal and cultural experience about a disabled student teacher. They blend storytelling and music which fuses a theoretical analysis about storytelling and life. Although sociocultural issues draw deep reflection about the emotional turmoil, cultural influences of language and social interaction provide details that critique social structures. As musician becoming teacher is a passionate yet complex endeavor, the faculty advisor shares first-hand a poetic but painful story about a disabled teacher being inducted into the teaching profession. By making explicit the personal-cultural connection, they use the life-changing epiphany to critique cultural issues about teaching and disability. As the faculty advisor approaches the professor for advice, his musicianship shifts her forward, backward, and sideways through feelings that evoke, invoke, and provoke a curriculum that does not transfer knowledge from educational method classes. Instead, it embeds musical language as a metaphorical conduit to interrogate the pros, cons and both sides of the complicated issue of disability that influences the completion of his teaching practicum for his undergraduate bachelor of education degree. An epiphany from music and story reveals the irony of living in a culture of both uniformity and diversity. They explore the constructs of ideology, abnormality, marginalization, and secrecy. Thus, by blending story and music, the authors resolve a transformative autoethnographic aspect about the personal and cultural influences that provoke new deeper ways of thinking about curriculum.
This article examines the implicit educational logic of Patti Lather’s book Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science and her insistence on critical self-reflection. To unlock the form of education that Lather enacts through Getting Lost, I will turn to Italian critical theorist Giorgio Agamben and his notion of study as an alternative to mere learning. What is unique and important is that Getting Lost offers a moment of what I refer to as studious inoperativity wherein the researcher as studier can live within a threshold condition that is neither outside nor inside the research protocol. Instead of being lost, Lather emphasizes getting lost as a state betwixt and between, of pushing forward toward resolution while also perpetually withdrawing from such resolution, of constantly feeling the power to find solutions while also perpetually witnessing such solutions fade into the background as new problems arise, of learning from and wrestling with a learning that un-learns itself in its learning. In this sense, to get lost in the remnants of research is to feel the shift in the educational logic of research from learning from one’s experiences (to be an advocate or militant researcher) to studying in the ruins of this experience.
This article presents a praxeologically informed approach to "transgressing the researcher-subject" in ethnography. I unfurl a concept of "strong" reflexivity as developing a perspective of unfamiliarity toward one’s own practices and beliefs. By drawing on my study on practicing ballet, I illustrate how I dealt with my own bodily involvement as a professional dance student. Comparing my approach with evocative autoethnography, I not only emphasize that corporeal sensitivity and alertness are inherent to both styles of inquiry. Yet, I also point out their differences. Whereas evocative autoethnography takes subjectivity as a resource for insights, this approach uses it as an instrument for discovery.
Western researchers often do not incorporate the voices of African women in their research endeavors; and a serious engagement in women’s health activism in Zimbabwe cannot happen without this preliminary step. Endarkened feminist epistemologies have theorized a social science that refuses to sidestep African women’s perspectives. As a corrective to conceptual quarantining of Black (African and African diasporic) feminist thought, the exciting body of literature in the field broadly characterized as Africana feminism has helped to legitimate the languages, discourses, challenges, unique perspectives, divergent experiences, and intersecting oppressions and privileges of African women’s and girls’ lives. In this article, we develop an emerging Africana feminist methodology to propose building a scholarship and activism database as well as guide an exploratory discussion of health activism in Zimbabwe.
This contribution explores autoethnography as a strongly reflexive approach to qualitative research and its reception in German-speaking sociology and cultural anthropology. Over recent years, our academic communities have developed an increased interest in autoethnography, although many reactions range from critical to hostile: It is accused of solipsism, narcissism, lack of arguments and theory, affective immediacy, non-criticizability, endorsement of neoliberal politics, a threat to disciplinary identity, and a strategic mistake in the fight for appreciation of qualitative research. We discuss each point of criticism and translate our insights into more general considerations on strong reflexivity in German-speaking cultural and social sciences.
The story we share here stems from our research with British military personnel who are adapting to life with a physical and/or psychological disability after serving in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. Throughout our research, we have struggled to answer the kinds of questions that plague qualitative researchers: How might we gain insights into intense, traumatic, even life-changing experiences? Should we be inviting individuals to recount or revisit such potent moments from their lives? What interpretive framework might we draw on to make sense of what are sometimes senseless experiences? How can we share any ensuing understanding with others without diluting, diminishing, or disrespecting the lives of soldiers or their families? The story we share here—which responds to Denzin’s challenge to reanimate life and Erickson’s provocation to do so with greater modesty, visibility, and reflexivity—offers one answer to these questions.
This article offers a discussion concerning the future of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. Taking the form of a dialogic exchange, we take up Isabelle Stengers’ notion of "wonder" as a creative and political lens through which to consider the disruptive, radical, and productive methodological capacity that collaborative writing as a research method potentially offers. Working particularly with Deleuze and Guattari, we argue that language in collaborative writing practices is deeply entangled with complex materialist practice, and through engagements with these "matterings" we make sense of collaborative writing as immanent event. We discuss—and experience—the challenges that collaborative writing has for research and this article pushes at established categories, works against the fixities of conventional theory construction, contests the humanist and phenomenological proclivities that arguably limit the process and effectiveness of collaborative writing as method of inquiry, and wonders at the immensities that are possible.
The pragmatist roots of constructivist grounded theory make it a useful method for pursuing critical qualitative inquiry. Pragmatism offers ways to think about critical qualitative inquiry; constructivist grounded theory offers strategies for doing it. Constructivist grounded theory fosters asking emergent critical questions throughout inquiry. This method also encourages (a) interrogating the taken-for-granted methodological individualism pervading much of qualitative research and (b) taking a deeply reflexive stance called methodological self-consciousness, which leads researchers to scrutinize their data, actions, and nascent analyses. The article outlines how to put constructivist grounded theory into practice and ends with where this practice could take us.
This narrative begins in 1950, a conversation between Sam Jim, an Indigenous Elder in British Columbia (BC), and a university professor researching Sam’s community. Sam troubles the privileging of Western thinking, knowledge, values, and practices. The story fast-forwards to a contemporary research partnership between an Indigenous researcher, the same BC Indigenous community and an Indigenous community in Peru. Each community faces different struggles in protecting their lands from resource extraction and in regenerating traditional ecological knowledges for future generations. They meet these challenges by reviving their traditional knowledges and practices, including human and more-than-human interrelationships and interdependencies. The communities have different cosmologies, histories, geographies, languages, economies, and socio-political contexts. This requires research methodologies and methods that acknowledge the challenges and opportunities of working across different contexts toward more complex, culturally inclusive possibilities for living together on a shared planet.
As early as 1967, the French ethno-psychoanalyst Georges Devereux proposed adopting a radical perspective on researchers’ subjectivity to the entire field of "behavioral sciences." Whenever our research confronts us with other human beings and thus with ourselves, he argues, we are confronted with anxiety. Instead of fighting against this anxiety and other painful irritations that go hand in hand with any social research, Devereux’s proposal can thus be understood as an invitation to work with this anxiety and use it to gain deeper insights. This article suggests that we re-read Devereux in the light of the contemporary discussions on reflexivity and subjectivity based on (a) an outline and short interpretation of Devereux’s central argument, (b) a subjective re-reading by the author herself, and (c) an examination of some contemporary readings by other qualitative researchers.
In this article, we explore transformative interviewing through the lens of new materialism. Rather than viewing transformation through a humanist perspective that centralizes a transcendent self, we draw upon Barad’s agential realism to reconsider transformation following the ontological turn. Thinking with agential realism, we engaged two interview studies, one on biracialism and one on masculinity, to demonstrate how the materiality of our interviews (e.g., research bodies, computer programs, questionnaires) intra-acted with our participants to both facilitate and hinder our attempts at transformation. We conclude by theorizing transformation as a type of purposeful entanglement that proceeds from the material-discursive intra-actions of our inquiries.
Research funders throw down a gauntlet about the "grand challenges" of our time, like a cure for cancer, or eradicating poverty. But "normal science" is the practice of the particular. Our knowledge comes in glimpses, not the arc of the floodlight. This article argues that if we want to build a cumulative knowledge of the social, we need to synthesize, not fragment, and to talk across borders, not put up fences. Critical qualitative inquiry can be a vital corrective to the "grand challenge" mindset, but only if we help the wider research community understand our message.
The adequate presentation of empirical research findings poses an essential, yet often neglected challenge in qualitative methodology. This article contributes to the debate by proposing the research vignette as a mediating position between conventional and experimental forms of writing. On the basis of an illustrating example from an interview study on the psychosocial dynamics of HIV-related sexual risk behavior of gay men in Germany, the methodological foundations of the research vignette are outlined and practical applications for qualitative research are discussed. The research vignette provides the opportunity to conduct a psychoanalytically informed interpretation in which the presentation of findings is woven into a critical reflection of the interaction dynamic in the research encounter and substantiating theoretical considerations.
This special issue is devoted to reflexivity as an epistemic tool in qualitative research. We suggest a distinction between epistemically weak and epistemically strong reflexivity and present examples for strongly reflexive research from the German-speaking countries and the United Kingdom. The issue pursues three major goals: First, it provides a vocabulary to deepen the discussion about the epistemic dimensions of reflexivity. Second, it intervenes in hegemonic discourses on the "threat of subjectivity" and shows that approaches often perceived as "more subjective" and therefore less valid use, in fact, an epistemically stronger concept of reflexivity. Third, it offers insight into some innovative areas of strongly reflexive research in Europe. A comparison of these methodologies shows that the use of reflexivity as an epistemic tool is compatible with a wide range of approaches.
In this text, I want to reflect about the impact of the process of my Autoethnography performance training from 2011 in my work/research/life with . . . as a teacher, a researcher, and as a woman standing from a contemporary QI conducting research and teaching about the unsaid topics of the new movements of migration of people in the border of northern Chile from/in and outside the academia. Color, violence, historical influence and Andean migration process, forgetfulness, borders, and the "normal" attitude turned into action as "not to see"/not to feel/not to believe the big problematic realities in foreign lives. All of these are part of this performative text in which I reflect and confront daily life experiences; my academic role and the risks and threats that my latte color woman’s voice mean to the academia in these times.
The critique of methodological nationalism in the social sciences has posed a theoretical and methodological challenge to qualitative social research. It has forced researchers to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of applying qualitative research methods in their research on transnational social phenomena. We underline the need to examine the influence of the biographical experiences of the researcher on the research process in transnational research settings. We argue that by inducing biographical self-reflection during the research process, it is possible to work out the possible biographical entanglements with the research topic and to reflect their influence on the further development of the research process. In consequence, it is possible to tackle methodologically the "invisible" role of the researcher in the narrative construction of transnational social fields and to show how transnational knowledge production is an intersubjective, relational activity.
We engage in story-retelling by recounting, reconstructing, and reflecting on our experiences as evaluators in a cross-cultural setting, a South African village. A principal focus on the serendipitous ethical and methodological issues that arose is highlighted. As most ethical dilemmas go, solutions are not clear. Therefore, the authors spend time critically considering the soundness of the decisions that were made, from the lack of diversity of the research team, to the ways we interacted with local citizens, to research design issues. We share our thoughts through a confessional tale via research poetry.
Although Indigenous scholars have been documenting Indigenous research methodologies, little has been written on the practical considerations of doing research across Indigenous/Settler contexts. As a small social work research team (two Cree researchers and one Settler) exploring Indigenous aging, our work crossed several contexts: academic and community, social locations within the team, and epistemes. Centering the research on an Indigenist, anti-colonial framework allowed us to highlight and correct for colonial power dynamics throughout the project. By enacting Indigenism together, we found that Indigenous and Settler researchers can create a space of deep learning and knowledge co-creation with communities. However, this work was challenging, risky, and at times difficult. Learning to navigate some of these complexities required ongoing attention to our relational accountabilities. We detail lessons learned from each of our perspectives, concluding with implications, community obligations, and directions for future research.
With his path-breaking The Qualitative Manifesto. A Call to Arms (2010), Norman Denzin calls for qualitative inquiry to be carried out with the aim of contributing to the empowerment of subjects involved in the research. He pleads passionately and vehemently in favor of a research process that is led by the ideal of social justice. My contribution wants to plead for making radical equality between researchers and research subjects a core element of qualitative inquiries as well. For this purpose, I will turn to the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has been largely ignored in qualitative inquiry. His work, though, is of central importance for critical qualitative research. The idea of equality opens up a new and more profound understanding of politics that would allow us to specify the political meaning of qualitative studies in late capitalism more accurately.
In this article, I examine the process of establishing the communicative validity of research. Using Habermas’ ideal speech situation as a theoretical backdrop, I explore three moments in which the roles enacted by members of a research collective were implicitly or explicitly negotiated. I find that by examining moments of role negotiation we can explore the level of participation at which stakeholders engage in the process of knowledge production. When roles are explicitly negotiated, therefore, fluid, authentic participation is greater and communicative validity is enhanced.
Is there still a role for discourse research today, some 30 years after Michel Foucault’s death? A decade ago, French actor-network theorist Bruno Latour famously declared the end of critique as ethos and practice in the social sciences. What is more, arguments made about the contingency of historical phenomena even arm "enemy" forces. Empirical work therefore should be replaced by a politics of "matters of concern." French sociologist Luc Boltanski added to this critique of critical perspectives by suggesting that an investigation into social modes of critique should replace critical sociology. The present contribution discusses both critiques of critique and the problems and limitations of the solutions proposed by both Latour and Boltanski. Against this background, and with a focus on discourse research, it stresses the ongoing need for precise empirical work as a condition for the social unfolding of critical perspectives.
This article sets out two psychoanalytically informed conceptions of fantasy as a resource for reflexivity in research. First is the fantasy as a defensive structure that distorts our perception of reality, and the use of the researcher’s affective responses as an interpretive tool. Second is the fantasy as a signifying structure that constitutes the subject’s engagement in reality, foregrounding unconscious symbolic associations. These approaches are traced in the construction and analysis of interview data, exploring (a) a trajectory that interprets fantasy as a defense against difficult emotions, (b) the construction of free associations, and (c) symbolic material that disrupts the interpretation of fantasy as defense.
Chinese sociology was denounced and abolished as "bourgeois science" for more than a quarter of a century (1952-1979). This article examines the politics of rebuilding Chinese sociology. Examining lectures, reports, and essays associated with the first three officially approved research projects (1981-1986), I clarify why the quantitative paradigm was embraced by sociologists at the expense of qualitative inquiry. With the introduction of survey questionnaire methods from the West and the making of sociological knowledge "useful" within China, sociology rebuilt its disciplinary identity and legitimacy. Based upon my analysis, I lay out three thematic issues essential to a critical, decentered approach in qualitative research.
We discuss the kinds and degrees of competence that the ethnographer needs to acquire. We consider the "unique adequacy" postulate, proposed by ethnomethodologists, that suggests that in the study of esoteric or specialized domains, the researcher needs to acquire or have previously acquired competence themselves. We suggest that this deserves more critical and nuanced scrutiny, not least given the impossibility of having prior competence in all aspects of a complex organization or activity. We also suggest that we need a more delicate appreciation of types of competence and, hence, of ethnographic knowledge. There is no single prescription, but a more thorough appreciation of the sociology of knowledge will inform ethnographic practice and methodological commentary.
Discussions around constructing a new critical qualitative inquiry need to reflect challenges on three levels: (a) Inquiry can be critical about the issues under study—a social or political problem to be addressed in a critical perspective; (b) critical approaches to methods and approaches in current research—other forms (e.g., quantitative research) or parts of the mainstream of qualitative research; and (c) a major challenge is to remain able to really do empirical qualitative research addressing social problems and to remain reflexive. Articles in this special issue address these to make a contribution to constructing a new critical qualitative inquiry.
Critiques about the development in mixed-methods research (MMR) by some of its protagonists mention the following: ignorance of earlier developments, too much focus on designs rather than issues, more a metaphor than a mode of research, the belief in paradigms, and too much focus on methods instead of theoretical and methodological issues. Myths and mantras in the MMR literature are discussed here. For overcoming the limitations of MMR becoming evident in these critiques, myths, and mantras, triangulation is discussed. A revitalization of this concept in recent formulations (triangulation 3.0; systematic triangulation of perspectives) outlines triangulation as a framework of a critical and reflexive MMR.
Migration is an issue for many countries. It affects several areas of social problems, for example, work and unemployment. A relevant issue to study in the context of unemployment and social welfare is, "Which are experiences of migrants with different language backgrounds in finding work and support?" For a running study with episodic interviews and mobile methods with migrants from the former Soviet Union to Germany, several issues are discussed in a "new critical inquiry": Critical issues in the studied area (help, control, normative claims); applying (familiar) qualitative methods (interviewing in various languages and cultural backgrounds or mobile methods); triangulation in a new critical migration research.
This is the story of a Black woman Baby Boomer who, inspired by the 1969 song Young, Gifted and Black, experienced cultural border crossings early in life. It includes reflections from Black women of the Hip Hop Generation who, decades later, also pursued the "world waiting" for them promised in that song. In our lived experiences across generations, we found strategic language use is part of the "gift" and critical to crossings. We also discovered identity implications as we "shift" across borders into predominantly White environments and back into our Black communities where language is perceived as a marker of racial solidarity. Black feminist thought is used to examine the implications of a communicative practice that has been done for so long and so well it appears effortless. But we know it is not—for both generations, there are benefits, yes, but also detriments, frustration, and fatigue.
Qualitative inquiry largely stands outside the current policy focus on experimental results—the "what works" agenda. Yet thinking and doing things differently—another form of experiment—could be more prominent in critical qualitative inquiry. The article will look at the ways in which qualitative inquiry is currently positioned in policy debate and reflect on whether or not a different form of "experimentalism" could generate a different form of knowledge about what "might work."
Speaking from within a time of economic crisis, It’s a Beautiful Thing, the Destruction of Wor(l)ds investigates how scholarly activities reflect activist identities and the affect of experiencing social change in the Greek crisis. In Dear TINA, we write through and about workplaces: correctional institutions and higher education, and their effects on our ways of knowing. These two performance lectures by Ministry of Untold Stories offer a working through of ontological uncertainty, precarity, and risk. We propose that if scholarship is to offer resistance to "there is no alternative," then there must be a methodological revolution.
This is about creating new ontologisations of sustainable child/hood/s and/as exceeding forms of contracts between generations through experimenting with bodily affects and sensing movements. Experimenting as writing that is and doing with texts to foster patterns of becomings, thus affirming the positive structure of difference: Writing as opening the self up to possible encounters with affective outsides, collapsing divides in me and simultaneously possibilizing child/hood/s as (a) matrix of becoming. This is about turning early childhood and care institutions and schools into postdiagnosis localities or places of transition, their main task becoming that of not passing on traditions but to prepare for future contingent events. Teaching children to act in disagreement that is and drivers of processes and change through creating better—as in minor—languages for being and doing differently together.
What if—in light of the escalating pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology? Because this question moves beyond slowing the pace or volume of productivity to address underlying issues of ontology, it asks not how we can find a slower way of doing scholarship, but how we can find a slower way of scholarly being. A philosophy of Slowness has sparked movements around the globe regarding Slow Food and Slow Cities; these and similar movements disrupt daily practices that prioritize speed, efficiency, and output at the expense of quality. In response, a Slow Ontology approaches writing as a site of creative intervention. This article offers methodological possibilities for writing a Slow Ontology in qualitative inquiry: each attends to how we might write the materiality of our local environments. In writing a Slow Ontology, researchers might create writing that is not unproductive, but is differently productive.
The article explores the role of a Brechtian theater pedagogy as "philosophical ethnography" in four investigative drama-based workshops, which took international students’ intercultural "strangeness" experiences as the starting point for aesthetic experimentation. It is argued that a Brechtian theater pedagogy allows for a productive rather than representational orientation in research, which is underpinned by a love for the aesthetic "re-entanglement" of (dis-embodied) language and ethical concerns about mimetic representational acts. To show how a Brechtian research pedagogy functioned as philosophical ethnography, the article maps the aesthetic transformation of participant Jamal’s verbatim account in the drama workshops—from (a) its emergence in a post-creative-writing discussion in Workshop 2, to (b) its enactment as a body sculpture in Workshop 3, and (c) to its translation into a rehearsal piece in Workshop 4.
September 11 narratives from Mennonite children of New York City (NYC) are presented in the form of research poetry.
Drawing on several studies we take up question about fictionalization in this article. In particular, we are interested in the intentions and purposes of fictionalization and discus these within the context of narrative inquiry. We draw attention to how fictionalizing has become a common and often unquestioned part of responding to concerns about anonymity raised by research ethics boards. We see three purposes for fictionalization: (a) protection of the identities of participants, (b) creation of distance between ourselves and our experiences, and (c) a way to engage in imagination that enriches inquiry spaces and research understandings.
This study explored issues, paradoxes, concerns, and practices regarding issues of interpretation and translation in qualitative research, which concern scholars in cross-cultural/cross-language studies. This study focused on two stages of research work. In the first, a bilingual dissertation was rewritten as a play and installation, and performed in three different venues, with the purpose of introducing audiences to the political crises in South America surrounding desaparecidos, the thousands of citizens who disappeared into the prisons of dictators. The second round of research was carried out through interviews with Spanish and Chinese doctoral students who conducted research and presented it bilingually. The conclusions can be applied to any cross-language study, but especially dissertation studies conducted by PhD students, and such bilingual studies, which address social problems in the international students’ home countries, have broad implications for enhancing and strengthening social justice beyond the boundaries of the United States.
Meaning haunts me. At once its foundations are nebulous and its consequences profound, as bodies are broken and raised on its surface. An artifice that cuts deeply, meaning and its accomplice, the measuring apparatus, consume me. To assuage this haunting consumption, in a series of eight vignettes, inspired by posthumanism, I use a form of artistic inquiry to contemplate meaning and the measuring apparatus in qualitative research.
In States of Denial, Stanly Cohen describes how individuals and institutions know about yet deny the occurrences of oppressive acts, seeing only what they want to see and wearing blinders to avoid seeing the rest. Cohen emphasizes that denial though deplorable is complicated. It is not simply a matter of refusing to acknowledge the obvious, though uncomfortable, truth. Many people "know" and "not-know" about human suffering at the time. "Whitewashing the Past" explores White supremacy’s legacy in the rural Midwest through its telling of a town’s reaction and non-reaction to a truth compromising library display of the town’s Ku Klux Klan’s history. Racial segregation and racial indifference maintain the American caste system that renders African Americans’ experiences as irrelevant to rural Midwest majority White towns, when their very composition as majority White is dependent on exclusionary Sundown policies and ordinances that are "known" and "not known."
This article problematizes the concept of data and experiments with rhizoanalysis to think data in terms of problems, questions, and concept creation. At issue is representation and interpretation, foundational blocks of qualitative research that are incommensurate with rhizoanalysis and post-qualitative research. Deleuze has problematized this issue through questions and experimentation within an asymmetrical world filled with paradoxes that gave rise to concept creation of sense and nonsense. In the Logic of Sense, sense is the event itself. Sense emerges out of nonsense. In this article, representation and interpretation are deterritorialized (virtual becoming) and reterritorialized (actualized) as nonsense–sense and palpation. Palpation is a concept that refers to data experienced indirectly. Rhizoanalysis is deployed because of its non-hierarchical and non-linear approach to data. Multiple Literacies Theory follows a similar path. It releases school-based literacy from its privileged rank to engage reading in multiplicitous and heterogeneous rhizomatic connections. Reading a data assemblage is untimely and not pre-given. It plugs into Multiple Literacies Theory, an analytic approach to reading an assemblage in rhizoanalysis. Reading a data assemblage is explored in a study on how writing systems in multilingual children function and what writing systems produce through affect. A rhizomatic approach is proposed and constituted through a research assemblage whose differential elements enter into a relationality of affect that flows through and transforms the assemblage. It produces a movement that dissolves dualisms in favor of multiplicity, uncertainty, and the untimely. It decenters the cogito human, maps assemblages, and extends experiences of a material world. Posing problems and questions open paths to a future yet to become.
The author utilized a screenplay as performance ethnography to add depth and an alternative means of conveying the stories of young Black Caribbean Franco males living in the Diaspora. The dialogue allowed the audience to witness the conflicting relationship that the youth experienced with technology (surveillance in particular) as both a source of oppression and potential source of freedom. The author posited that this freedom would lead to forgiveness (rooted Arendt’s work on vita activa) and ultimately love and conscientization (found in Freire’s work Pedagogy of the Oppressed) but can only emerge when given the space to be expressed through art, music, movement, or any nonwritten communication that did not further silence the participants.
A follow-up reflection on the writing of "Family Feuds are Forever" explores how writing autoethnographically is not an innocent practice. When we write, we become vulnerable to others’ readings of our words and lived experiences. Yet, as writers of social science texts, we welcome this vulnerability, and in doing so, we discard our innocence. We create interpretations of events and a record for ourselves, and others, that are subject to outside and inside scrutiny. This reflection explores how writing autoethnographically as in "Family Feuds are Forever" challenges us to be ethical with ourselves and others.
Pursuing the notion of verbal rumination as a theoretical method, this autoethnography plays in the space between fact and fiction, past and possibility. A disorganized narrative, by any definition of the term, this repetitive, ruminative, and relational storying plays in the shadows of subjectivities, in fragments of memory and possibility, storying a life lived, half-lived, unlived. Restorying a life that might be, could be, would be.
Through autoethnographic poetry, I take the reader on a journey through my experience of moving to Laramie, Wyoming, to become faculty at the University of Wyoming. As a gay male who is still haunted by the 1998 brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, I engage in storytelling: relaying my personal experiences of living in modern-day Laramie, showing the reader my fears, obstacles, and revelations through prose.
What, within Indigenous modes of health and wellness, can structure a story powerful enough to reduce health inequities in Indian Country? Health inequities in Indian Country have resisted improvements despite considerable effort. Many inequities have stabilized with a few inequities worsening. This article seeks to document the movement of stories for health inequities, focusing in particular on the online presence of wellness programs for diabetes in American Indian communities. Stories, health care providers, those who suffer with diabetes, families, bodies, communities, limbs, tribes, insulin, and traditional medicines all act within a larger narrative that envisions Indian Country without the ongoing devastation of diabetes. The practice of storytelling, as evidenced in each of the wellness programs, itself is an intervention in a health care system that would rather uplift the physicians’ stories of the patients than the patients’ stories of themselves. By considering websites of multiple wellness programs for diabetes simultaneously, the author will synthesize common themes and diagnose gaps in the wellness programs with the goal of identifying components for an innovation that reduces health inequities regarding diabetes. A broad and preliminary assessment of the stories being told about diabetes in Indian Country provides an initial foundation for an innovation powerful enough to improve health in Indian Country.
This autoethnography presents a narrative account of the author’s experience of living and coping with the stigma of deafness. First, the autoethnographic stories explore the author’s experience of face-to-face encounters with hearing people in which he attempts to pass himself off as normal. The stories illustrate how stigma played a central role in the framing of social interactions inside and outside of school. Second, the article draws on Erving Goffman’s theories on stigma and identity management in an attempt to illuminate an understanding of what the author was coming to terms with. Finally, the author offers his own reflections on the stories including details of some life-changing moments that provided the impetus to transform the stigma of deafness into a positive attribute.
This performance ethnography presents a multi-vocal dialog of a group of social workers and social work students dealing with personal and professional issues of critical social work. Performance ethnography is an innovative qualitative research method that uses a dramatic medium to bridge between theory and personal experiences and between research, teaching, and learning. Through personal writing and a discussion of an intervention story, we present our experience with critical social work. The play-like structure presents the group dialog as an important medium for encouraging critical reflexivity and for reviving theoretical critical social work concepts with personal and practical meanings.
This article describes an Indigenous and qualitative research project with 13 First Nation (FN) and Métis youth attending an Aboriginal youth health and wellness program located in the Canadian prairies. Our goal was to collaborate with the youth to co-create knowledge concerning their definitions of health using a convergence of Indigenous and qualitative methodologies. Independent but interconnected themes that emerged are discussed as related to neurodecolonization and the recovery of traditional practices and their contribution to youth resilience. The resilience of youth was reflected in these themes as well as their definitions of health. Our findings point to the importance of acknowledging and validating the role that neurodecolonization practices contribute to healing, both at individual and collective levels. Furthermore, we suggest recognizing resilience as well as viewing health holistically to more adequately understand and address the health-related concerns of FNs, Métis, and Inuit (FNMI) youth.
The author presents ars criteria (the art of criteria) poems as a re-entry into the dialogue about rigor and quality in qualitative research using arts-based research, and poetry in particular. This piece uses found poetry to address questions of critical rigor and vigorous application of criteria in qualitative research. She argues that we need to continue to dialogue about applying criteria with rigor or adopting vigorous criteria and believes that "flexible criteria" exist and should be used when evaluating poetic inquiry.
We present our narrative as an exercise in Critical Performance Pedagogy: Culture Jamming. It is our contribution to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Our collective voice, which is framed as a reflexive layered narrative, is offered to both incite introspection and provide a glimpse into the lived understanding of the "Other[ed]." The call and response-inspired exchange represents indigenous method, and is a challenge to the hegemony regarding the narrative voicing of African Americans. It frames the frustration and subsequent activism of stigmatized people and offers a response to their narrative by a White educator poised to institute culturally responsive pedagogy. It is presented as research method, commentary, and call to action, in this not-so-post-racial milieu.
"A Blossoming of Oranges" is a phenomenological response to two houses of criticism of the creative writing workshop model, the first of which positions the workshop model as a force for cultural hegemony, and the second of which identifies the workshop model as a causal factor for the deterioration of writing in America. This defense is presented in the form of theatrical vignettes, participant writing, and constructed conversations between participants, researcher, and critics. Major lines of criticism are explored, as well as the bodies of research on both the creative writing workshop model and the field of existential phenomenology, as they illuminate the workshop model as an aesthetic hermeneutic that may aid in the artistic development of individuals and the betterment of society.
This autoethnographic account details the struggles to accept my own identity and same-sex attraction. Due to my need to pass, I moved often. With each move, I found the darkness that I needed to survive for it was only in the darkness that I could explore my desire and simultaneously stay hidden. Coming out of the darkness began an intensely difficult journey. This journey takes the discussion of growing up in a shame culture further into adult life and the effect over time that growing up in such a culture has on life, self-worth, and love.
In this article, imposters’ (or fake authors) aim is to problematize fixed concepts such as author, authoring, and authorship both in qualitative research and in organization studies—especially in relation to organizational communications that ostensibly promote and value diversity of (sexual) identity. In seeking to do so, these imposters engage with an IKEA ad and, in a process of "prospective" writing, inductively explore the absence or void of an author through a series of writing events.
Development in digital tools in qualitative research over the past 20 years has been driven by the development of qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) and the Internet. This article highlights three critical issues for the future digital tools: (a) ethics and the challenges, (b) archiving of qualitative data, and (c) the preparation of qualitative researchers for an era of digital tools. Excited about the future and the possibilities of new mash-ups, we highlight the need for vibrant communities of practice where developers and researchers are supported in the creation and use of digital tools. We also emphasize the need to be able to mix and match across various digital barriers as we engage in research projects with diverse partners.
Two central struggles facing activist scholars, including critical ethnographers of education, are (a) power relations researchers and participants navigate and (b) dissemination of our work to reach multiple audiences, including study participants and others outside academia. This one-act ethnodrama was written as part of a critical ethnography of a community change initiative. Ethnodrama is an appropriate choice given roles afforded participants and audience in which emotional connections and closeness of data and experience are highlighted.
This narrative articulates the advantages of long-term autoethnographic logotherapy. I explore how the practice of long-term autoethnographic logotherapy led me to the point where I was prepared for my father’s death, and how that allowed me to let him go before he actually died. I propose that long-term personal narrative and autoethnographic writing are not merely a form of therapy and healing. Rather, it is a practice aligned with existential psychologist Victor Frankl’s conception of logotherapy, literally "healing through meaning." Using vignettes, I interrogate canonical narratives about father–son relationships, especially focusing on troubled relationships, and examine standard notions of bereavement.
The end of the story is all you care about. So, let’s get that out of the way first. Penelope Jane was born on March 23rd. She was healthy. The trauma of that day still resonates within my body, called into being through subsequent visits to the hospital and a review of my own medical records from that day. A life-threatening fever and 9 hours of pushing led to a powerfully negative birth experience, one that I am consistently told to just forget. After she had a weeklong stay in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), I have a healthy daughter. In this article, I use auto/archeology as a tool to examine my own medical records and the affective traces of my experience in the hospital to call into question Halberstam’s advocacy of forgetting as queer resistance to dominant cultural logics. While Halberstam explains that "forgetting allows for a release from the weight of the past and the menace of the future" I hold tightly to my memories of that day. This article marks the disconnects between an advocacy of forgetting and my own failure of childbirth and offers a new perspective that embraces the queer potentiality of remembering trauma.
The author provides a description of a day in jail, beginning just after midnight in early December and ending about 20 hours later. The day involved many interactions with cell mates, especially eight of whom would eventually take the bus to the Mansfield prison. Among other functions, the prison serves as the designated holding place for those charged to post bail. The author’s metaphorical journey from one arrested to one identified as The Professor among his cohort of fellow prisoners leads into a literal journey on the bus to Mansfield. The prisoners imagined the bus, early on, as a horrific representation of their incarceration. Eventually, however, the bus became a symbol of change from the stagnation of place.
In this performance autoethnography, we the authors are inspired by the triple autoethnographic work of Bryant K. Alexander, Hari S. Kumar, and Claudio Moreira. From different moments in their professional careers, they come together to write their biographies into history, creating stories that at the same time resist and demand to be told. Our goal is to write our life into legitimation of a theoretical framework—performance autoethnography—that is not yet accepted in Brazilian academy.
In this article, I explore my fantasy qualitative classroom, one that promotes "paradigm driving," rather than paradigm-driven research. I discuss how paradigm essentialism, ontologization, and idolization, although important to learning qualitative research, get in the way of creative, flexible, and ambiguous approaches to research design. I share strategies for disrupting these forces in the classroom. My exploration highlights the challenges of teaching with multiple epistemologies in mind. I conclude by welcoming failure as necessary to revise my ideals and to stave off the fascism involved in imposing a utopian fantasy and looking forward to how I will work with failure the next time.
This is an autoethnography about the lyrical vagaries of memory. I trace the contours of early life memories, evoked by song lyrics, and show how pivotal events sometimes come into play in startling ways, through the in-breaking of unexpected memory fragments. In the end, I fall into a space in which I hope to open up dialogue about the intersections of memory, song, story, and relational co-being and co-authorship.
Through a three words poem, I share my constructed color voice developed from looking for and sensing my ‘I’ through the lens of worldwide international students in my learning experiences in different international "white" universities. At the same time, my ‘I’ is embodied from my fieldwork with Colombian women refugees or seeking for refuge, and as a Latin American woman living in northern Chile. In this way, interpretive [auto] ethnography is a path to situate my ‘I’ in a context where silences, forgetfulness, and "whiteness" behind our voices are consequences of social, political, and historical forces that have erased our indigenous and multicultural heritage in Chile. Today, the tendency in education is teaching, learning, and acting as if we are White people. This piece is an invitation to think-reflect-look-feel-remember and ask ourselves about what the color of our voice is and what the consequences of this standpoint in the academia are.
This essay concerns my reflection, thoughts, and feelings from the foundations and movements between my heartfelt autobiographical experiences and the fieldwork with Colombian women refugees or asking for refugee status in the current Chilean society. Inspired from the Three Words Workshop, as Performative Writing of Healing and Resistance, I wish to connect my I from a humanity way with the international audience to talk about "Otherness" racism, gender, and social injustice in a border place in Northern Chile. Thus, to connect and provoke audiences, wondering about WHERE WE ARE in the fieldwork with people suffering seen as other people far from us vs. close people as us. At the same time, I ask about WHAT IS our position from the academia to the street. To finish, I reflect about HOW Interpretive Autoethnography could be a way to promote social transformation for a better world.
How to write our history interlaced with the history of so many oppressed humans from so many singularities and shared universalities? We search for an autoethnography that is performative and transgressive in face of brutal inequalities, obvious injustice, and lame justifications by those with more privilege and power "to name the world." We search for a form of being and writing that goes, without apologies, after the structures of power that shape and maintain such systems of oppression. We search in our autoethnography an alternative model of writing that exposes the breaks and cracks of our existence in neo-colonial times. We see betweener autoethnography as a way of being and writing ourselves into the history of resistance against oppression, injustice, and exclusion, one that starts from our common humanity in betweener identities. We write, here, a joint betweener autoethnography against essentialist representations in name of justice.
Norman Denzin has called for a reformed discourse to enable qualitative researchers to achieve a fruitful dialogue about democracy and social justice throughout the world. In this essay, I endorse Denzin’s emancipatory project which uses a critical framework modeled on writers such as Wright Mills, Paulo Freire, bel hookes, and Cornell West. I use material from Freire and Mills especially to suggest that fruitful dialogue also requires us as researchers and writers to become simpler, even "blue-collar," in our own craft-writing. I do so in the hope that we can learn to speak and write "human" and move away from what Mills called the "academic pose."
This article discusses the role of refusal in the analysis and communication of qualitative data, that is, the role of refusal in the work of making claims. Refusal is not just a no, but a generative stance, situated in a critical understanding of settler colonialism and its regimes of representation. Refusals are needed to counter narratives and images arising (becoming-claims) in social science research that diminish personhood or sovereignty, or rehumiliate when circulated. Refusal, in this article, refers to a stance or an approach to analyzing data within a matrix of commitments, histories, allegiances, and resonances that inform what can be known within settler colonial research frames, and what must be kept out of reach.
This article has in its flesh the question of what I, as a qualitative researcher, do, other than code, when I do something I think is "analysis." In 1850, Horne catalogs the ingredients of a huge decomposing dust-heap in Marylebone. It is described as comprising of original heterogeneous contents from all the dustbins of the London locality, as having grandeur and permanence and capable of sustaining life. Resembling the ethnographers’ scrutiny as she distils, condenses, and categorizes data, these contents are searched and sorted in accordance with their ongoing potential, the debris is organized to ensure the appropriation of (re)useable decomposing materials, "the dead cats are compromised . . . dealers come . . . they give sixpence for a white cat, fourpence for . . . a black one . . . the bones are . . . sold to the soap-boiler." Integral to this process of decomposition is the mound’s uncanny life as a recipient of the dead and procurer of new life, as movement sparks from the heterogeneous matter of lifeless carcasses, disintegrated bone fragments, breeze, cinders, and dust. Given this backdrop of decomposition and becoming amid a plethora of life and death, movement and dispersion, this article opens up serendipitous encounters between an ethnographer and some data, whereby analysis is understood as a body encountering another body, or an idea another idea, and it happens that sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. In this encounter, the organic and the inorganic become folded into the other, allowing each to be dragged and dispersed among its own and each other’s mundane detail.
The aim of this article is to demystify what we think we are doing when we engage in qualitative analysis. We illustrate the centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex affective ethical and political relationalities that circulate in, through, and outside empirical research. We explore research processes as "intra-acting" drawing upon Barad, and develop Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of "assemblages," "intensities," "territorialization," and "lines of flight" to analyze research encounters. Taking inspiration from MacLure’s notions of data "hot spots" that "glow," we explore methodological processes of working with "affective intensities." In particular, we draw upon our research with teen girls, mapping out how the discursive-embodied category "slut" works as an affective intensity that propels our feminist research assemblage—from the co-creation of "data" in the field to the "data" analysis and beyond.
This article puts to work a Deleuzio-Guattarian methodology of cartography using data from a pilot study of young schoolgirls’ "school-related" ill-health and well-being. Doing a cartography means setting up a "map" of various kinds of data produced by a multiplicity of desiring agents in various power-producing fields such as medicine, psychology, popular science, media, as well as narrative data from young girls and the two researchers themselves. Together, these data make up a wider machinic assemblage of Public Health in Sweden. As researchers, we understand ourselves as co-productive of this machinic assemblage that, in turn, is productive of a multiplicity of different Bodies without Organs (BwOs) that young schoolgirls fabricate for themselves. The analysis will show the specific types of BwOs that are fabricated, how they are fabricated, the modes of desire that come to pass on them, and thus what kinds of subjectivities of schoolgirls might be produced.
This article explains how the author used Deleuze and Guattari’s concept assemblage to analyze data from an interview study about the reading practices of 10 academics. Instead of coding interview transcripts, the researcher used writing and reading as methods of inquiry and analysis to explore how reading can become a force that enables complex relationships with texts.
In this article, the authors recuperate the mind–body connection lost in procedural and theoretical forms of qualitative analysis. They offer a glimpse into their em-bodied data analysis practice—movement, travel, and dreaming/meditation—as modes of analysis post-coding that respect the physical (body, movement, space, and time) and the metaphysical (dreams, mediation, creative acts) simultaneously. Daza describes her process as percolating, while Huckaby frames hers as trekking.
What possibilities for thinking and expression lie suspended between what we say is a "something" or a "someone" and the forces, multiplicities, intensities, and uncanny relations that effect and constitute its naming—its sedimentation as such? How do we engage in analysis practices that help hold open identitarian thought’s press so that we might learn from the embodied register of previously un-thought forces and creative rhythms; the material-discursive passageways of a life becoming a life? In this essay, the author introduces somatographic analysis as a practice of deeply attuning and attending via poesis, or creativity, to material-discursive data and the subjective emergences they enact. Following a description of somatographic analyses’ practical features and aims, a Working-Class Academic Zombie as figuration gets assembled. This figuration functions as both an illustration of somatographic analysis practices irrupting in the fold of inquiry and an alternative material–theoretical tool marking the limits of classificatory systems for understanding first-generation college students and their paths to becoming women academics.
This autoethnography is about my personal search for my father, who was an early presence in my life, but who gradually became a palpable absence. In many ways, I have been searching for my father all my life, and somehow hoping to rekindle a relationship that I have experienced mostly as something I lost early. As my search progressed across a span of more than fifty years, I found my father in the one place I least expected. In this article, I begin to write my father in a new light, one that offers insights into his legacy for me, and for my sons. In the end, I hope to write our lives in a way that captures just a bit of the spirit of my spirited father.
In this article, the authors take up the question of what they do when they do analysis in post-qualitative research contexts. Working as a/r/tographers who see their artist/researcher/teacher practices as simultaneous and non-hierarchical, they use theory, writing, and collaging to think beyond work produced by "positivist, scientific storytellers." Art-making within inquiry becomes a rigorous articulation process through which sense (rather than meaning) is tentatively fabricated. The article includes a three-part assemblage that conveys how the authors articulate thought through pieced fragments of data in ongoing movements of hoarding, mustering, and folding, the aim of which is not to conclude with answers but to pause, gather energy, and invite comments until questions spur them on again.
This article is an experiment in diffractive analysis. In a diffractive analysis, research problems, concepts, emotions, transcripts, memories, and images all affect each other and interfere with each other in an emergent process of coming to know something differently. The substantive topic that is worked with to open up this experiment in thought is reading anger in early childhood intra-actions.
Thick description is often invoked by qualitative researchers as a form of representation after analysis such as coding has been completed. I argue that thick description can be more productively considered as an aesthetic encounter guiding the research process from beginning to end. Drawing on the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I demonstrate that thick description is more than an analytical consideration of context but is rather an articulation of how we see and understand. According to Gadamer, there is an aesthetic quality to our experiencing that is never completely rendered visible in our accounts. This is because we do not draw on context to make sense of the evidence presented; we see and understand in contexts—physical, historical, cultural, linguistic, moral, experiential, affective—that we venture in, as Clifford Geertz put it, as we conjure our interpretations of what is going on. It is only by allowing ourselves to be guided by the entity of study and critically questioning the complexity of our contextualized responses that we can gain a better grasp of this complex architecture that is analysis.
Coding and data are conceptual twins. This article focuses on the latter concept in particular and opens with a dilemma: We can either follow the root meaning of "data" and say that they are the "givens" that we "collect" and code. In this case, however, data turn out to be mythological, for they are always produced, constructed, or "taken" as the pragmatists said. Or we can say, like some qualitative researchers, that "everything is data," which rests on a more sophisticated philosophical position but which easily renders the concept empty. The article describes a way out of this dilemma by presenting a way to think about (and teach) qualitative analysis that is neither data-driven (induction) nor hypothesis-driven (deduction) but driven by astonishment, mystery, and breakdowns in one’s understanding (abduction). Materials are "taken" and produced to describe or resolve a mystery, which, to me, is "analysis after coding."
In this article, I use Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction as a methodological practice of reading "insights through one another" in response to the editors’ call for examples of analysis after coding in qualitative inquiry. A diffractive reading of data through multiple theoretical insights moves qualitative analysis away from habitual normative readings toward a diffractive reading that spreads thought in unpredictable patterns producing different knowledge. In response to the editors’ pedagogical approach for the issue, the article focuses on an example from previously collected interview data and how a diffractive analysis produces questions and knowledge that are only possible in analysis after coding in qualitative inquiry.
This essay examines the limits of allegedly atheoretical approaches to qualitative research that rely on the coding of qualitative data. The authors focus specifically on the challenge of analyzing socially produced silences. The use of coding techniques for analyzing data is found to be inadequate for documenting the social erasure of a middle school student who does not conform to local gender norms. The article argues that the interpretation of socially produced silences requires the use of theories that explain the source and effects of these silences. This utility is illustrated through the application of feminist and queer poststructuralist theory to the analysis of the experience of the aforementioned student.
This article troubles the seductive nature of coding based on its potential to fulfill the desires for systematicity, procedure, and clarity. I attempt to explicitly narrate what it is I think I do when I "analyze" data in my empirical work. Building on the notion of promiscuous feminist research, I delineate more explicitly how promiscuity became the hallmark of my inquiry while conducting research at a high-achieving, high-poverty urban school. I also discuss how materiality is entwined with theoretical thinking and explore how a promiscuous deployment of Foucaultian discourse analysis and Critical Race Theory (CRT) helped me to see how race works in schools in a more complicated way than if I had used one or the other framework loyally or prescriptively.
Director’s Comments: In 2008, I undertook an ethnographic study to better understand how women negotiated competing discourses of femininity within Southern sorority spaces—women-centered, member-only social societies that promote friendship and philanthropy in American colleges and universities. This final manuscript of three, exposes the small post-structural resistances of discursive discipline that sorority women negotiated both overtly and "accidentally" through mis-repeats as they moved from freshman to senior sorority women at USouthern, a large university situated in an active college town in the Southeastern region of the United States. The following three ethno-screenplay scenes are used to reintroduce the discourses of ladylikeness that have already been unpacked in prior articles, and to further develop and explore issues of negotiation and subversion around those discourses.
Although advocates of mixed-methods research have proposed pragmatism as a paradigm for social research, nearly all of that work has emphasized the practical rather than the philosophical aspects of pragmatism. This article addresses that gap by connecting John Dewey’s work on experience and inquiry to current issues in the study of social research. In doing so, it also addresses the political concerns that link pragmatism and social justice. As a new paradigm, pragmatism disrupts the assumptions of older approaches based on the philosophy of knowledge, while providing promising new directions for understanding the nature of social research.
This autoethnographic account chronicles my experiences living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is generally framed as a chemical imbalance. I advocate a phenomenological, narrative-based understanding of the illness and emphasize its communicative characteristics. I also consider the ways in which creative writing strategies associated with OCD treatment might inform qualitative research practices.
Using a split page structure as a physical delineation between story and analysis, the author examines teachers’ stories of perceived professional risks involved in teaching social studies as a first-year teacher. Collectively, these stories from young teachers tell a larger story, full of concrete, visceral, and textural details of the challenges of induction and the adaptation to varied school contexts. The author finds that young teachers have contextually based and emotionally charged stories of perceived and actual professional risk in the early years of teaching. This knowledge is lived, understood, and re-storied through the stories they share in safe, trusted, and reciprocated knowledge communities, and offers tremendous insight into school contexts, the static nature of instruction and pedagogy, and teacher attrition. Their stories can teach multiple audiences what it means to enter the pressure cooker environments of today’s schools as a young teacher.
This research poem is a hybrid representation of qualitative methods and poetic inquiry. My work with African refugees in Sicily focuses on their assimilation process on the island and among a population that paradoxically both resent them and to whom they are invisible. Their marginalization notwithstanding, there are several initiatives offered to refugees to acclimatize them and to make them "good citizens" in their new "home." Civics class is just one. Assimilation is not a mere abstraction for them. Daily life is difficult for them even after they learn the language. For this poem, I used observation of these classes to "concretize emotions, feelings and moods—the most private kinds of feelings, so as to create experience itself to another person" (Richardson, 1993). Furthermore, Richardson speaks of the (lyric) poems task "to represent actual experiences—episodes, epiphanies, misfortunes, pleasures in such a way that others can experience and feel them" (Richardson, 1994). The writing of this poem involved direct observation and interviews with the refugees resulting in the fragmented representation of vortex of their experience(s) and my observation of their experience(s). I have tried to render both in the most truthful and poetic way possible. I am indebted to Laurel Richardson whose work, among many others, has been my inspiration to use poetry as the truest representation of my work to render the greatest meaning.
This article relishes indistinctness; it revels in hidden spaces and in voices crying to be heard. It draws attention to what is not realized and, in the realizing, celebrates the moving on into the not yet known and the politics of movement. Using a Deleuzian "logic of sense" and sensing immersion in Bachelard’s "poetics of space" the article plays with opacity, fragility, and imperceptibility as mistiness, flavor, perfume, tone, and mood populate its word plays and topics of concern. The article listens to and creates narratives that live in moments as events. The article actively desires to talk, listen, and hesitate in the excitement of dreams of un/dis/re/covery. By tentatively working with and in the post-human, the article toils in the indistinctness of those always opening and closing crevices, fissures, and interstices that dis/appear in the slow-moving glacial heaves, flows, and overflows of discourse and materiality.
This here’s a kick-ass article ’bout a pissed off qualitative researcher who feels that some of you higher ed profs out there got a lotta attitude and need to be brought down a notch. I speak my mind in this piece ’bout a lotta stuff, like me, positionality, voice, labels, method, theory, ethics, and other crap like that. I write like a redneck ’cause that’s what’s in my blue-collar soul. I keep it real. Take it or leave it.
Among the uses of poetry in qualitative inquiry is its ability to help us reflect on, play against, or perform a topic of interest (Prendergast, 2006). This writer attended a conference on the "Pedagogy of Privilege" and immersed himself in the discussion of multidimensional diversities, hence the production of this poem. Written from an etic perspective, this ethnographic poem is not a representation of ethnographic reality (Denzin, 1997; Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010), but an abstraction of composite identities. This poem interrogates categories of sexual and gender identities, acknowledges multiple emotions, embodied experiences, and space; with an invitation for others to integrate their own voices and experiences. This poem is a form of writer’s reflexivity. Pedagogically, this poem could help students of social work and other helping professions to grapple with the complexity and fluidity of gender and sexual identities and the definition of family.
Through a series of asynchronous vignettes, I explore the experiences surrounding my wife’s and my decision to have a home birth. I sought to disrupt the heavy hand of narrative temporality and synchronous ordering through story. The disjointed vignettes speak to the narrative difficultly of trying to parse out an isolated event (a birth) that is fully wedded into a much larger sociobiological fabric. In addition, I anchored each vignette around Martin Buber’s concept of a "life in the middle" through the representation of a symbolic fulcrum. This idea of a fulcrum is predicated on the notion that our lives are difficult to narrate as they unfold and are inherently bound by a multitude of contexts. I suggest that our lives unfold in a sensuous pragmatic aesthetic of presence that is not neatly divided between beauty (birth) and depravity (death) but ripe with potential and meaning that denies duality of experience.
In this article, we use collaborative autoethnography to reflect on the different perceptions that can exist about the same event. We narrate our shared experience during a violent episode in which issues of race, class, and inequality of opportunities were present, involving not only our minds but also our bodies and emotions. We reflect on the impossibility to remain objective and neutral when observing reality.
I have borrowed two images from Graham Greene. The first, hunting roaches, is a metaphor for attacking my own failures as a scholar. The second becomes a subtitle for this attempt to summarize a sorting of my academic life. I first explain why I have rejected autobiography, autoethnography, and mystory in favor of using Greene’s "sort of life" as a way of structuring my scrappy academic experiences. I then use another set of apparently frivolous metaphors to organize the reflective telling of my sort of academic life. These metaphors or processes are presented as a series of life phases: scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing. They are interrupted by a separate "doing nothing" phase, which is a commentary on a chronic case of writer’s block. Finally, I reflect on two more hopeful phases of my sort of life that I identify as usefully "frivolous" and fruitfully "post-academic."
In this essay I broach some of the issues surrounding the teaching of qualitative research methods, not in an effort to necessarily resolve them, but so that we might wrestle with them. Some of the issues concerning the teaching (and learning) of qualitative research include, but are not limited to: the schooling trends of pedagogicization; the politics—global, national, regional, and local—affecting teaching; interpersonal and intrapersonal structures, processes, and relations; the status and hierarchies of knowledge and of curricular subjects; the status accorded research in general and qualitative research in particular; the individual qualities of the instructor and his/her pedagogy; and the nature of the various environments within which teaching occurs. Fieldwork, thinking, and writing—as constitutive elements of qualitative research, are considered in light of the issues raised.
While literary critics applaud Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father for its polyvocal self-authorizations, the book’s broader cultural context shows how politics and public performances constrain possibilities for multicultural identities. The fluid personal identity authorized by the book faces political pressures that require public reaffirmation of dominant narratives of both Whiteness and monocultural American supremacy. I trace specific counterattacks on Obama’s identity during the 2008 U.S. presidential election cycle, including "controversies" around his birth narratives. I evoke my own narratives as a Brown-and-bearded American immigrant to complicate my audiencing of Obama’s performative responses to "Birtherism" even after he was elected president. I focus especially on his interaction with Donald Trump prior to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. In such moments, I argue that Obama navigates away from self-authorizing his multicultural American identities and toward authorizing American power in ways that reinscribe a monocultural nationalism.
Doctors are required to document their examinations of the patient. This task is particularly important in psychiatry, where what the patient says is practically the only source of information available to the clinician. In our article we shall focus on the process of information management in psychiatry and trace the information which was recorded in the patients’ notes back to its origin in the interview. Our data consists of eight recordings of psychiatric interviews along with the patients’ notes.
Our main argument is that the notes are not merely written from the point of view of the psychiatrist, but might have little or nothing to do with the interview. We demonstrate, first, that accurate notes are a record of how the doctor conducted the interview. Second, the notes doctors made also misrepresent the interview with the patient: doctors record false information, distort it, take out of its context.
The author decides to close her long-term practice of clinical psychology. She compares chosen endings with unchosen, traumatic endings. She explores in narrative writing her decision-making process, therapist–client relationships, grief over endings, and what causes one to decide to stop working. She includes a narrative on the influence of grief on life choices, concluding that one can choose, with integrity, to leave what one loves.
This is about developing recursive, intrinsic, self-reflexive as de-and/or resubjective always evolving living research designs. It is about learning and memory cognition and experiment poetic/creative pedagogical science establishing a view of students ultimately me as subjects of will (not) gaining from disorder and noise: Antifragile and antifragility and pedagogy as movements in/through place/space. Further, it is about postconceptual hyperbolic word creation thus a view of using language for thinking not primarily for communication. It is brain research with a twist and becoming, ultimately valuation of knowledges processes: Becoming with data again and again and self-writing theory. I use knitting the Möbius strip and other art/math hyperbolic knitted and crocheted objects to illustrate nonbinary . . . perhaps. Generally; this is about asking how-questions more than what-questions.
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity provides gender theorists with a rich theoretical language for thinking about gender. Despite this, Butlerian theory is difficult to apply, as Butler does not provide guidance on actual analysis of language use in context. In order to address this limitation, we suggest carefully supplementing performativity with the notion of performance in a manner that allows for the inclusion of relational specificities and the mechanisms through which gender, and gender trouble, occur. To do this, we turn to current developments within discursive psychology and narrative theory. We extend the narrative-discursive method proposed by Taylor and colleagues, infusing it with Butlerian theory in order to fashion a dual analytical lens, which we call the performativity-performance approach. We provide a brief example of how the proposed analytical process may be implemented.
In this performance autoethnography the author explores the simultaneity of telling and resisting stories of lived experience. In the process the author constructs the notion of "resisting stories" as autoethnographic performance narratives that both resist and demand telling in the process of making themselves public. Through his memories, the author tries to show the in-possible performance of brown-bodied, curlier hair woman, his Mother, in her yearning to Whiteness. However, the author too, cannot escape the stories his own hair tells. Please, keep your "hair straight."
This article is about improving and expanding on our assessment practices in schools. It is about subjective judgment and autonomy coming together in policies and pedagogies of body and place. It is about performance as/in viable and liable words. It implies a linguistic move from infralanguage to an onto-ontological Derridean heliotropic word awareness and, further, the creation and use of onto-epistemological Deleuzian aoins. The backdrop, thus also data, is an outdoor education project in a high school in Norway. It is called a "joy for life" project aiming to positively contribute to students’ learning, but also to their health and well-being. Through this article it is a goal to show that constant transversal ethical and/or moral-as intrarelational analytical-deliberations are pivotal in intensity moments of assessment and Dewey has been/is always.
This article draws on work around matter and the material in order to examine how (extra)ordinary "things" are used to (re)produce formulaic and predictable performances within the context of an early years classroom. Using ethnographic data I focus on a series of encounters where oscillations between (in)animate objects and the child work at schooling the body. I also note how the "work" of things constitutes a point of tension where on the one hand they are implicated in discourses of normalization yet simultaneously work at "othering." The article also argues that despite their coercive propensities children’s relationships with and through material things can open up possibilities for dislocating sedimented pedagogical practices where "something else" becomes possible.
Amidst late 19th-century efforts to emphasize modern medicine’s transition to a more scientific approach, physicians seeking to represent themselves as scientists began wearing white laboratory coats. Today educational researchers are likewise urged to don metaphorical white coats as scientifically based research is held up as the cure-all for our "failing" schools. However, given science’s vital role in justifying and extending Western imperialism, for members of many indigenous communities, brown bodies and white coats are an uneasy fit. In answer to Linda Smith’s call for decolonizing research methodologies to remedy the distrust between indigenous peoples and scientific research, this article considers how educational research in indigenous and historically oppressed communities could be transformed by replacing the metaphor of the lab-coat-wearing scientific researcher with the trench-coat-clad detective or private eye.
This article seeks to engage debates about integrating pluralisms regarding multiple forms/representations and how they might function smoothly if they are closely aligned. This article offers, narrative poetry with an artistic impression aimed at seeing how these might interact with each other. Like poetry, visual images are unique and can evoke particular kinds of emotional and visceral responses. By offering narrative poetry together with an artistic representation it is not meant to devalue the importance of either, but it is aimed at seeing how these arts-based methods and creative analytical practices might unite as a narrative to offer knew ways of "knowing" and "seeing."
In the field of education, critical theorists, critical pedagogues, and critical race theorists call for academics to engage in activist academic work to promote the social transformation of the material conditions created by racism and other forms of oppression. This article is a response to this call for academics, particularly those in the field of education, to confront inequities resulting from intersecting oppressions such as heterosexism, racism, and sexism as well as to take action to create a more socially just world. Using two years of field notes and interactive interviews, we present a critical co-constructed autoethnography that reviews literature on activist research, offers a critical analysis of our own efforts at activist research and provides a framework for reflecting on the impact of different types of activist research, particularly in the field of education.
This essay explores the relationship between seemingly unrelated natural and personal events and the political upheavals in our global community.
Studying abroad changes students in unexpected and remarkable ways. This article shows how students in the University of Georgia Cannes Film Festival Study Abroad Program navigate paths toward more cosmopolitan worldviews, thanks in part to improvised educational practices. I write from an autoethnographic perspective, informed by Bhabha, Said, and Appiah, as I explore how my students’ study abroad experiences with the European Other awaken memories of my first encounters, as a wide-eyed Midwestern boy, with European cosmopolitanism decades ago.
A complicated title may put some readers off. Others may be intrigued by the complexities that a messy title suggests. "Un-doing a title" is an essay that focuses on unraveling the threads of Hanna Guttorm’s messy article "Becoming-(a)-Paper, or an Article Undone." The essay, first, introduces titology and titles and subtitles as paratexts. Second, it examines the title’s main concepts, namely, Becoming, Paper, Article, Undone, (Post-)Knowing, Writing (Again), Nomadic, and Messy, which structure the article. It concludes with brief comments on topics raised in the main text including that of academic texts as love letters.
This is the account of an attempt to conceptualize a poststructuralist metaphor analysis of the use of the term gender as designating a domain of research and study. In the first section of the article, I explain the choice of empirical materials, which is taken from the discussion section of a seminar on Gender and International Development, given by Professors Naila Kabeer (School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS]) and Elaine Unterhalter (Institute of Education [IOE]), at the London International Development Centre. I then delve into the contradictions of poststructuralist metaphor analysis, while trying to construct the foundations of an analytical method from the tatters of my original understanding of a linguistic metaphor analysis. In the second section, I offer a sample analysis of the seminar discussion text. I finally return to the two questions posed in tandem by this piece: How does "gender" operate as a designation of a domain of research and study? Is poststructuralist metaphor analysis epistemologically possible?
In this article, we discuss not only the complexity of some difficult ethical issues but also the peculiar and reciprocal engagements that emerged during the research process carried out with Jimmy Sax, along with the ways in which we have attempted to deal with the ethics of research to avoid a reproduction of processes of Othering in the field of critical disability studies. In the existing body of qualitative research literature, an increasing number of researchers document their experience of the issue of situational and relational research ethics. However, since research evolves as an activity embedded in social, political, and historical contexts, we argue that qualitative researchers should also embrace sociopolitical research ethics. In that vein, inspired by poststructuralist (and) feminist philosophers, we identify and discuss two different conceptualizations of research ethics, referring to care for the other and care of the self.
The development of transcription poems is presented along with the authors’ borrowing from found poetry to create the research poetry form archival or artifact poetry. Archival poetry has roots in the arts such as the traditional poem centos, contemporary found poetry, and appropriation in the arts. Appropriated poetry exemplars are included. The authors advocate for a space they term good enough poetry for researchers to write what at first might be "inferior," but what might develop into refined poetry. The following areas are discussed: (a) merit, (b) who should write poetry, (c) becoming a research poet, and (d) accessibility.
This is a live world writing story about my stay as visiting scholar at the Department of Communications, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign with Professor Norman Denzin during the Fall of 2012. It is a story about open-science economy safespaces otherplace learning and benefiting from uncertainty and confusion and the love of adventure and jazz. It is a story about the bike with the pink tires leaning calmly against the wall of the ROTC Building, guarding the gate against invaders, and growing deeper shades of red as the weather shifts.
Where lying down is a simple physiological act, lying down among people is a far more complicated thing. When my own body requires me either to lie down in public places or absent myself from the social world, I face complicated questions about who I am and who I want to be in a world where I do not conform. Interweaving diaries and memory with conversation, observation, secondary research, and reflection, this autoethnographic text is a celebration of the rebel body and of a search for a more curious way of being. Unfolding a collective need for courage to break rules that cry out to be broken, Lying Down Anyhow begins with my body but is, more truthfully, a tale for every body.
The story presented here is adapted from my phenomenological dissertation project, which I wrote as a multigenre dissertation in a format similar to a teen magazine. It is a story of bodies and girls and resistance. It is a story of an incredible group of seventh grade girls of color who embodied some kind of agency in resistance-to a phenomenon I named bodily-not-enoughness: those moments in American culture when someone or something tells girls and women we are not enough of something in our lived or physical bodies. Because this story is about lives that are not yet over, I present it in the way that stories are lived: fragmented, selectively, contextually constructed (Richardson, 1997), and with plenty of interruptions.
The three poetically renarrated accounts presented below arise from data collected as part of a qualitative exploration of therapists’ experiences of disenfranchised grief in relation to the suicidal deaths of their clients. The first poem encapsulates the raw emotions experienced by one of the participants, Murray, in relation to his client’s death. The second and third poems reflect upon the ways in which his experiences were subsequently silenced by his client’s widow and by his broader personal and professional contexts. As will become quickly apparent, by revisiting and recasting the original narrative data through a poetic lens, a richer and more palpable means of understanding the impact of client suicide on therapists is offered than that provided by conventional narrative text.
This article revisits a narrative space opened by writing a master’s thesis on history teachers’ identity since a biographic-narrative approach. Teacher identity is understood as a process of becoming through a complicated conversation about our educational experience; a conversation with ourselves and others. The work takes the shape of a play in which multiple voices come together to tell this story.
This essay addresses Mexican villagers who sustain community amid social dissolution that accompanies poverty and U.S.-bound migration. Villagers manage signs in behavior and discourse to foreground feeling and thought of pastoral life and create emotional and intellectual detachment from the effects of a modern one. This management shows how people mitigate contradiction to produce a context that supports how they feel and think collectively. Narrative represents participants’ speech, behavior, and setting to highlight poetics and approximate a cultivation of community, a performance-based approach to ethnography.
This performance-based autoethnographic work is inspired by the epiphanic moment in the author’s life. By depicting a woman struggling between families’ expectations to her and her own dream, the author demonstrates the complicated nature of the structure–agency interaction and sympathizes with those obedient daughters who inherit the family traditions with understanding but simultaneously are confined by the past. The haunting ghost of the woman’s family is her late grandfather who was executed as a political criminal. Always trying to please others and compensate the loss and sorrow in the family, she finally failed in intimate relationships and expelled herself to an exotic culture, where she felt settled since she carries no labels or past there. The moment of reconciliation did not solve physical problems, but helped her reexamine the painful family memory and move on with courage and agency.
This Mystory begins with a letter to my father’s physician regarding the VA’s decision to deny my father benefits for his service-related cancer. In reflecting on memories about loss, agency, community identity, and the environment, the narrative that follows reaffirms the integrity of place, while also serving as a platform for questioning discourses that emphasize lifestyle variables as the primary source of disease. In challenging the VA’s decision, I allow for what Soyini Madison calls a "politics of possibility."
This article examines how user action and subjectivity interacts with the imperatives (program, curricula) of architecture. Embedded within designed space are assumptions, directives, possibilities and limits that affect the bodies/subjectivities inhabited by a user. Both by making explicit (de-constructing) the unspoken implications of architectonic language and by describing the embodied experience of daily usage, I depict the inherent paradox of waiting in a place designed for passing on.
This article utilizes poetic representation of an oral narrative to explore the wartime experiences of Jackie (Cole) Hanauer who as a child lived through the repeated bombings, displacement, distress and uncertainty of London during the Second World War (WWII). This poem utilizes a poetic critical ethnographic approach and extends current historical research on individual experiences during the Blitz that have focused on personal literacies against the backdrop of mythic and stifling perceptions of this historical period. The methodological approach consisted of recording, transcription and transformation into poetic form using the guidelines of poetic rendition. The resultant poem offers emotional insight and experiential understanding.
A discussion about bricolage is presented in a one-act play, a qualitative comedy in the making. The play takes its initial shape from Pirandello’s "Six Characters in Search of an Author" but is transformed into a more academic, but occasionally comic, dialogue. The characters engage with a journal editor by weaving the ideas and often the words of academic writers into a script about bricolage as a qualitative research strategy. The characters, three of whom are Shakespearean in origin, also borrow or steal lines and bits of plot from other plays, especially "The Tempest." The comedy ends with another comic offering, a bricolage about bricolage.