Qualitative Conversations

In this special episode, Qualitative Conversations hosts a panel discussion with scholars who weren't able to present at the 2021 AERA conference due to technical difficulties. The particular panel session discussed in this episode was titled Critical Participatory Inquiry as Sabotage and included the following participants: Meagan Call-Cummings, George Mason University; Giovanni Dazzo, George Mason University; Sharrell Hassell-Goodman, PhD candidate in the Higher Education Program with a focus in Women and Gender studies and Social Justice at George Mason University; Alexandra S. Reed, George Mason University; Rodney Hopson, U of Illinois-Urbana Champaign; Melissa Hauber-Özer, George Mason University & Jesuit Worldwide Learning; Elisabeth L. Chan - Northern Virginia Community College & George Mason University.

The following is the transcript of the conversation.

Rodney 0:24
Good morning. Welcome. I'm Rodney Hopson, a faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign professor and evaluation in the queries division, Interim Director of Korea, really excited to have some colleagues here today talking about some really critical issues. If you didn't get an opportunity to hear a Ura, I was discussing for the roundtable disruption, interruption and change. It's not enough. What we need is sabotage, critical participatory inquiry as sabotage in and of the Academy. So I'm going to open up by having our colleagues introduce themselves and their key ideas and then come back around with questions of dualism.

Melissa 1:16
I'm Melissa Hauber-Özer, as I recently completed my PhD at George Mason University in the international education program. And our first paper in the panel was a collaborative counter storytelling piece that I co authored with Megan, Sharrell and Elizabeth which examine an incident that occurred within our ongoing YPAR project or youth participatory action research project. And this incident, and then our conversations about it after the fact pushed us to consider our power relations within the collective and then especially around race and gender. And then our relationships or interactions with the host institutions within which you're doing this critical, participatory work.

Giovanni 2:05
Great. Thanks, Melissa. My name is Giovanni Dazzo. I'm a doctoral candidate in research methodology at George Mason University. My article was titled small acts of sabotage, unraveling expertise to push for restorative forms of inquiry. And in this paper, I've been reflecting on my personal background and how I needed to bring this into my own methodological work. And as a doctoral candidate specializing in critical methodology, I needed to acknowledge my identity as a child of Sicilian immigrants being raised in small rural California town, into a family of farmers and laborers. For example, in farming communities, when we see smoke billowing from an open field of crops, this isn't necessarily a sign of danger, but one of renewal of coordinated and careful sabotage. And when done carefully, this practice called slashing burn or slashing cover has been ecologically sustainable for millennia. So I started to think about qualitative research in this way, what type of lens needs to be cleared, burned and left uncultivated for some time, and reflecting on which methodological processes have been around for so long, that they're worth burning down? So in this paper, I discussed three areas. How often are We inspired by the words of our co researchers and community members, so much so that they should be cited alongside the greats who have 1000s of citations, but where we relegate their words to the finding sections of our papers? Second, I started questioning my parsimonious citation practices. So in some cases, I simply use terms like double consciousness and simply include parentheticals for WEB Dubois, and our usual APA and Chicago styles. But it's almost an eraser divestment of knowledge divorced from the historical, contextual, political and racial. So this small act of sabotage has required me to credit and balance the words of others at the expense of my own. And last, I've begun to explore what I call known methods or those that community members and I already use in our daily lives. So when I talk about these non methods, it's not about erasing our knowledge as researchers, but more about acting in humility to unlearn our methods through the act of recognizing community expertise. So I don't simply dissenter, my experience or romanticized community members traditional knowledge, which is another issue in and of itself, but recent are both acknowledging each as residing in expertise. Thank you, Giovanni.

Rodney 4:48
I'm

Sharrell 4:49
looking forward to reading your work. Hello, I'm Sharrell Hassell-Goodman. I'm a PhD candidate in the higher education program with a focus in Women and Gender Studies. And social justice. So my paper is a self study as a result of a black feminist critical participatory action research project, in which a group of 22 undergraduate and graduate women of the African diaspora and when I say African diaspora, we represent black African American, African, Afro Caribbean, Afro Cuban and Afro Latina women operate as a research collective. Throughout this manuscript I explored an in darkened feminist epistemological approach to critical participatory action research as an act of sabotage to radically center black women's knowledge as legitimate. I document the ways in which I navigated in negotiated my ethical commitments and obligations to the research collective, through critical events analysis. Along the way, I realized that my voice around knowledge shifted, and my orientation in the classroom was disrupted. I look at three incidents around my experiences in the classroom throughout the article. Using the researcher journal as data and critical events analysis as a framework, I explored the following questions. One, how does a first generation woman of the African diaspora a researcher come to know to what does it mean for black woman's knowledge to be interpreted as legitimate? And three, how is research an act of self sabotage? As a result of this study, I found that in darkened feminist epistemological approach to participatory action research is critical to undo the ratio of black woman's knowledge in the academy, exposing the nature of white supremacy that maintains normative confines within the Academy is to understand the challenges associated with other cultural norms and standards, specifically black women to be seen as legitimate.

Elizabeth 7:00
Thank you, Sharrell. My name is Elizabeth Chan. I'm an associate professor at Northern Virginia Community College, and also a PhD candidate in multilingual, multicultural education at George Mason University. And I worked also on the paper together with Cheryl and Melissa and Megan that, Melissa, so very well outlined at the beginning.

Sasha 7:28
Thanks, Elizabeth. Hello, my name is Sasha Reid and I am a PhD candidate at George Mason, studying special education and qualitative research methods with special interest in intellectual and developmental disabilities inclusion, and accessible and equitable research opportunities. I'm in the process of completing a three paper dissertation which is aimed at understanding the concept of inclusion at the post secondary level, from young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities through a critical participatory inquiry project. My panel paper was titled sabotaging method the tensions of accepting responsibility. And I'm drawing particularly from paper three, which documents the process of how I've approached navigate, and in reconciling my researcher responsibilities and commitments to my researcher group during the entire traditional research cycle process. So question, design and approach, data collection, data analysis, and deciding on next steps. And I'm really focusing on where and how I'm yielding my position of power to disrupt that traditional cycle, and where I can design or simply leave room for organic participation to occur with participants with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Throughout I'm grappling with the following questions which guide the paper from the era panel? What is recognized as Reacher research in my field, field being special education and disabilities? And how am I now forgetting the difference between a method and a way of inquiry to Who is this research for and three, how is my power and positionality as a person who does not identify as having disability tied up in this tension of responsibility, my responsibility to produce knowledge that's deemed academically significant, as well as my responsibility to meaningfully include a commonly forgotten population in the research arena.

Megan 9:52
Thanks, Sasha. My name is Megan Call-Cummings. I'm an assistant professor of research methods at George Mason University where we're all From in one way or another, so I specialize in participatory feminist and critical qualitative methodologies. The paper I wrote for this panel is called sabotaging significance, a call for less research and more organizing. The paper is kind of a description of my journey of sort of critical reflexivity and kind of messy and fluid processes of both and sometimes simultaneous adaptation to and also rejection of the status quo within academia. So over the course of the last seven years, I've sort of shifted professional positions from doctoral student to university faculty member and I've kind of flipped back and forth often between a research trajectory that I would consider to be kind of like edgy and anti racist, but still within the bounds, like the safety bounds of being deemed acceptable. And then research that kind of tries to give the middle finger to academia to you know, my university, even my future tenure committee, right? It's like, whatever I'm going to do what I want. If I get tenure, it is what it is right? So I kind of flip between those two often. So the paper follows this, this messy journey offering vignettes to illustrate the kind of difficult process of really, completely altering the way academia understands and applies the intertwined white supremacist concepts of rigor, validity, trustworthiness and of course, significance. So these concepts and practices, I argue in the paper are applied routinely and often invisibly, as tools of domination and control, as as much that calls itself research. So what I argue in the end, is that what we need, just like Eve tuck has said in this moment is less research and more organizing. And I wonder, you know, how would we measure the significance of such a move? For you? Awesome.

Rodney 12:02
Well, let's go back to you. Actually, Megan, because I'm familiar with your work in this panel, seems to be an offshoot of some other work that you've been doing been asking, bringing in other saboteurs and other critical participants in this space. So what led us to this particular work at AERA in this presentation? And tell us a little bit more,

Megan 12:24
if you don't mind? Thanks, Rodney. I appreciate that. So, yeah, we were all part of a class last summer, this summer of 2020, I had planned to facilitate a special topics class on decolonizing methodologies, really, because several students, you know, like the ones here and others had kind of come to me and said, this is something that they needed. So I put together a syllabus during the spring semester, I knew it would be online because of COVID. And then you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was like less than a week before the class actually started, that George Floyd was murdered by police officers and on protests for racial justice erupted across the US and the world. So that not only became I mean, the sense of a backdrop really doesn't do it justice in terms of how it affected that class, it was like this simultaneous experience, we were all living in different ways, because of our different identities and connections to racial injustice, and things like that. And so, so it became these class discussions were like rich and messy and raw with vulnerability and anger and resentment of academia, and are places within the structure that's so often thick with injustice and inequity, but simultaneously have as so many people working for justice and equity. And it was actually one of Giovanni's posts, I think, along with some of Eve Tech's work that we read together, I believe that that suggested the idea of sabotage, right? The idea that what's needed now is, as Giovanni said, burn the place down, or start little fires everywhere, right? What's needed now is is not more research, right is not more research into what's wrong or who the problems are. But it's about organizing. It's about scholars becoming an activist and taking responsibility and ownership of these processes. So we talked a lot about being tired of academia or the way things are in higher ed the status quo. And so that's kind of what led us to the idea of this panel.

Rodney 14:33
Yeah, that's, that's, that's quite helpful. Maybe I'll just pick on you Giovanni, as well to talk a bit a bit about both the theoretical frameworks that have inspired this work around subtour mean you don't have resistance. You don't use like resistant or resist or and then mean. Tell us more about what it is for you to bring those. Those frameworks slash and burn from the farming. Italian migrant. Please make the connection.

Giovanni 15:01
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first for me, looking at conceptual and theoretical frameworks I've been using more recently, I have put aside the academic literature, I have spoken with my grandfather, and spoken to my parents. And first and foremost, I have also spoken to community members that I work alongside in Guatemala who are ..., Maya, farmers, laborers, community members. And so when I started to think about theoretical frameworks, and what it means to theorize, I stepped away from the traditional scholars because I felt this needed to be my first small act of sabotage in unraveling. What I was socialized to think was expertise. So as now, as I construct conceptual frameworks or theoretical frameworks for my own dissertation, and various articles, I actually start with the words of community members and cite them alongside the greats, including Paulo Freire, a bell hooks, Martin barro web Dubois. But second, I've been engaging more and more with sociological theory and Communication Studies since I typically conduct applied research and program evaluation on human rights and justice initiatives. So Daren Barney's work on sabotage and the politics of withdraw have been pivotal for me, as it provides this theoretical grounding and critical theory and historical examples of sabotage, and how we don't really talk about sabotage when we engage in Marxist theory, and thinking about sabotage and and this politics of withdraw. I've been engaging a lot with the work of activists and scholar activists who talk about the politics and epistemology of self determination. Everyone from Kwame Nkrumah, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill-Collins. And then following on that, when it comes to these citation practices that I talked about, I argue that the way we cite is similar to what bud Hall and we're just 10 done in their 2017 paper on decolonizing. Knowledge call accumulation is dispossession, a term they credit to the work of geographer David Harvey. So in their example, just as universities stolen accumulated land by native and indigenous peoples to build campuses that would then dispossessed them of the right to then live, earn and learn on that land. We do the same as we race to accumulate as many citations of our own work by citing the work of great individuals that came before us, but forgetting those who inspired us in the communities we work in. So I see this as a form of resistance and refusal. In the words of Tuck and Yang to this parsimonious language, we're often forced to use just another small act of sabotage to the way that academics and citation habits unintentionally or intentionally silence entire populations. And when I think about this idea of known methods, I credit the work of Ignacio Martin barro, who was an El Salvadoran, Jesuit priest, and psychologist. And he called on researchers to de-ideologized everyday experience by working with communities to co construct data through routine practices. So now in our collective, we explore how ... Maya, traditional oral traditions and storytelling, as well as their traditional ceremonies can be integrated. But then also, I've pushed back against my own methodological associate realization and asked, what, how did I collect data before I was a doctoral candidate, when I was in a farming community. And so for Italians, it's often that we take a stroll. And so this is what I've been doing with my co researchers is that we often take us take a stroll, and we talk and they narrate their experiences and their landmarks. And an Italian it's called body on the passage of that. But now I think of that as one of my methods, one of my known methods that I've actually forgotten about, because I've taken so many courses on research methods. So that's really how I've been thinking about these small acts of sabotage. That what if we brought in more of our own every day, when we thought about method, rather than solely recognizing the easy things that we identify where we've carefully constructed ourselves through methodological training?

Rodney 19:44
Hmm, let me. I'm not going to unpack that. I want to ask Sharrell to do a little bit of unpacking, actually. And thank you for that, Giovanni, because you've, you've left us with a few things to think about. What's your role I'd like you to to help us think about this balance. This this balance, oftentimes is contradiction in this tension in the academy between and picking up on some more Giovanni says was known methods, methods that exist and trying to engage in some methodological sabotage he makes it sound like we should be in the form of the farmland. But we're we're not always in the farm level we're calling one. We're calling out other others. So how do you? How do you think about this?

Sharrell 20:34
Yeah, I think and this, your point really segues nicely to what Giovanni was talking about to lay the groundwork. And I think, you know, I try to think about my epistemological and ontological commitments, and to what into whom my research is answerable, and accountable to thinking about Patel's work, like specifically, I tried to engage in anti racist and D colonial research methods that center those that have been on the margins. And I try to be concerned with the lived experiences of others, and how they are centered in research. I think it's easy to get focused on identifying problems, to justify our research. But really, we have to be careful with these Western paradigms that center deficit perspectives, that focus on fixing people rather than attending to oppressive systems. With all that said, we also need to be mindful of the ways in which white logics and white supremacy is embedded within our research methods, and how we must work to retool and think about our methods and who they're excluding who they're exotifying and how they're dehumanizing people. What assumptions i think is also something that we need to be looking at, we're making when we utilize certain methods, what biases do these methods possess, that we need to account for and interrupt? If we say we are committed to methodological sabotage, I also think that that means that we need to be slow to conduct research. So similar to what Megan was talking about, and really thinking about why am I interested in doing this research? Should I be the one to conduct this research? What is the impact of conducting this research? Who will benefit from this research? You know, also thinking about how power is dispersed within this research? How will this research be disseminated? Right? For example? Is it published in a fancy journal? Or is it available and accessible to community members? And so so those are some of the things that I think about when trying to balance the commitments within the academy and the expectations, while also thinking about ways to sabotage methods and methodology?

Rodney 23:04
Helpful. And thank you for the references. Let me ask you, Elizabeth as well to, to to think about that as well. Because one of thinking about John's stance feels working some of the notions that he lifts in terms of rethinking the ethnocentric reproduction of knowledge in our social science and universities. So how is it? And how might we as academics begin to engage in some sabotage in the academy with these largely older, oppressive, patriarchal systems that have been traditional, and have been driven in a euro and American thought for hundreds of years?

Elizabeth 23:47
Yes, definitely. Thank you for that question. And kind of when I start out thinking about just the act of sabotage, and even just starting from that word, trying to get other academics on board with the idea of sabotage and thinking about it as a deliberate subversion to the system, that we are intentionally trying to be destructive or obstructive to the system. Right. And I think that's a good point that Cheryl had mentioned is just keeping the distinction there in mind between the difference between person to person versus looking at it and institution or system. And so, I mean, another way to think about sabotage is to think of it as as historically when people use the word sabotage, like some sort of plan or sabotaging your, your employer, right, as we mentioned, a way to kind of hinder the manufacturing right would be an example that workers or the labor movement would get involved in. And thinking about the post secondary education system. And with the rise of neoliberalism within the system, where we as educational experts are increasingly being treated, right like parts of this kind of machine, that we're we're churning out these monocultural body of, of laborers, right for the workforce, and a growing discontent that is felt by academics and educators. But it kind of with that, we also seen a little bit of this growth of apathy, as well, which I think kind of works against that, this feeling that this is the way things are going to be right, or the tides kind of swinging back and forth. And we'll just wait for things to swing back the other way. So in other words, they're thinking still within the system, rather than questioning the system and thinking about how we can start to do some of that deliberate subversion. So I feel like, especially right now, there's a lot of attention, people are paying more attention. Because I feel like it's always a political time, right. And there are always activists who are working and mobilizing and social movements are happening, you know, all the time. But right now people are, are paying more attention. And I think, to sabotage, you have to be willing to risk, right. So you have to be able to risk social, political, financial, other forms of capital. And so for many academics, I feel like that's a sticking point. That's a hurdle And in order to get more academics involved, I think we take advantage of that the fact that people are paying more attention now. And when people feel that motivation, maybe it's anger, or frustration, or around a certain issue, you do get more people on board. But it's not quite enough, because people need to understand why the issue is important. And that includes understanding the long history. And as you you mentioned, thinking of it in terms of ethnocentric understanding, then we know that there's that responsibility for people to do some of that internal work and learn more of that history and why it matters for them personally, and their responsibilities to that issue. And so knowing that history and questioning our own positions within it, and within the systems, then we continually reflect about what powers and privileges we have at doing that individual work. And I think during, at the same time, we start to build these relationships between peoples and between the academics within the community. Together, we can feel more confident in questioning the ideologies that are there and critiquing the institutions and the systems together. But to do that, I think we have to lay out a very clear vision of what the end result is going to look like, what we share in this vision, and to give very clear first steps that feel reasonable and doable. And then as we work together in that way, we, we have to understand that say we are supporting each others not quite enough, right? That especially right now, we hear a lot about I'm in solidarity with you, or I'm in solidarity with your communities. But again, we have to put our capital where our mouth is. And so solidarity is embodied practice, right? It's an embodied action. And it's a relational action, right, where we grow relationships with people in different communities, and that's from Fuji Connie. And so I really draw upon that idea to try to think about how to bring more people within the academic community together around these issues.

Rodney 29:46
And that's very, that's profound. Let me let me move to Sasha to hopefully find a way to think through that. So I'm taking a lot from Elizabeth points here sash and one of them around relevance has to do with maybe one of the things you spoke on earlier the relevance of your work. Who's this work for? and responsibilities. Tell us a little bit about yourself your work in the relevance of your work around your topic as well, please.

Sasha 30:23
I'm thinking about two points that Elizabeth made one. That The time is now and that we need to take first steps, we need to have a few clear first steps. I do agree with those two points. I do think the time is now. And we cannot ignore the centuries of dangerous and dark histories of research, particularly with individuals in what are deemed marginalized or vulnerable populations. One of which is the community that I work with individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Between between the recent efforts of the last half of a century trying to prevent the mistreatment that was their riddling their past and the socially accepted view, not my view, but the socially accepted view that these individuals will not understand the research or construct knowledge, therefore they have no interest in research or being included, included in the research has resulted in no research, including this group, it's lacking. In addition to that, there's not only a belief that this group will understand or group marginalized groups won't understand it's that there's a distrust of the data. So what they do tell us what we do listen, what we do hear from them. We don't believe in order to triangulate that data, we go somewhere else to trust the source. Oh, the academy and hope and what I'm trying to work on sabotaging is chipping away at that episode femicide, you know, D'Souza to Santos says, killing of knowledge, and particularly for the disability community, we've had centuries of killing knowledge. The research has not only been dirty and painful, it's led to silencing and truly killing of the knowledge production. it perpetuates systemic exclusion in research, and continues this gap gap between individuals with disabilities and knowledge production. I really think that's relevant to my work. And it's particularly dangerous in the fields that I'm in. Because special education and disability research tend to emerge from social sciences, social justice fields, right. And so the research that has been done, maybe seen as benevolent, but in fact was really harmful and contributes to the injustice in the silencing of an entire population. Additionally, to me, this work is really relevant because I like shut off that I approached this through a social construct of disability, not medical, not deficit view. biodiversity, including neuro diversity is natural, it's important, and it's everywhere throughout our world. Be Academy be institutions Higher, higher ed may still be an ivory tower. And I recognize that I am a tenant in that tower and rather rather comfortable. So how can I use my comfy position to push back push back what what the research mode looks like? In particular, for this dissertation? It's it's not following a traditional steps outline in any of our qualitative textbooks. It's it's not hitting all the check mark the checkboxes for a phenomenological study or for a participatory action study. But it is still solid work on my group doesn't fit into some sort of qualitative matrix. And I wonder, can this be okay and I continue to answer yes, it is okay. This is good, solid work. I am engaged, engaging in conversations and dialogue with my research community and I am exercising federates Trust through dialogue. These co researchers are the experts because of their lived experiences. And I want to center the experiences as expertise instead of well, the method wasn't followed through to see if that makes sense. I also enter this research with a background in explicit instruction, like training students. And a lot of these young adults have come from the school system, or the community system where they were trained to sit, listen, obey, copy, blendon, do what they do, do what somebody without a disability does, and giving room and space for doing whatever you want, say what you want, don't give, don't answer the way you think it is, or a test is a small act of sabotage for this particular community. But I I think that can extend to other marginalized groups as well. So really, I think just knowing that I'm a privileged white woman who does not identify as a disability as having a disability. I have a lot of power and then I can shake up what the privileged white male scientists and scholars have laid out for the last 100 hundreds of years. And I'm excited to continue working with my group beyond dissertation and hopefully lay out some new frameworks that can be used to be more inclusive.

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Rodney 37:19
Thank you, Sasha, that's also work that seems quite important and significant. And I want to dovetail your comments and relevance and issues of responsibility and carving new spaces to Melissa. How might we fear those who critique the saboteurs? What, how do we how do we respond to the status quo, to those who say that this diversity is about deviance or difference is really about deficit. Help us using some of the words that Evan Gordon has written in the paper as well that I'd like to come back to with other colleagues that help us Melissa, what do you what do you think?

Melissa 38:26
Well, I would say that it's more important now than ever, to, especially for those of us who identify as as white, we have a responsibility to engage in explicitly anti racist work. Now that these racist systems and structures have been revealed to us we've been we've had these blind spots for centuries, as Sasha has said, especially in relation to people with disabilities that we have these movements going on right now reached the racial justice movement, of course, in the context of which we wrote this paper. And then as we revise the paper, and then it got it accepted for publication, more and more names are being added to the list, victims of police brutality, and now we see a rise in anti Asian hate crimes. And for me, personally, my research is with refugees. And there's been a lot of contention around the issue of forced migration and refugee resettlement in the United States. And here in Turkey, where I live, there's a lot of polarization around Syrian refugees, what their rights should be a long term outlook. So I really believe that this is the time that we need to stand up and push back Actually, this idea of sabotage is that we're working from the inside to dismantle these racist systems and structures. And so what we tried to do in our paper was start with ourselves, especially for Megan And for me as, as white women who have these blind spots, we wanted to engage in a really structured process of reflexivity, in order to kind of sensitize ourselves to how these incidents feel very different for our core researchers of color. The particular incident that we look at in the paper seems relatively simple. On the surface, that white man who works in the university in the facilities, actually he never identified himself basically accosted Elizabeth removing a table during this research event with us. And then, as we dug deeper, we saw how it was really racially charged, looking at it through Elizabeth experience, and through chevelles experience of trying to intervene and find some resolution for this incident. So I wasn't even at the event actually. But for me, it was a really important process of looking at how, how I'm missing the point in these types of interactions, how in my own research with refugee youth and young adults, I might be missing something that's, that's really affecting their experience some structural issues or interpersonal issues. So we took this approach of critical race theory and actually critical whiteness theory to examine these these kind of layers through a critical race praxis from Nam Moto, where we look at the experience and rethink it, and then translate it, looking at the how these racist structures and patterns of white supremacy are operating in our society and our institutions that are supposed to be safe havens for diversity, and then engagement, which is really grappling with the tensions that can happen within our research collectives in our interpersonal relationships, and then trying to center the experiences and knowledges of these communities, marginalized communities, and working towards more equitable curricula, policies, practices. So in my own research, I'm trying to do that with refugee populations. And it's, it's hard, but I feel that this is really our the commitment that we need to make as critical qualitative researchers to engage in hard work. Because we have this privilege, and we need to do more than just position ourselves as allies, we need to break down these structures from within those of us who have privilege have, perhaps more power to work towards change.

Rodney 42:46
Well, I'm inspired. I don't know how much time we have and I don't know how much more you all have to say. But I want to thank you all for your appealing to ... of our communities, the self-determination. And not being wedded just to the university's own understanding of knowledge and relevance. Thank your for ... your pushing that notion of that understanding is the pure soul of what this work is about. Thank you as well for your parrhesia for your vulnerability for telling the truth. For not being afraid and coureagous. So as I turn back. I couldn't help but thinking about some things I'm thinking about now. The centenial year of professor Edmond W. Gordon who is celebrating his 100th birthday next month at the Teacher's College in a series of Webnars. But there are a series of activities this whole year. I hope you all can participate in celebrating this giant of a man. He wrote in ed research with fellow colleagues. This notioon called community centered bias, which is quite nice. Communitiy centered bias is this notion whcih he eterms as a tendency to make one's community the center of the universe. and the conceptual frame the frames all thought. He suggest that this androcentral, culturo-centric, ethnocentric chauvinsim known as community centric bias is rampid. And you all simply displayed that in yourconversation. I don't know if you all have anything else to say but I certainly would welcome your thoughts and some dialogue a bit back and forth,a bit more sabotour.

Giovanni 42:46
Well i'll go first I I think you know with the work of of Edmund Gordon and and how he really brought forth affirmative, voices in the affirmative, as opposed to always looking at the achievement gap as a as a deficit, but one thing that i've seen as as small acts of sabotage.

And really pushing back against this idea that our Community is the Center of the world.

You know this is, this is a big thing in even Italian culture in Roman times Rome was was the Center of the world and that's actually something that often comes up in in Italian culture as much as. The nation has has struggled I would say there's still this this idea that Italy, of course, bread, the Renaissance, they had a number of other cultural and philosophical philosophical advancement, but getting into anti fascism and Neo Marxism there was the idea against this this cultural hegemony through the work of Gramsci and. And really in the Italian resistance movements in the Polish resistance movements.

Looking back at those they had tiny acts of sabotage, or what the the Polish called small small sabotage your minor sabotage admit it was.

They were things as simple as not acknowledging that you spoke German, even if you did or giving people the wrong directions simply so they would go the wrong way.

And these are also things that are continued to be done in Italy in Rome.

Just to mess with tourists, but I would say, even in my own work, and not only my studies, but my my full time job within government sometimes you have to not speak the same language as people and and recognize that so then it's a type of calling out and calling in to say.
I choose to be different, and even though the work of sabotage is meant to be.

Under the radar you still have to expose yourself, and I think that's important, I think. That type of authenticity in one's work comes out when.

You enable yourself to.

To be present to be visible as a Sabbath tour.



Sharrell 42:46
I guess I can go.

Next I.
appreciate those examples, Giovanni because it's even thinking about my work and what i'm interested in doing is.
working to site black women right and thinking about black feminist knowledge and it's contributions to the Academy that's often seen as an oversight.

So I think about the work of Anna Julia Cooper who brittney Cooper and her work kind of in her work of beyond respectability draws from the work of Anna Julia Cooper.
As this comparison approach right so specifically thinking about that as a methodological approach that's committed to seeing.

The black female body as a form of possibility and not a burden and centering the black female body.

as a means of black social thought, so I think it's about you know thinking about these different approaches and who are we centering.
Right and so when we move beyond a deficit approach that seeks to sabotage Western ideas around research.
You know, really exists, particularly we think about black feminist work exists outside what we think of as the Western research cannon.

And so, how are we thinking about that work to infringe upon conventional notions of social science.

and acknowledging the rebel relevance and the importance of centering black woman's knowledge is legitimate, so I think when we think about these acts of sabotage, we are thinking about.
You know these ideas of resisting familiar Western paradigms that are oppressive in nature.

Even thinking about scholars work like Dr kristin Smith, who creates a campaign calling cite black women in response to the academic candidate frequently you know doesn't recognize the intellectual and you know contributions of black women right, and so I think that's that's something that is really important that we're paying that we're considering we're thinking about these notions of sabotage and what does that actually look like and I appreciate Giovanni your connection.
People, you know that we often don't see as intellectual so i'm thinking about black women are folks that were enslaved. And their acts of resistance and what does that look like and how do we take that to to the next level or how do we take that a step further and our own research, so I appreciate your connection Giovanni and just wanted to add my perspective as well.

Rodney 42:46
Any final thoughts... You know... here's mine. And i'm just passing the baton. I'll tell you what it looks like. It looks like folk who have and can draw on a history of resistance not others not borrowing others resistance songs. Like I don't need Giovanni's farm songs Italian folk songs I have my own fucking songs in my own history if you don't know yours get yours. It's like Langston Hughes. The song the poem is I Sing America, I am the darker brother they sent me to the kitchen with company comes, but I laugh and eat well and grow strong tomorrow i'll be at the table and and nobody when a company comes. Nobody will dare seat in the evening coaching them there's a there's a form of resistance that's what it sounds like find your own resistance songs live your life.

Welcome. Tervetuloa. My name is Mirka Koro, I come from ASU, and I go by she and hers. I would like to acknowledge the land on which I am standing here in Phoenix and the original Hohokam caretakers of this land. I would also like to thank the Egon Guba awards committee and QRSIG chair Jessica VanCleave and her executive committee for this amazing honor and opportunity to share my thoughts with you all.

Despite my indefinitely youthful appearance and my love of Apocalyptica, I have a somewhat lengthy past with qualitative inquiry. Aaron, Juha, who are my stimulating discussants, Egon Guba, and I are entangled in our past and hopefully our experimental and philosophical qualitative inquiries will keep forming and shaping new relationalities among us and others in the future. I think it was 1998 when I attended my first AERA, heard amazing talks, and met Egon and Yvonna. At that time, I also attended my first QRSIG business meeting and thought to myself how excited I was about qualitative inquiry, stimulating scholarly exchanges, thinking, doing, theories, and paradigms. Egon’s Paradigm dialogue and Yvonna and Norman’s leadership with QI and ICQI were very inspiring for a beginning scholar. Since early 2000s Aaron’s work on methodology, Foucault, philosophy, ethics, and responsibility has been intellectually engaging and provocative for me. My entanglements with Juha, in turn, extends even further in linear time. I met Juha during my master’s studies and he introduced me to the world and practice of qualitative inquiry. I remember vividly attending Juha’s lectures and methodological seminars describing his exciting field work. His critical scholarship, philosophical knowledge, work with Freire’s legacy, and intersecting lines of methodology are truly inspiring. Mahtavaa etta olet taalla tanaan Juha videon valityksella! Entangled narratives, shared professional and personal histories, paradigm dialogues, multiple matter of and within factory and working-class town of Tampere Finland, meetings rooms of SQUICK in Athens GA, endless sunlight and scented orange blossoms of Phoenix AZ come together today.

I have multiple titles for this presentation yet all of them are quite inaccurate.

Title 1: Restless methodologies and speculative wonderings multiplied
Title 2: What does the light have to do with this?
Title 3: Lived scholarly possibilities of (methodological) multiplicity
Title 4: If we take speculation seriously…we need to multiply- also methodologically
Title 5: Lost in the words but still alive-- many methodological lives of qualitative matter

As you can tell, I deliver this talk with much speculation and hesitation. My methodological wonderings will not have core components or clear argumentative logic. The talk might not even offer anything new especially if one considers the relational nature of knowing and situatedness of being as simultaneously historical, already already here, and always multiple. Light encounters, in turn, have everything and nothing to do with my presentation today. This talk is designed to be light in its effects- dizzy, requesting little effort, having little weight, move away from inner light and truth, something that informs, to ignite and spark. I hope this talk may offer some provocations in the form of thoughts, wild ideas, images, light effects, and conceptual and theoretical movements and more. Maybe something I will say or do will enable you to enter the difference, feel affect, sense and live the methodological light/lightness and darkness differently, and access alternative spaces through unthought connections and different ways to work through and live realities of inquiry, methodologies, and qualitative relations. Still designs fail and continue with their hesitation.

Provocation 1: Close your eyes and see. What methodologies become possible?

I will wonder about the potential and possibility embedded in speculation and speculative practices in a methodological world where many worlds fit. Some of my thoughts today are prompted by the way I live and experience qualitative inquiry as a contemporary reflection, mirror, and actor in our complex and political global world. Many qualitative scholars are excited about opportunities related to experimentation, theoretical connections, onto-epistemological freedom, justice and ethical orientations research can offer. We have been inspired by the post, (new, feminist) materialisms, and more-than-human movements. We showed that qualitative research is needed, driven by practice, and can create different knowledges and knowledges differently. Recently, the field has also experienced ontological and relational turns paying more attention to ecologies of life and inquiry. However, some of my excitement has been tamed by artificial theoretical boundaries, conceptual regulations, standardized citation practices, overly descriptive guidelines, and other political ways to manage learning of qualitative inquiry and monitor experimentation processes. Occasionally I find myself mourning for more liberatory practices, worlds within worlds that stay open and welcoming in infinitum. Sometimes I feel saddened by the epistemological and ontological violence that we might have practiced against our community members, sisters, and brothers. It is also possible that I am late to the game, delayed in my reflections, dwelled in the past and we have already lived methodological pluriversity quite productively and practiced responsible collectivity for some time. However, I am truly inspired by visible and hidden potential, more inclusive vision and unthinkable hope for qualitative inquiry as a methodologically pluriverse community.

This talk includes interrelated flows of relationality including speculative, experimentative, methodological, and plural flows. Speculation offers opportunities for creative imagination, hesitation, reflective questioning, and thinking with unthinkable futures. Experimentation reminds us that much of qualitative research is crafted in shifting practice, in artistic relations (Hannula et.al., 2014), and within different and internally creative and active time-space-matterings (Barad, 2007). Responsible methodologies and methodologists (see Kuntz, 2015) are needed while current methodological practices are radically re-visioned. Pluriversity and pluralism, in turn, are thoughtful choices toward more collective equity and ecological diversity. Finally, all of these relational flows ask for open-endedness and creative potentiality embedded in our ecological and relational onto-epistemological systems and practices. The flows come and go, relating and connecting logical and illogical ways while always creating alternative time-spaces.

About experimentation

Some years ago, I wrote about methodologies without methodologies, about methodological spaces without faces, names, and predetermined categories. I was interested in methodologies with inaccuracies and defects, abnormalities. At that time, my problem was the insufficiency of language, methodological non-imagination and inflexibility and my focus was on theoretical and methodological difference in infinitum. Now my breakdowns are more relational and material. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) reminds us about a scary and lonely world without others, specter of difference, and the cruel and toxic identitarian politics. Now I see more clearly the vitality in pluralism, caring and sharing communities, and perceive the endless becoming of many. Worlds within worlds, methodologies within methodologies, researchers within researchers – in other words the multiplicity and methodological pluriverse are the worlds I want to talk about today. I also argue that for us to live the plural and many (also plural and many methodologies) we have to imagine. Qualitative inquiry is not a world without a difference and since its first visionaries and documented imaginations qualitative inquiries have been conceptualized as the other, multiple, and diversified. However, somewhere during the journey we may have lost our vision of this kind of relationality and collectivity. The paradigm and dialogue of difference can also be problematic since it is often guided by dualism and hierarchization leading toward methodological barricades, partition, ontological erasure, and epistemological colonialization. Furthermore, from the perspective/paradigm of difference one can also more easily locate and narrow down the ‘toxic methodological other’ simultaneously forming master subjects and methodological narratives. I think it is important to remember that perceived methodological differences are not natural but constructed.

Provocation 2: Turn off the lights and sense the material you are sitting on. What methodologies become possible? If your momentary relationality to matter could speak, what might it say?

In addition, I want to remind us about qualitative dreams, dreams of qualitative researchers, and the power of the unexpected. How might us, qualitative scholars, live our inquiries and allow more and infinite spaces for adventures of ideas and concepts created and crafted by scholars, surrounding materiality and all citizens of the entire world- not just the citizens of global North. For Whitehead (1967) adventures (of ideas) illustrate slow drifts of mankind toward betterment and civilization; a historical movement and adventures of framing the explanations influencing history. Not only the western history but the history of all humans (and non-humans). Adventures include a wide variety of mental experiences shaping human lives and their histories in diverse global contexts. Ideas also experience their own local histories. How do ideas arise and are infused, how ideas and concepts related and blend? How do ideas multiply in the infinite pluriverse?

Furthermore, it is interesting to think with Whitehead also in the context of methodology. Methodological language has rarely been ‘correct’ and accurate and more importantly methodology has rarely been independent from other processes. Rather, I imagined methodologies outside the fixed, pre-determined and premeditated steps. Methodologies function as spaces for experimentation and as experiential experiences themselves. These processes have always had drifts, movements, and own collective histories potentially without causal and individual history and necessary linear logic. These kinds of methodologies still excite me. More specifically, speculative methodologies and experimental plurality seduce. Thinking with thought pragmatically—guided by transformation, application, and practice—has produced a series of experiments in my work including experiments with text, language, discourse, concepts such as data, slowness, seduction, academic conference machine, (methodological) darkness, methodological landscapes of desert, write-scapes, matter such as writing-feeling flamingos, ghost, shadows, monsters… and more. I practice methodologies while simultaneously recreating, reshaping, and reformulating the world we collectively live with and within. Methods do not order or predict the world, but they create an emerging sense of worldly events. Erin Manning (2016) noted that “Thought must not be mapped onto practice: it is an emergent, incipient tendency to be discovered in the field of activation of practices co-composing. To map thought in advance of its speculative propositions would diminish the force of study and reduce the operation to the status of the creation of false problems and badly stated questions.” (p.41).

Experimental and plural methodological history does not start or end. Slowly and gradually, one may become interested in open-ended inquiry, problematization, and been drawn toward multiple simultaneous and conceptual shifts. Theoretical and pragmatic ruptures lead to inquiry and seductive forces of matter and images. For example, some years ago I was drawn to Baudrillard. Baudrillard’s work prompted me to consider how the signs of reality create a duplication, a virtuality, hyperreal, which made it impossible to separate true and false, real and imaginary data, matter, and concepts. Baudrillard helped me to see that objects and data can have their escapes, strategies, and resistance. “The more object is persecuted by experimental procedures, the more it invents strategies of counterfeit, evasion, disguise, disappearance” (Baudrillard, 2000, p. 79). During my qualitative research methods courses students produced virtual and hyperreal data, they ate their interview transcripts and documented the possibilities and impossibilities outside Cartesian dualism. Collectively with my peers I sensed methodologies and processes in dark rainy forests, words formed 3-dimensional cartographies, and sounds moved me toward more than human and beyond singular and humanistic dialogues. My scholarly body grew tired of linear logic, clear argumentation structures, and valid research processes. Academic conference machine took over my international collaborations and our ‘crazy gang’ willingly allowed tables, dolls, gorillas, pacifiers to take over and participate in our becoming and knowing. Materiality produced us slowly but steadily, relationality heavily guided our collective thinking-doing and enabled us to sense the world around us and thinking in action. The AcademicConferenceMachine and its striated spaces and regulatory intellectual organization created disturbing effects and we saw this machine as a reliable, regulatory, structured organizational space, a space of (non)repetition — which runs the risk of becoming so regulating, normalizing and standardizing. We had to conference otherwise and desire to craft alternative spacetimes collective grew upon us. Later, our sensing outside sensibilities and exploring text outside textual practices were guided by Poly-experimentalism, a multifaceted experimentation addressing multiplicity and plurality in their various forms. Following the practices of Delamont and colleagues (2010) who encouraged scholars to make the familiar strange, listening Norman Denzin’s (1970) proposal that sociological imagination should shape methodological thinking and practices, and more recently being inspired by imagination and performance philosophies that have emerged through representational innovations such as interactional theaters where “scientific” research is performed. Furthermore, methodological experimentation acknowledges the diverse processual, intellectual, and methodologic examining and forays that take place when scholars extend discourses and habits of thought as well as extend on common routines that seem to become habitual practice in research projects. Drawing from my work with Linda Knight we argue that methodological experimentation is difficult to pin down with a singular author, text, meaning, practice, discipline, tradition, discourse, or even example because it can vary in scale and impact as experimentations are diversifying practices. Instead of focusing on conceptual singularity and practical linearity of the methodological past, seemingly fragmented thoughts and acts are united through the concept of “poly” and multiplicity of methodologies across different flows. In my recent work on navel gazing my collaborators and I started thinking about research assumptions and practices that we keep hidden. This led us to think about ‘navel-gazing’ as one practice of excessive focus on the ‘self’ through aggrandizement, ornate reflection, or even self-plagiarism and self-citation. We laughed at the idea of looking at one’s navel--the image is a silly one--but we decided to try it. One by one, we tried gazing at our own navels and then discussed the experience, theoretical and methodological insights, and silly recordings of our philosophical conversations. The proximity of navel created an interesting paradox. One’s navel (including one’s scholarship, knowledge, reality, truth, practices and so on) became intimately connected to the physical body of the researcher while at the same time it was acknowledged that navel is rarely seen, closely inspected, and infrequently deep-cleaned. Yet (researchers’) navels form intimate connection to internal organs, trace baby’s connections to their mother, bridge the external with the internal, and also offer ultimately useless space and unused place of human cavity and relationality.

According to Whitehead (1967) experimental inquiry avoids routines which force intellect to vanish and conditioned reflexes to take over. “The very essence of real actuality… is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing” (p.274). “A learned orthodoxy suppresses adventure” (p.277). Experimental work forms a fertile ground for troubling our learned orthodoxies and problematizing simplicity in its’ various forms. Wonderings about many possibilities of theory shaping inquiries, thinking beyond the thinkable methodological practices and countering existing practices can be generative. Methodological experimentation also offers endless possibilities to reinvent inquiries and re-conceptualize qualitative research approaches especially when experimentation functions as a vehicle and strategy to live our lives as inquirers. Whitehead (1959) distances speculative Reason from its (scientific and traditional) methods. Speculative reason’s “function is to pierce into the general reasons…to understand all methods as coordinated in a nature of things... the speculative Reason turns east and west, to the source and to the end, alike hidden below the rim of the world” (p.65). Speculative reason questions the methods not allowing them to rest. Whitehead explains how Greek thinkers advanced speculation by being curious, probing, questioning and trying to understand - everything.
About speculative speculation

Next, I will discuss some speculations of speculation. Speculation offers multiple strategies to think beyond the known, recognizable, and predictable. Speculation slows one down and forces us to think about alternative scenarios and differences. It does not take anything for granted and it is fueled by adventure. Created knowledges can travel from one location to another. Since 2007 speculative scholarship has taken many turns. Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, Harman’s object oriented philosophy, Grant’s neovitalism, Brassier’s radical nihilism, Bennet’s vital materiality, Barad’s agential realism, Whitehead’s process philosophy to name a few. In many ways speculation offers a response to the slow, hesitant, complex and uncertain world of methodological multiplicity and diversity that many of us live in and hope to acknowledge as a reality found and reflected in our scholarship. Speculative scholarship is tentative and thus rather impossible to repeat, teach, and even describe partially because language always fails. Speculative experimentation is less concerned about how materiality and research matter might talk back or have human agency and more interested in acknowledging that research matter’s dialogue and agency is possible and likely beyond human understanding, language, and consciousness.

Like any theory, speculative theories are meaningless if they do not enable scholar to experiment and figure out things in the world. According to Weisman and Gandorfer (2021) “theory inhabits the gap between sensing and sense making. It is a sketch, a set of speculations of how to ethically and politically understand what we experience” (p.401). Weisman and Gandorfer exemplify speculation through forensic architecture which builds on a split of a second as a durational and lethal concept. Duration and spatial coordinates of a split of the second are in the continuous flux of matter, actions, and meanings. The indeterminate nature of split of the second makes this time-space lethal and extremely dangerous since it reveals the larger picture which unfolds within this molecular scale of time. A split of the second also functions as a zone of endless exceptions. In addition, Weisman and Gandorfer offers us matterphorical concepts as concepts that express the entanglements of matter and meaning within specific time-space frames.

One might ask who benefits from speculation and why I propose that speculation is potentially needed and necessary in today’s Academia, scholarly climate, and field of qualitative inquiry. Our world is rapidly changing and we can no longer predict the most suitable methodological futures. Speculations may form infinite ways of life beyond academic capitalism, rigid citation indexes, and tenure clocks. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) referred to caring as a speculative mode promoting interventions to become. Methodologies that speculate also wonder yet they don’t verify, offer fixed solutions, or pretend to understand the other and different. Instead, they care, connect and create educated guesses and various scenarios of possibility building on the exploratory, imaginative, and visionary powers of speculation (see also, Somekh, 2007). In some ways, speculation is about choosing and deciding without predictability and foreseeable future. Speculation also raises many questions without answers. For example, does speculation carry with itself an immanent critique of stability, norm, and of the anthropocentric? What critiques and collective discursive practices become possible within flat ontologies?

Kaljonen et al (2019) described speculative approach to experimentation building from the philosophy of science, being open, hesitant, and involving participatory events. In this kind of experimentation, ‘participants’ can imagine and create new practices and framings. In speculative pragmatism qualities and knowledge are not mental building-blocks of real but practices ontologically emergent within nature. They are pre-objective and pre-personal functioning in shifting time frames. According to Manning (2016) “speculative pragmatism means taking the work’s affirmation, its urge of appetition, at face value, asking what though-feeling does in this instance, and how it does it. It means inquiring into the modes of existence generated by the act of “hypothetical sympathy”, honoring the minor gestures produced at this interstice, and seeing what these open up, in a transversal maneuvering (p.39-40)”. What might speculation do to a thought, to a thinking in action?

Speculative inquiries, hesitant and slow scholarly projects are choices and these choices often come with bodily and material consequences. For example, speculative inquiry might emerge from collective subjects, immanent concepts, and relational objects urgently functioning as a crisis, pause, hesitation, horror, and revolt. New non-linear logic of speculative experimentation could function as non-consistent forces and dispersive matter. Can speculative projects forget their material and affective pasts? one might ask.

How might spontaneous/restless/lightless inquiry feel?
What might methodological hospitality look like?
What degrees of freedom could today’s methodologies afford?
How might speculation and speculative practices function in responsible ways?
How might qualitative scholars think in knots and by tying themselves into knots in relation to spacetime and place?
How could methodology as a matter of persuasion appeal to the experience of the other?

Finally, “speculative philosophy has an irreducibly aesthetic dimension; it requires new, bold inventions rather than pacifying resolutions” (Shaviro, 2014, p.43). Shaviro writes that aesthetics includes feelings an object for its own sake beyond its legitimacy, usefulness, and interpretation. Aesthetics of methods offer affective potentialities through their relations and senses. More things are felt and sensed than known. Methods are a matter of degree and the world of methods is the world of experiencing relational differences. What happens to methods when the observer, individualism, and capitalisms are being removed? Maybe Alien phenomenology (Bogost, 2012) could offer some examples. Bogost draws attention to strange relational life of non-humans which could be analyzed through units, lists, excessive betweenness, configurations, and non-linear patterns. For example, when we can eliminate likeness-in-human-terms (within our scholarship), we may be able to attain the innerness of things of un-nameable units. What it is for the bat itself? Caring is creating and scholars could be moving from the problem of access to the problem of being with. Shaviro also proposes that “Knowledge is just one particular sort of relation- and not even an especially important one at that. Most of the time, entities affect other entities blindly, without knowledge playing a part at all” (p.105). Thus, Shaviro encourages us to speculate about things and experiences that we cannot access directly. Touch can be felt but not necessarily known. Every instance of beauty is something new.

About (speculative) pluriverse

Stengers (2018) in her book Another science is possible emphasizes the power of curiosity to bring things together, collectively and slowly change our world. [Slowing down science] “should involve an active taking into account of the plurality of the sciences, in dialogue with a plural, negotiated and pragmatic (that is, evaluated on its effects) definition of the modes of evaluation and valorisation relevant to different types of research” (p.52). After all sciences and inquiries are collective and value of individual and individualization is measured as a part of collective dynamics. According to Stengers speed also creates insensitivity. “Slowing down means becoming capable of learning again, becoming acquainted with things again, reweaving the bounds of interdependency. It means thinking and imagining, and in the process creating relationships with others that are not those of capture… the kind of relation… what a life worth living demands, and the knowledges that are worth being cultivated” (p.81-82).

Could we imagine and experiment with methodologies which do not belong to ontological hierarchy? “All entities, of all sizes and scales, have the same degree of reality. They all interact with each other in the same way, and they all exhibit the same sorts of properties…Ontological equality comes from contact and mutual implication…They all become what they are by prehending other entities” (Shaviro, 2014, p. 29). The flattening of ontological hierarchies such as form and ground, past and future, foreground and distance could serve as productive provocations. Within this logic all methods are also embedded in other methods. Methods interact with each other also without human involvement. Methodological entities are distinct from each other only due to hesitant decision and spontaneous selection while still functioning within shared methodological and relational ecologies. Novelty arises from the act of positive decision and the act of decision is spontaneous and it cannot be predicted. A decision about methods needs to be done but it cannot be predicted or determined in advance. However, the creation of enabling constrains may assist scholars with these decisions and guide the processes of choosing, adding, subtracting, relating, juxtaposing, tweaking, and recombining and more.

Provocation 3: Travel with a light beam in your home office/current workspace. Where does it take you? What methodologies could be added and subtracted?

I conclude by advocating for methodological multiplicity in a worldly and experiential way (see Reiter, 2018). The world of multiple worlds, Pluriversity, is not an ontological project but a project of praxis. Escobar’s (2020) vision of pluriverse, following the Zapatistas concept “a world in which many worlds might fit” (p. 26) oscillates “between a politics of the real and a politics of the possible – between pragmatism and utopianism” (p. 226). Cultural, ecological, and methodological transitions characterize methodological movement within the pluriverse. In addition, this kind of methodological pluriverse takes into account biophysical, human, and spiritual elements. Diverse zones of contact beyond anthropocentricism become increasingly important. A methodological pluriverse of justices, matter(ings), and forms of critical qualitative inquiry offer new and alternative imaginaries. Mignold (2018) proposed that “pluriversity is not cultural relativism, but the entanglement of several cosmologies connected today in a power differential” (p.x). In methodological pluriversity methods and methodologies do not function as independent units but they are entangled through and by networks. One schema for methodological organization and design is no longer sufficient and different methodological approaches lay next to each other as pieces of mosaic. Mosaic methodologies search for alternative, limited, and contextual methodologies which potential is endless. Any form of knowledge is always in relation to other knowledges and methodologies. When methodologies are recognized as many physical, material, spiritual sites they are also brought closer to human and non-human lives and many materialities of these entangled spaces. Life maintaining and communal methodologies of the South and consuming and possessively individualistic methodologies of the North come together various hesitant but important ways. We desperately need more qualitative methodological sites outside the North America and qualitative research practice needs geographical decentering.

As we further consider critical qualitative research that focuses on the complexities of justice matters(ings), the politics of research cannot be denied. Escobar (2018) provides a vantage point from which research can be approached as a political practice. He envisions a relational future which entails “the steady decentering and displacement of the capitalist economy…decentering of representative democracy and settling into the place of direct, autonomous, and communal forms of democracy; and the establishment of mechanisms of epistemic and cultural pluralism (interculturality) among various ontologies and cultural worlds” (p.76). In this kind of methodological world, methodological development is no longer the organizing principle but, rather, a variety of experiences and strategies are considered valid. Methodological processes are always under construction and criticality of our worlds and scholarship is a relational task and imperative. More specifically, this alternative world, a pluriverse, would carry forward epistemic decolonization, alternatives to methodological development, transitions to post extractivism, notions of civilization crisis, and communal logics.

In addition, pluriversal methodologies build networks, assemblages, naturecultures, socionatures and strengthen distributed agency (Bennett, 2010) and and. Maybe it is a time for negomethodologies drawing from Shaw’s (2014) African feminism beyond individual methodological ecos and a move toward expanded ecological methodologies. It is clear that qualitative scholars are faced with modern methodological problems which do not have modern methodological solutions. The current methodological crisis has to do with specific kinds of world-making practices and fundamental methodological dualisms (theory-practice, mind-body, researcher-participants, reason-emotion, insider-outsider etc). More so, dualism itself is not the problem but hierarchies established around the binaries and hierarchical classification of difference shape our practices in problematic ways. Enacting non-binary and flat methodologies could be seen as a requirement for transformation and radical change. Healing of our fragmented methodological past and ontological practices by acknowledging hurt feelings and emotions could serve as one point of relationality. Massei (2004) encourages us, also qualitative researchers, to engage in the geographies of responsibility. It is good to remember that by designing methods/studies we design beings. Methodological design is as much ontological as relational task.


About (methodological) futuring

Escobar encourages us to think of the act, process, and design of futures; futuring- in this context methodological futuring. Methodological futurings can redesign themselves and work through breakdowns. It could be argued that the field of qualitative inquiry does not have methodological problems but methodological breakdowns. Methodological breakdowns bring to the forefront our current practices and tools. Some of these breakdowns might be anticipated and the insufficiency of current methodological tools offers opportunities for creation, experimentation, and invention. The shift from problems to breakdowns also positions knowing as relating and highlights connections rather than taking distance from the problems. How might methodologically sustainable futurings and productive breakdowns function?

I agree with Ziai (2018) who problematizes progress and development especially since methodological progress and development does not always lead to democracy but potentially to various forms of violence and oppression. “There is no objectivity that can determine other people’s position and what they need. Socialization and economic planning are not necessarily the keys to a better world” (Ziai, 2018, p.124). A vision of different methodological world could include multiple scenarios. For example, existing ‘methodological rules’ could be changed at any time, all scholars could modify ‘rules’ based on comparable consequences, scholars would be able to leave methodological communities without exploitation and exclusion, dependency on specific kind of scholarly connections and citations would need to be eliminated so methodological dependency does not limit alternatives and make it impossible to leave the field and move across subdisciplines. Focus would be shifted from politics of discipline toward the politics of relationships. These kinds of scenarios might also mean that we need to unlearn various forms of hierarchical cooperation and expand our theories of free methodological connectivity and relationality.

What if,
…theories of systems and ecologies could help us to understand challenging problems.
…objects and materiality could provoke thinking-doing without being themselves thought.
…we could create diverse methodologies that protect and restore ecologies.
…everyday life would serve as a context for methodological experiments.
…we could support more place-based and globally networked methodologies.
…we might utilize emergent encounters and participatory solutions and processes.
…qualitative inquiry would build on continuously changing and diverse transdisciplinary knowledges and minor practices.
…there are no more of the same but scholar go more frequently for the impossible.
… the field of qualitative inquiry rotates methodological obligations and responsibilities.
…the field of qualitative inquiry could create communities of radical methodologies.

If light makes vision possible, I would like to end with one additional alternative title: “Other methodologies are possible and new methodological sensibilities on their way. It is time to dim our lights and see (the invisible)”. Thank you.



Jessica:
Thank you so much Mirka for your inspiring and thought provoking talk as always. You always leave me with a lot to process. So, we are lucky that we have two fabulous respondents this evening to help us process and think through some of what you presented us with. So, our first discussing is Aaron Kuntz.


Dr Kuntz:
Thank you. Oh geez you turn on the zoom video and I feel like I'm staring at my driver's license photo which isn't a great thing so my apologies in advance. Well thanks so much for the paper and for inviting me to respond. I'd like to thank, of course Mirka for this provocative paper. My mother always told me that I don't listen well and she's right so it was a delight to have the paper and material form as engaged with the ideas and to see I was privileged enough to see some drafts, as it went through so it's really neat to see how things are processed. So there's much to engage within this paper and Mirka's work more generally. So, for the sake of time. I think I'll focus in on notions of experimentation, plurality and ethical engagement in somewhat entangled order and offer a sense of inquiry, as an experimental way of making the just imbued with an ethical force for change. I'll begin my offering to overarching questions that this talk, provoked for me. Question one, what are the problems, to which speculative experimentation, respond or engage, or question to what problems are made possible through speculative experimentation. What breakdowns are enabled. So these questions arise because problems and practices and strategies are productively entangled, as do lose in glossary note, all concepts are connected to problems, without which they would have no meaning. And so I wonder about how the very notion of speculative experimentation are connected to problems and particular context, one potential issue might have to deal with the anxiety inducing problem of chaos anxiety for me anyways, that if we have no definitive future, nor defined present, then we live in a chaotic world, and speculative and experimental practices only amplify that multiplicity. Importantly, Elizabeth Grosz notes that chaos need not be understood as absolute or complete disorder, but in her words, rather as a plethora of orders forms with forces that cannot be distinguished or differentiated from each other. It's, it's for me it's the blurring of definition that manifest chaos. the overabundance of order, not its absence. So perhaps this is part of the effect of sadness or worry that permeates some work today, and creates I think into Marcus words that we have too much order, we have too much form too much will the excess of which overwhelmed and chaos ensues. As there was a braid it notes. This in her terms, too much this is one of the sources of exhaustion, which mass marks, so much of our current predicament, and ultimately brings about a shrinkage of our ability to take in and on the world that we are in, simply because it hurts too much to take in, and on. So, we perhaps turn to experimental engagements with this too much this this xxs that exhausts, which brings its own problems, of course, and that's a good thing.

So on experimentation. I'm not creative, never claimed to be at least not in the conventional sense of the term, I can't sing, or I can but my singing does not mean even the most progressive claims of aesthetic worth. I'm also not a visual artist as such things such as experimental inquiry approaches, often simultaneously astound me scare me move me and closed me off from engagement, a multiplicity of effects, indeed, if I am creative I suppose it is through a sense of conceptual creativity, but I have manifest through an ongoing engagement with philosophy. Again I turned to Elizabeth gross who considers philosophy, the way would wayward sibling of art, a kinship as both enactments emphasize the degree of experimentalism as a means to create new relations, new problems, a few future not yet created as gross so eloquently writes, I love this phrasing she has twin wraps over chaos philosophy and art, along with their more serious sibling, the sciences in frame chaos. Each in its own way, in order to extend something consistent composed eminent, which it uses for its own ordering and also the ranging resources. There's a double mess here, right, of course that calls forth the productive potential and reduction of philosophy art and science, in one sense speech allows for a means to encounter chaos in meaningful ways. And another sense such processes of ordering might well lead to attaining of difference, a closing off of potential in order to allow for things to, Well make sense. And so as we engage with Marcus provocations, wondering what methodology is become possible when we dim the lights. I wonder about what might orient us how we might enact and eminent positioning that is not dependent on the prolific ordering have a past yet does not transcribe pure relativism through derangements either. This is a question I think of ethics. And I wonder about the potential for inquiry work to think the just as Michel Foucault termed it or more deliberately inquiry as a means to make the just because for co thinking that just requires an overt political stance that begins with an ethical positioning, a determination that normalized governing processes are untenable. Further, thinking as deludes notes, means to experiment and to problem that's thinking that just begins with an act of experimental refusal no longer abiding by the claims of convention and entails an imminent, making thinking that just dust becomes making the adjust and making the just might articulate as a process of entangling an ethical determination to produce a difference with an orienting belief in another future potential that we might become differently, through different relations animated by different forces within a materially generative world. I'm interested in in inquiry is making the just because I sense within Marcus work and ethical commitment, one that emphasizes and affirmative ethical engagement with potential, and a determination to experiment with that potential to speculate on what might yet become so hers would seem to be more than a neutral stance and what is to be done. This is important to note and contemporary work that engages with flattened hierarchies, how does one and unethical engagement with the world admits such flattening indeed a flattened hierarchical perspective is often critiqued for its political naivete and refusal to acknowledge histories of asymmetrical relations of power that is some would argue that flattening traditional hierarchies conveniently erase historical context that disproportionately govern some groups and privilege others, such a perspective may conveniently overlook a legacy of exploitative relations that are only extended through a dismissal of material hierarchy.

In short, it is quite possible that the rush to lay claim to rise a medic expressions of flattened hierarchies extends from a privilege of not experiencing a legacy of power claims on one's person. As such, this theoretical embrace of a dispersed system stems from privileges gained from conventional hierarchies and systems of power. Such context situated, even the most well intentioned critique as reformist in order. Born from and transcribing the very exploited to relations they claim to disrupt. As an alternative, a materialist critique might complicate the smoothing of conventional hierarchies, for what Thomas nail terms, a twisted ontology in which different regions of matter are unevenly developed and circulated this twisted ontology remains vital to considerations of exploitation and material inequity that seemed to have fallen out of theoretical favor of late, our contemporary moment is rife with uneven material agencies, and that unevenness matters. Further our inquiry work certainly has a generative role in twisting ontology locating some ways of living as important for recognition, even critique and excluding others. As a consequence that remains important to locate those uneven exploitative relations map their intersections, even exclusions and consider their effect on ontological levels. As a practice of transgression inquiry martyred articulate as a type of challenge from within one and habits a limit in order to manifest a transgression. Because limits, always hold the material for transgressive potential experimental inquiry uses the condition of limits to manifest the rupture, and acting a future yet unknown. Recognizing the symbiotically productive relations of limits and transgressions shifts the intention and work of the inquiry. It's not simply enough to strive to break and limit, one must use the material of the limit to generate something else. This is a creative or experimental experimental relation to limit, one that manufacturers difference, were once there was only repetition such it is that inquiry must be decided the materialists in order to generate transgressions through governing limits, one must discern and intervene within the material conditions that make our governance possible. And this word begins from a place of ethical determination that are present exploitative relations are untenable. We cannot bear them anymore transgressive change extends from the very sensation of living then through the material world.

00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:36.000
In her provocative book entitled, what comes after entanglement ever Gerard advocates for an ethical engagement with exclusion, recognizing in her words the entities practices and ways of being that are for closed when other entangled realities are materialized. This perspective aligns with the notion of twisted ontology as I spoke of earlier is one locates those become things that are short circuited by the layered build up that occurs when some ontological formations are twisted together governed into relation, and others are necessarily excluded the landscape of twisted ontology is is one of uneven development and exclusion some relations are deemed to matter more than others and the processes of such mattering requires ethical deliberation and an emergent sense of responsibility as Gerard goes on to right attention also needs to be paid to the frictions foreclosures and exclusions that play a constituent a role in the composition of lives reality centralizing and politicizing these exclusions is vital and carving out space for intervention, examining rational exclusions is constitutive of our contemporary moment is an ethical act of inquiry for Gerard when that generates the conditions necessary for intervention. And for Gerard those constitutive fictions frictions foreclosures and exclusions serve as an important and often theoretically overlooked entry point for material analysis, more than the density of the entanglements themselves, it is their limits, those spaces were identified relations fade into necessary exclusions that provide opportunities for ethical engagement deliberation and contingent action. Let's it is that experimental inquiry necessary necessarily an X, X of difficult recognition, we are bound by and responsible for these tragic circumstances belief, we might be otherwise, and virtue, we must become differently. Experimental inquiry is in short and ethically laden making a means of generating the Justin circumstances that overwhelm through perpetuating injustice. This might bring us to a series of provocative, I think questions that call and Krugman asks, and I think extend from Marcus work. Here are the questions, what are the problems we cannot be, what are the problems we cannot but feel the force of over what and why are we constantly anxious and inevitably distraught.

What are the problems with which we wrap and work our lives in burning intensities. In many ways I remain emboldened through Brady's notion that we practice a pragmatic engagement with the present in order to collectively construct conditions that transform and empower our capacity to act ethically and produce social horizons of hope, or sustainable futures for me inquiry is part and parcel of such resistive and productive practice. This is inquiry as an ontological way of living, motivated by ethical force, a way of reading the future into the present to borrow the phrasing of JK get some grand and work is work reminds us, this can be joyful experimentation, an exuberant experimental engagement with the not yet. And similarly, as for co admonished. Do not think that one has to be said in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable through inquiry we engage with the president as a delusion and music witness blurring the governing processes and practices of fascism, such that they lose their precise purpose, creating relational conditions through which specific forms of resistive potential become a new through inquiry we might engage the present to break its violent hold on our very being utilizing the circumstances that enforce our exhaustion such that we might become otherwise through inquiry we stand vigil look out for potential change, refusing the governing limitations of the status quo and using the material of our contemporary moment to generate a transformative difference.

My thanks to Mirka's paper for helping to provide provoke these thoughts, and to all of you for listening. Thank you.



Jessica:
Thank you so much, Aaron such an exciting response I'm like all jazzed up now after here in New York I'm hearing you. I'm really looking forward to this being on the podcast so that we can revisit and re listen and continue to learn.

So our next. Our next response is from Juha and I am going to do my best to share a YouTube video, and play. Perfect.

Juha:
Thank you miracle for your mind provoking talk, and for inviting me to comment on it. It's been my great pleasure to follow your career and success over the years. And here are my comments. Just let you put it in your speech global anti capitalist perspective is necessary. If we are to survive as a species. During the past year, a virus known as covert 19 halted the world. It's a biological fact that we can't wish away, but it has had tremendous social and political consequences worldwide. We cannot change the mechanisms, the wireless works and mutates, but like navigators who sense the strength of the wind, and its direction. We can take those laws into account in our actions. Neglecting them can result in a fatal multi organism disease. Like a mistake in a vacation can cause a shipwreck. Therefore, I must say all the sheep and take the storm caused by the wires into account in at least two ways. First, I may reason that life is dangerous. In any case, continue to meet people and ignore possible consequences for my health. Second, I can think that health is wider and therefore, I want to follow safety measures, wash my hands. Keep social distance and wear a mask. As I cannot escape the fact of covert 19. I still have the freedom to choose what effects. I allow it to have on me and my actions. Besides, by following the necessary safety measures. I take care of myself and my fellow beings. And by doing so, carry my collective responsibility. Indeed, many have had to consider how to live, not to become infected, or infect others, the recommendations of health experts have been clear. But humans are not machines. They take the official messages in their judgment and relate them to the totality of the individual lives. The weighing of these options on human decision and meaning making interests me as a qualitative researcher and a social scientist. The options can be seen in a continuum where at the other end of the other end. People lot live their lives as useful. And at the other follow safety measures, quite literally. The rationales and logics for these options vary. Perhaps the most exciting answers come from the unresponsive and individualistic risk takers. Who otter. Yes, of course, there is a risk of infection. And it makes me think. But even then, the philosopher gh fun rate has presented a general model of action, in which he distinguishes the result and consequence of an act. On the one hand, the result of the act of opening a window. Is that a certain window is open these consequences. A state of affairs, which by virtue of course or necessity, come about. When the Act has been done. On the other hand, a consequence of the act of opening a window, may be the temperature in the room goes down, or as the famous poet bent this article ski writes about a possible consequence. The bird could fly in. What makes makes the logic of human action and decision making, related to the covert 19, so special is the collective nature. My individual decisions are associated with a type global network of others choices. The post pandemic time will finally tell if the window has been open or closed. And how many black Corbett 19 ravens have flown in We managed to transform our teaching online early on, even during the pandemic my workplace down but a university succeeded to produce or produce enough degrees to fulfill its promise to the Ministry of Education and Culture, The largest funder of the universities in Finland.

We have proven to be good academic workers, perhaps too good for the success came at a price, the temporary University's campus plan approved by the University Board in Fall 2020 states that, and I quote, the experience gained through the covert 19 pandemic highlights the need for flexible learning and working solutions. In particular, where digital and physical environments merge to support that user's data lives, and well being. Quote ends.

In addition, the plan includes the promise and I quote, dumper the university's goal is to be carbon neutral by 2030. As part of the target, its office and teaching spaces, will be reduced by 25%, quote, and I guess no one sees anything wrong with the carbon neutrality. but many made the math and calculated. One plus one equaling that the university would eliminate our faculty building. In fact, carbon neutrality may be mayor smoke and mirrors the true reason being cost savings. under the neoliberal regime. The canvas planned. You know University is another example of the new management University managerial capitalist University. To add insult to injury. Due to the COVID 19 restrictions on the campus. The university managers could launch the plan without fearing that we teachers and students occupy the University, University building, as we did a few years ago, consequence. Consequently, it's possible that we lose our office spaces seminar rooms lecture halls, and more importantly, our sense of community, and perhaps turn into digital nomads without any other social existence than our digital presence. Many might feel betrayed. Maybe we managed to do our job too well and won the race to the bottom, the capitalist neoliberal University. As the world doesn't seem to follow the Broadway. The harder you work, the luckier you get, but quite reverse. Perhaps tomorrow we don't say that. We do killed the radio star. But that digital shift at our office space In the future, we might not teach in the shadow of the Corbett 19 anymore, or under the mango tree as Paulo Ferreira in Finland it's too cold for that. But carry on our solitary talk only in the Digital's fair.

Okay, I do know the world though there is much, much crazier and uglier than this, and the ills of the world are last. But God is in detail. We cannot take our position as educational and social scientists for granted anymore. For it's not only the managerial University. That is after the critical scholar, but also the news media. Believe it or not, we have only one national newspaper in Finland Helsingin Sanomat plus few other regionals. A couple of days ago Helsingin Sanomat published but an editorial in which one of the editors in chief stated as follows, and I quote, the father, one goes from the core of science to the social humanistic and ultimately artistic research, the less empirical evidence, there is in academic competition. And the more ideological the reshoots becomes the editor then shared the editorial on Twitter and wrote. It seems that this editorial has raised diverse debate, the speculative assumption in the text was that academic competition would seem to have a greater tendency to become idealized. When there are no clear criteria in the field to compare theories, Ideally, just to become ideal a choice. Yes. When there are no clear criteria in the field or to compare theories. Quote ends, a sociologist, then asked, and I quote, I continue your speculation by asking what is in your view, the clear criteria to compare those theories in science lacking in social sciences, which prevents the power of ideologies. The editor replies Scientific Method. Then the philosopher of science intervenes. Would you like to tell us what is that what is the scientific method that we philosophers of science, despite many attempts, haven't been able to find one. This was also a quote. It seems to me that the powerful national media outlets mighty editor has aligned with the populist right, the conservative right, the racist right and the matches. And we have had a wake up call in so many places in the biological, psychological, social and political spheres. We cannot stay in our coupon compartments any longer. We need, what miracle was talking about poor diversity. We need to join forces as miracle and Fred, poor thing. Put it in a few years back, and I quote, this quote ends my comments. Scholars need to stop engaging in research activities for research sake, only research needs to serve the public citizens, students, parents, teachers and so on. Social Science Research should be a collaborative effort, and a form of public science. It's time to consider how to increase methodological attentiveness and the potential of collaborative inquiry that builds on collective yet contradictory stories extract and material life experiences.

Thank you so much and congratulations Mirka.

In this episode, Jessica Van Cleave (SIG Chair)
discusses with Cassie Quigley (Program co-chair) and Alexandra Panos (Program co-chair) what the Qualitative Research SIG has planned for the 2021 AERA conference. Below is the transcript of the conversations.

VanCleave, Jessica: Hello everyone, welcome to qualitative conversations a podcast series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American educational research association. I'm Jessic vancleave the current chair of the qualitative research special interest group. And i'm happy today to be joined by our program co chairs cassie quickly and Alex panelists and will be providing an overview of the 2021 annual meeting, which will be virtual for the first time this year and will take place from April 8 to April 12. Doctor cassie quickly as an associate professor of science, education and associate chair and the Department of teaching learning and leading at the school of education at the University of Pittsburgh.She received her doctorate and curriculum and instruction at indiana University in 2010. Dr quigley's expertise and qualitative research is focused on methodologies that Center the participants, such as Community based methodologies and using data collection methods like photo methods. In the past 11 years she has published over 50 articles and book chapters focused on those methods, including in journals, such as the International Journal of qualitative studies and education. Qualitative inquiry and the journal of mixed methods for search she also co authored a book on steam education entitled and educators guide to steam education, which is published by teachers college press. She has presented her qualitative work at numerous conferences, both nationally and internationally, she teaches qualitative research methodology courses on topics such as participatory action research, validity and reliability for qualitative work and ethics around educational research.

VanCleave, Jessica: Alexandra panels as an assistant professor of literacy studies and affiliate faculty and measurement and research in the college of education at the University of South Florida. She earned her doctorate in literacy language and culture, education, with a minor in inquiry methodology at indiana university bloomington in 2018. Dr panels takes an interdisciplinary stance in her work as a critical qualitative methodology. And grounds her theoretical methodological and empirical work in her substantive field of literacy studies. She has published numerous articles and book chapters that focus on the critical environmental and spatial dimensions of qualitative methodologies and literacy studies. Most recently, she has served as senior guest editor on a special issue, focusing on the spatial dimensions of taken for granted qualitative research practices related to masking. And anonymous ation to be published in the international Journal of qualitative studies and education, this year.And, as a co author for a book project under contract with teachers college press titled confronting denial literacy social studies and climate change, thank you both for joining me today to talk about this year's Program.

Alexandra Panos: happy to be here.

Quigley, Cassie (she/her/hers): Thank you JESSICA.

VanCleave, Jessica: So, to get started on can you just offer an overview of the program how many sessions are included, and what is the range of topics we're going to see.

Quigley, Cassie (she/her/hers): sure. So this year we are really excited to have 14 different sessions 15 if you include the mentoring session and 16 with the business. Meeting, as well as the sessions include a variety of sessions around well being and care as well, we have a session around advocacy and justice. there's a wide variety of critical work that ranges from critical race practices post-human position ality feminist approaches and critical participatory inquiry. We are especially looking forward to learning from scholars in one session called disruption interruption change it's not enough what we need is sabotage critical participatory inquiry as sabotage in and out of the Academy this work draws from black and Asian feminist and D colonial stances.

VanCleave, Jessica: Wonderful that sounds really exciting and thought provoking so, can you tell us a little bit about how many submissions the singer seen this year and how many slots were allotted to the same by eight yeah.

Quigley, Cassie (she/her/hers): yeah absolutely so this year we had 46 submitted proposals and symposia 37 of those for paper or poster Roundtable sessions we had, A really a ton of symposium submitted, which were we had 10 symposium submitted this included a mentor session which we'll talk about a little bit later. And so, our process for reviewing and accepting these submissions really takes a lot to ever viewers like you all, and so we were really fortunate that. All of our reviewers accepted that the numbers of submissions that they proposed. That they could handle and really turned those sessions those reviews around in it in a short amount of time, so we just wanted to extend that thanks to our reviewers for that. Each of the proposals reviewed by three different people and including at least one graduate student reviewer. At that time, then it's turned over to Alex and me, and we spent almost about a month going over the process of looking across the reviews we do utilize the scores as you'll remember if you're a viewer you're often you're asked to score on a numerical basis, but that is not used to accept or reject our sessions instead we look holistically across the reviews, which really just helps to ensure that there's a bias towards one type of research over another, and so that kind of gives you a description of the process for the AERA sessions for the qualitative Research SIG.

VanCleave, Jessica: It is a lot of work to put this program together both by you and Alex and all of the Members who service reviewers and we are so so grateful for all of that service. It really is a big job and seeing what we can expect at this year's annual meeting I'm very, very appreciative of the range of opportunities and the thoughtfulness that was put into that process.

VanCleave, Jessica: So uhm one of the sessions that Members will have the opportunity to attend is the business meeting, can you tell us about the business meeting and what Members can expect if they attend that session.

Quigley, Cassie (she/her/hers): Yes, absolutely we're really hoping that everyone is able to attend the business meeting.Because it really is our one time to gather together as a group, and of course we are wishing that we could be you know in community with one another, together face to face. But we still would love to see everybody join us online for this session, the session is about an hour long and we were able to pack quite a bit into this session, including a program report awards, and we will have a speaker which i'll talk to you about in just a minute, so our program report moves us through the various committees that are on that qualitative research day, including the Program mentor session for the mentor Committee, among others, the award session, which is quite a heavy lift for that committee includes outstanding book award outstanding dissertation award, which will be presented by the committee chairs, then we will have the Egon Guba speaker this year and we are so fortunate to have Mirka Koro accept that award and she is going to be speaking on speculative experimentation and methodological … . Our discussant will be Aaron Kuntz. And then we will be JESSICA will be introducing that session will end the business meeting with some closing remarks and some an opportunity to give input from our sig membership, so please join us for that one hour session if you're a.

VanCleave, Jessica: Are we so grateful, when many of our Members attend that business meeting it's a nice opportunity to have a little bit of Community and connect with one another, even if we're doing so virtually this year, so, in addition to our business meeting one of the things that the sig supports each year or mentoring opportunities so, can you talk a bit about the mentoring session that's going to be offered and the other mentoring opportunities that are on the Program.

Alexandra Panos: Sure, I can take that one JESSICA. Um the mentoring session we're really excited about i'm Kelly and the committee have worked really hard to create a space where. Members of the SIG can get guidance and feedback and discuss their work as either graduate students early career scholars. And I know we opened it this year to associate level faculty for mentorship into the next stage of their career as well, but that's sessions, going to be Sunday at 230 and it's a closed session so if you haven't signed up this year, that means it's not open but. This summer, and next fall calls will be going back out for applications to join the mentoring session as a mentee and then. I know that Kelly, and her committee work to invite and solicit members of the sig to lead in their mentorship capacity and this year, as well as past years, I know they focused on the concept of sickness, so if you're feeling stuck if there's something that's. Challenging in your work right now, this is the session for you to consider for next year.

VanCleave, Jessica: um well, as you mentioned Kelly on the committee have lots of opportunities they not only support on our Members at a era, but they also provide opportunities for mentorship in the proposal process so keep an eye out for announcements on the list about those opportunities. There's also informal office hours with members of the same that are available during the annual meeting again that process as Alex mentioned is already concluded for this year but, but if you are interested in connecting with more senior members in the segue for mentoring opportunities at any stage of your career be on the lookout for opportunities as they come through the listserv.

VanCleave, Jessica: On, so this is a lot this program has a lot to offer and a wide range of things across every day that the annual meeting is active, so what suggestions, do you have for Members, maybe, especially first time attendees to navigate the eight year a program and take advantage of the exciting QR saying sessions.

Alexandra Panos: yeah thanks JESSICA, I agree, it can be a lot it's one of the reasons that orienting to the conference via the QR sig can be so helpful because it directs you to the kinds of sessions that as a qualitative researcher. And you would be especially interested in, so if you're already a member of the sig JESSICA has sent out A Google Doc that gives a really sort of straightforward overview calendar overview of each day. So you can see what's coming up and then at the bottom of that document there's a description of each of the sessions, with the abstract and the speakers and their titles of their papers and Roundtable session presentations and the symposia etc. But once the the system itself gets underway, and we have access to our virtual conference program if you're registered as an attendee or a presenter discussing or chair you'll be able to access that virtual conference platform through the AERA website and You can search for us via the sig so that you can find those sessions, you can search by presenter you can search by paper title. So it's it's pretty helpful, especially if you've already sort of done some of that homework of what is the QR sig doing and what are the, what are we up to in this space. I think it's also important to remember that if you're assigned to a session as a presenter co presenter a chair or discuss it or have some active role in a session. One of the cool things that they've shared with us about the virtual platform is that the system will just sort of plop you into this space that you need to be at that time, like there's no clicking or searching for you as a presenter or someone with a role in a session. If you'd like to attend a session within the platform, we believe, what i've come to understand, about the platform is that you'll be able to design your own schedule and joining session simply by clicking within the platform itself And we also strongly recommend that, given the nature of these new spaces, we know now, after a year For many of us of attending other virtual conferences that each virtual platform is unique and we should have access to it honor around April 2 and we want to recommend that you And, especially if you're presenting you and your co presenters spend some time getting used to the conference space use it to develop your own schedule and Just sort of stick in there and and get your get your hands on it era has made a number of videos available that describe the conflict conference platform and answer some questions about that, but we expect that getting in there ourselves will be the most instructive and we're waiting waiting with great with bated breath to get in there ourselves so we hope that's helpful and if you have any questions about the conference platform, the annual meeting website is a place where help will be found, and we are also always available to send you information that we might be able to share.

VanCleave, Jessica: there's some really great tips, thank you for helping us think about how we might orient ourselves and and navigate both the platform and the content of this year's annual meeting so.

VanCleave, Jessica: you're interested in the qualitative research say you've got you've been checking out our Program.

VanCleave, Jessica: On but you're not yet a member, so can you talk to us a little bit about how you become a member of the qualitative research special interest group and what some of the benefits of membership might be.

Alexandra Panos: Of course. Well, we think that you should be a member. Of the QR SIG definitely, especially if you're listening to this podcast which is produced by the QR SIG, so this is one of the Member benefits that extends beyond membership, but that you'd be supporting But when you become a member of AERA one of the things that you have the opportunity to to do is to select a division and sig. For free so most of the time you have to pay a small fee that helps support the sake, but you can when you register get one of those those free memberships and if you select the call say you're a member. Benefits include receiving emails specifically for the membership, which includes many opportunities for connecting with other members of the same with mentorship with workshops calls for special issues sort of a first pass at important content related to qualitative research and our personal favorite with membership to the sig includes opportunities to review for the Conference, which is so beneficial to our field to. The sig itself and to your fellow call researchers, so if you have any questions about membership, you can reach out to any of us and we're happy to answer them and we really hope that if you aren't yet you will join us.

VanCleave, Jessica: Absolutely, we are very lucky to participate in such a vibrant Community that is continuously growing, and we hope that as many folks as are interested well will join us and continue to diversify and broaden our Community. So thank you so much cassie and Alex for joining me today and providing an overview of what Members can expect from the qualitative research same program this year. I hope to see all of you who are listening at our business meeting and I hope you'll consider joining the sake and contributing to our Community thanks again for being with us today on qualitative conversations.

Alexandra Panos: Thanks JESSICA.

Quigley, Cassie (she/her/hers): Thank you.

In this episode Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya (University of Florida) interviews Dr. Jeong-eun Rhee (Long Island University) about her scholarship in the field of qualitative research and her notion of 'transnational intergenerational decolonial feminist knowledge' and her recent book, Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting Rememory and Mothers.

The following presents a transcription of the conversation.

Dr. Bhattacharya 0:24
Welcome everyone listening in it is my honor to be your guest podcast host today. My name is Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya. I'm a qualitative research professor at the University of Florida. With me is Dr. Jeong-eun Rhee, professor of education at Long Island University. This podcast, Qualitative Conversations, is produced by the qualitative research SIG at AERA. Professor Jeongeun Rhee recently authored a text the Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting Rememory and Mothers, which is part of my Futures of Data Analysis and Qualitative Research series hosted with Routledge. The book has already created a lot of buzz, and challenged people's understanding of home memories relationality transnational existence, and multiple forces of oppression that cross borders without being categorized as a specific kind of qualitative research. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome Dr. Jeong-eun Rhee, welcome.

Dr. Rhee 1:27
Thank you for that wonderful introduction. Kakali, I feel so honored to be here.

Dr. Bhattacharya 1:34
So to begin our conversation, give us an overview of your academic journey and how you came to write the book.

Dr. Rhee 1:43
There are so many different ways which I think I can answer that question. But at the same time, I'm not sure if I can clearly they up out of past I have, walked. that let me write this book. At least what I can share, though, is that my academic journey has been never separable from my personal, cultural, geopolitical and even spiritual journey. And I think this recognition is in fact how I was able to write this book. But, of course, it was not simply my journey, either. Right? So my journey has intersected or integrated with my family's journey in the context of larger historical relations. As well, as having said that, I also think if we assume that we can now and explain how we've come to where we are, in certainty, I think it can be our arrogant assumption. And I think that's also point I make I made in my book. I mean, the question that I pursued in the book was, what do we do with What do we can never explain? Right? So I think there are certain aspects that I do not know how to explain in terms of how, you know, my last four years of academic life, including my graduate school experiences, etc, has led me to write this book. But, But I know is that I could write this book, because I have learned or remembered how to connect with my mother's not just singular but plural, right, my mother's and ancestors of this land, and then their lands who have prepared a space for me to do my work. And this book is in fact a testimony or or even a question about my journey, both academic and spiritual, that reveals these connections.

Dr. Bhattacharya 4:48
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. It is really interesting. Like, it's not like something that you can like, fully map, but it could be another book and in and of itself, if you just write it. The the journey to writing this book like it's a prequel to the book, perhaps you know, I know that I introduced your book as something that doesn't really fit a certain category or certain type of qualitative research very distinctively, it would be really lovely to hear how you see this book in the larger context of the terrain of qualitative research.

Dr. Rhee 5:25
So let me first express my gratitude to you Kakali as a series editor on feature of data analysis and qualitative research, who really encouraged me to think of your series as an outlet of my book. And as I actually talked about, in my book, I had worked on this book almost five years. And during those years, I actually didn't plan out to slate, my work as a qualitative research role, per se. I mean, in fact, I didn't know how to characterize the book until I completed the manuscript. I mean, what I knew was that this work was an inquiry, my inquiry, but but I was unsure if the qualitative research field itself was big enough to include my work as a qualitative research. And so I'm Kakali your gesture of welcoming however, you know, slight that move was like in the context and the large context of the whole field, still made a such a big impact on how I saw potentials of both my work and the field of qualitative research. So I just want to thank you for your vision for your field. And also, you're using our editorial position to open up and expand the boundary of the field.

Dr. Rhee 7:12
From my perspective, as a qualitative researcher, what I hope that my will contribute to is to offer more possibilities. So producing, sharing, and then remembering killing knowledge. I think it's interesting that, you know, technically, as I also shared in the book, I didn't have a proposal, research proposal for this book, I didn't have a human subject, nor methodology. You know, my field work included both physical and metaphysical interactions. In my theoretical perspectives came from Toni Morrison's fiction, beloved, and ... experimental autobiographical poetry ... In my research question was like, What do you do when you're haunted by your mother's rememory? But in this writing, as the inquiry process would, I was able to notice and learn was that, in fact, there have been so much work done that I could build on to pursue my question. Also, my question was not simply my question. There have been so many other women, particularly of color, who have asked similar questions. This was how I realized that my work was a part of a larger knowledge project, which I named, eventually, in the book, transnational intergenerational decolonial feminist knowledge process. I hope that my work shows how our deeply personal question is, in fact, a way to connect with a larger collective question that many interconnected diverse communities have pursued. And when we build those connections between our personal and collective we can produce different knowledge different. I think here what mattered was not about following particular techniques or mythology is in terms of technicality, utility, productivity, and also rules and regulations, but about being able to ask and work with and live with our questions. Yeah, so

Dr. Bhattacharya 10:00
You know, your question? I mean, your response to my question makes me think about how qualitative research broadly is moving away from being like this technocratic social science, to a more humanistic oriented inquiry, versus, you know, certain steps and procedures we do. To think in very technocratic social science way we do these steps, we collect this data, we analyze it, we doing four or five different strategies or steps or approaches, then we triangulate everything to make everything check and confirm with everything else and have verifiability. And then we know we got something, whereas you are doing this work. And you're saying that the unknown is this, this fertile ground of inquiry, and it can still remain unknown as a result of the inquiry to, or it can create many types of knowings, without any certainty or any members check or any triangulation, or any peer debriefing, it can still remain a very open ended inquiry as a result of an inquiry.

Dr. Rhee 11:10
Right. So at the level of, you know, I think methodology like, absolutely, I think that's kind of what I tried to, I guess, a share, not purposefully, but because that's what happened, but then at the level of epistemology, and then even episteme, I think what I tried to show is that actually, by really paying attention to this intergenerational transnational, decolonial feminist knowledge that have existed across the globe, right, that I was able to actually connect with it in the name of science, and how that opened up a new way, or different way, or, you know, relational kind of way of actually noticing the part of reality that I actually forgot.

Dr. Bhattacharya 12:18
Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's a Western training and colonizing training that teaches us to forget our own knowledge is and that's so that's always a question that I keep asking myself, what knowledge am I forgetting? What knowledge am I forgetting? There are two anchoring ideas in your book that are re-memory and haunting, which is appropriate for forgetting knowledge or haunted by the met the notion of losing our connectivity? Could you talk a bit about how you came across this ideas, and why they become such critical anchoring for you.

Dr. Rhee 12:57
So, read memory and hunting are affective concepts, meaning that to now what they are, you have to feel them. That's how you learn what rememory and haunting are no amount of reading will allow you to know what they are, how they work, and how they change you. And so I want to kind of put this out first, and, you know, conceptually, remember, it was first coined and introduced by Toni Morrison in our book beloved. And according to Morrison rememory is worth remembering and forgetting at the same time, that stays both in person and place that can be encountered by others. This notion, or even existence of remembering completely ruptures how empirical modern science functions. And then think about it. What does this mean that we memories, both remembering and forgetting, at the same time? How is it possible for one's rememory stay both in and outside a person's mind? If remember his base in place, as well, who's remembering? I mean, I can go on with all these questions, right that come from our scientific intelligibility. And to me, rememory of place has become like the source of a haunting as it is someone else's rumery that changes us. And so hunting becomes a demand from those who refuse to be forgotten. And I highlighted effective aspects of remembering and hunting, because I have read beloved so many times. But I really didn't get it. I mean, I cognitively understood what they were when the after my mother's death, and after my mother left to her remote memory for for me to encounter, I became able to see what rememory and hunting were. And so I think like this is the the point that I wanted to put out in terms of like, what I meant by affective concepts. And I think, you know, the famous instruction of Audrey Lorde, who said that masters tool cannot dismantle the masters house, it is very relevant here. I don't think I could figure out how to ask my questions with my academic training only. But with this absolutely non scientific concepts of remembering and haunting, which doesn't mean that they're not true, right. But with those, I started my super personal inquiry through my mother's death, and her remote remember is haunting. And and, in fact of her life was deeply implicated in US Imperial War in Korea. And through my work, now I'm carrying her memor, in this territory of the United States, where my mother's rememory interact with other mothers of colors from memories. And without this kind of embodied the spiritual relationships that have been that have become the source of knowledge. I don't think I could have made this and so my experience and wrote this work.

QR SIG Add 17:26
The qualitative research special interest group was established in 1987. To create a space within the American Educational Research Association. For the discussion of ethical, philosophical and methodological issues in qualitative research. We invite you to consider joining the qualitative research SIG today, for members of a era the annual fee for joining qualitative research special interest group for regular non graduate student members is $10. And the annual fee for graduate students is $5. As members of the QR SIG, you will gain access to a network of fellow qualitative scholars, as well as are many activities ranging from mentoring opportunities to our podcast series to update to news related to recent qualitative publications and jobs, please visit the American educational research associations website at www dot era dotnet to join the qualitative research sake today.

Dr. Bhattacharya 18:20
You know, this is such a good reminder of the value of other ways of knowing and being then just using the the way that is, and that disconnects you from your body and from your emotionality is, this is like deeply embodied very, very emotion based but not just that, but there is a, there is a sort of like a beautiful spiritual understanding as well, you know, and those sorts of culturally grounded Ways of Knowing that can't all be translated and, you know, like, repurposed in research language and put it out for the world to consume, either you sort of know how to be in those ways of knowing and being and in those connections, or you don't, and that's okay, either way, but those are the connections that spoke to you, which is interesting, because as I was reading your work, I found myself crying, cheering, laughing, cussing, and just going on this journey with you, which was ultimately very healing, you know, from bearing witness, and also from my own embodied experience as well. So could you talk about the role of healing in your work and how it might have shaped your thinking?

Dr. Rhee 19:42
So I think I want to reiterate that it took me five years to complete this book. The whole process of writing this book was a process of intentional process of bringing in justice to my mother's life. I mean, as I mentioned briefly already, I want to emphasize that, you know, this wasn't only about my biological mother, but also other mothers of color, who had prepared place for me to come and encounter, there were memories in this territory. So while that was my intention, the process has also become also the process of healing and re storytelling for me. And in fact, those five years became the time I needed to be healed. Through my loss, while I was fighting for justice, to my mother's of color, through my writing as inquiry. I think before I actually talk other things, I must acknowledge that, you know, this time luxury, my taking five years, partly came from my positional privilege is a full professor where I didn't have to worry about, you know, creating, getting tenured or, or getting promoted, etc. But at the same time, I want out other quality researchers to consider or have some time, we need this long staying in a certain kind of work, especially if the work is healing us. In fact, through this work, I have reaffirmed how important it is for us to produce work that heals us as researchers in the process of working on it, working through it, because the work that heals us, as researchers will help others as well, whether they are our participants, readers or communities we work for. So perhaps now we can even ask what is a mean that we as researchers work toward the healing knowledge? What different methodologies reveal bearable for us to do such?

Dr. Bhattacharya 22:40
That's, that's a lot, you know, I think, like I have always taught about the work of justice, you know, is it has to be complemented with the work of healing, you know, so the work of justice, or the work of equity, or the work of creating space and visibility from previous unjust things, you know, requires a healing, it doesn't require it's almost foolish to require the dominant group to be responsible for creating anything because the privilege are not incentivized to do anything for those that they oppress. Right. So then how do we do this work without always being in relationship with the colonizer, the privilege, the masterclass all of that. And so I always felt that the work of any kind of equity based work, you know, where you're, you know, demonstrating the oppression demonstrating the wounds require a complimentary healing piece attached to it, you know, justice work and healing work should go hand in hand. So, I know that we don't have a lot of time to discuss all the great things about your work, because there is so much to discuss. So to the listeners, please go and buy her book, decolonial feminist research: haunting rememory and mothers. And I want to sort of wrap up this conversation with advice that you might have for someone whose approach to qualitative research is non traditional, and maybe culturally situated, but doesn't have a concrete path for doing that work and might be feeling unsure. And, you know, what might they think about? Or how might they think about doing this work? there? There are no steps, but what might be some guiding points of consideration

Dr. Rhee 24:38
I must say that a colonial Western modern episteme really screwed us. I think our value on universality is a colonial desire. Meaning that, you know, cultural outsiders like me are trained to think that our particular Somehow too particular, meaning that, you know, not valuable not useful. But uh, but our particular existence constitute our interdependent ecology. So I think we have to remember that particularly particularity, and universality are not opposite concepts, but rather they constitute each other. So the challenge is how we can research and remember those interdependence and connectivity, our particularity has with other particularities, and also a larger historical and cultural context. And so actually, you know, as a way to do that, I encourage researchers to be real, like authentic in their questions. I think sometimes it's scary to put out our real, authentic question. I mean, I must admit that I felt that when I wrote this book, but to me, authenticity is our response ability to our particularity. And we doubt our particularity, there is no way for us to respond to what's around us. And then we must remember, there's always a rich tradition and history of knowledge productions, in any community or culture. And so I think we need to remember that we're not alone or interdependent. And what we need is the work of remembering our connectivity from our location.

Dr. Bhattacharya 26:59
Yeah, I appreciate that so much, I you know, I get the authentic bit, I feel scared to use the word now. Because every time I use authentic, I hear like all these critiques in my head, how people would say this, and what is co opted and nod and essentially a nod. And then sometimes I like, some things are just what it is, you know, you can say authentic or change it to genuine if you want, change it to sincere if you want, but there are certain ways in which we show up that is unguarded, that is a free flowing version of ourselves in that moment, you know, in which we are allowing things to rise to the surface, including these questions, and and allowing us the freedom to choose to be curious about those questions have a beginner's mind with these questions? So I think that is a really strong advice that people should pursue that and know that knowledge exists beyond what has been presented to them. It exists pretty much in the world in various forms, relationships, things that are within academia, but things that are even outside of academia, outside of our fields, and all of that,

Dr. Rhee 28:08
If I add one more, what do we represent, as a knowledge always betrays an actual reality we try to share made. So here I'm not simply talking about how our not least a partial and limited, but when we try to represent there's always violence involved, right. And so when we take this betrayal of representation seriously, I think we as researchers can approach ethics of doing research at another level, especially when we do our work in the name of decolonial, justice and equity.

Dr. Bhattacharya 28:53
Yeah, thank you so much for your time and your generosity and opening yourself up to share your thoughts and how you came about writing the book and your thoughts about qualitative inquiry. There is much to unpack here. Unfortunately, we don't have the time to unpack all of it, but I want to thank you and I want to thank the qualitative research SIG for allowing me the honor to interview you.

Dr. Rhee 29:19
Thank you so much.

In this podcast, Emily Nusbaum interviews Alice Wong, disability rights activist and founder of the Disability Visibility project. Their conversation Alice describes the relationship of research to her activism, her experience in the academy, and key questions that scholars should consider when embarking on research with marginalized communities. Below is a transcript of this talk.

Alice 0:25
All right,

Emily 0:27
my name is Emily Nussbaum, and I'm here with Alice Wong talking with her this evening for the Qualitative Research SIG of AERA. And I am super thrilled to be interviewing Alice for this episode. Alice is the director of the Disability Visibility Project, a thought leader known everywhere in Disability Justice and access issues and author of the recently published acclaimed book Disability Visibility. So Alice, thank you so much for talking with me.

Alice 1:11
Thank you for having me, Emily. You know, I also want to say that we have been friends for a long time, and I just don't want it to be a conversation with you.

Emily 1:24
Yeah, me too. So, since this is for a group focused on qualitative inquiry, I reached out to you thinking about your work through various forms of social media and the Disability Visibility Project and ways that the qualitative research community can start to think more expansively about what counts as qualitative research, and that kind of thing. But I think if I'm correct, and clarify, of course, that you began a more academic career in sociology. So I wondered if you could just give us kind of that background of how you started thinking about research and what that background was, and then we can talk more about the shift you made to the super important and impactful work that you're doing now? Well,

Alice 2:31
Just a long story short...I really...my initial career goals, my vision was to be an academia, I love to Sociology, every semester, I stroke fast, and, you know, I feel like sociology gave me the lens to really see the world and analyze the world. Especially, you know, toward the event of disability, you know, beyond, you know, to create a better model. So, you know, I went to undergrad I majored in sociology, you know, I keep in touch with a bunch of professors. It is a sociology department at Indiana University, in Indianapolis. I can't remember who it was who gave me my first experience as you know a research assistant at, you know, to tell you the truth, I am so grateful for their support and their belief or in me to be their student really activated it, you know, I saw a lot of gaps in the literature. You know, just gaps in research, just, you know, where are the disabled people? You know, there's you know,

Emily 4:10
like, in terms of only talks about talk about gaps and disabled people in terms of voice and in terms of like representation outside kind of more deficit based perspectives. Yeah.

Alice 4:28
Health care very simple. You know, there's a lot of work guys out there equalities it's so such a structure of medicine but you know, also maybe I've been thinking about like, well what about you know, disability and there's a, you know a lot of work on devious and stigma, you know, Eving Goffman, it was it was earlist people. Goffman and Foucault as well, just really If you think about what are the disabled perspectives, disable scholarship, advance these kinds of ideas, extend these ideas. It wasn't until, you know, that's really where I started studying about disability studies, work of Erving K. Yes, his work. People of the UK, so despite all of her

Emily 5:37
social model,

Alice 5:41
those were trying to like, wow, like, there are these, you know, there are people doing this work. And, you know, I thought this to be my contribution, I think, to a person particular, that's really was kind of a model of what I wanted to do. To date, Barbara Waxman.

Emily 6:04
Yeah, I just need to share if you can share a little bit about who she is, I only just learned about her and her work recently, in the last few months, helping a longtime activist sort of organize some of their materials for an archive for the San Francisco Public Library. And Amazing, amazing. So do you want to just mentioned who Barbara Waxman is?

Alice 6:33
Yeah. So Barbara Fay Waxman is a disabled woman, she was both a scholar and an activist. She is no longer with us, you know, rest in power Barbara, and, you know, she was one of these. So, like, unapologetic badass disabled women just totally grounded in the love of her body, the love of her sexuality. She did a lot of work on reproductive sexual health, of disabled women. And that was traditionally one of the areas that I really wanted to focus on. You know, as I did, various, undergrad, you know, just searching, you know, just so, lucky for a bit of people that are out there, that I could kind of connect with or at least identify with. though, you know, I think Barbara was one of those people. And, you know, she had a really long career of being both a scholar and an activist. And she both. She did. She did both. they were hand in hand.

Emily 8:06
Yeah, I'm interested in that. And I want to get back to, to more of your work or how you're thinking about it, but this nexus of being a scholar and an activist, and what more traditional kind of thinkers or people who are in more traditional academic spaces, what we what we could take away from that, or what any of those people could take away from that. Because I think that, that that Nexus is very, very important when we think about advancing that critical games of qualitative research.

Alice 8:41
Yeah, I would say that, you know, people like Barbara [inaudible] and Paul or his story here. Also they are really both activist, that says a lot about the academy and, you know, marginalized people who are entering the academy they can't separate the lived experiences from the way they teach from the way they relate to students, faculty, staff, I think, you know, what academia does, it sectors normative perspectives, normative body-minds. clearly, you know, white perspective white norms. And you know, this is this place is a lot of pressure to force people to like, separate parts of themselves. It does not encourage people to be who they are or every state that they are. If you think about the way scholars of color are really just not welcome, you know, somebody marginalized students at university scholars enter academic spaces, but they often don't at that staying. this says a lot about structural racism, ableism, and classism, that is pretty much permiated. Yeah. So you know, I think sometimes people ask when I became an activist, you know it is a very simplistic answer, but, you know, being disabled in a in a non-disabled world did not give you a choice. This is not a privilege. [inaudible] You know a lot of what I admired in both Paul and Barbara is that they used their positions, they used their research, they used all of their expertise and skills to serve us as the disability community. I mean, it shouldn't be a radical notion. But I think it still is. Because it goes against every sort of conventional wisdom about getting tenure or being professional. and this is wha I did. So there's different motives. Oh, why they are stroller? Did I beat myself? You know, initially, I wanted to contribute to the field I, you know, thought my perspective my I would like to be somebody that does research as a disabled person, with disabled people versus about or at disabled people.

Yeah. Thanks. And I want to just just pause for one second and reinforce that to people that are listening like that, that kind of distinction is really the crux of, say, the academic field of disability studies. And then also the way community scholars are working around and within in disability, right, which is research isn't about or on, or to fix or anything like that for abled people, right. But it's about centering disabled people and non normative body minds and thinking of disabled people as research partners, as well, in the process, so come kind of turning Inside Out of the framework.

Yes. I did. Also, I want to share that, you know, lived experience in addition to other skills, they are not mutually exclusive. The big idea misconception or binary that's I want to smash. Because I think people presume that I just have to have the research skills that's it and a theory and all that stuff. And disabled people are the ones who are the ideas or the ones to give feedback versus active partners in the development of theory.

Emily 14:33
That's super powerful Alice

Alice 14:35
It should be obvious, but it's not. You know, there's still a lot of power dynamics. You know, disabled people are treated in a very tokenistic, exploitative and extractive ways,

Emily 15:03
And especially when we think of multiple marginalized disabled people. Absolutely. So

Advertisement 15:18
the qualitative research special interest group was established in 1987. To create a space within the American Educational Research Association. For the discussion of ethical, philosophical and methodological issues in qualitative research, we invite you to consider joining the qualitative research SIG today. for members of era, the annual fee for joining the qualitative research special interest group for regular non graduate student members is $10. And the annual fee for graduate students is $5. As members of the QR SIG, you will gain access to a network of fellow qualitative scholars, as well as our many activities, ranging from mentoring opportunities to our podcast series to updates and news related to recent qualitative publications and jobs. Please visit the American educational research associations website at www dot era dotnet to join the qualitative research sake today.

Emily 16:15
So I'm curious, because I think this is this notion. I mean, I wrote it down. And I'll just say it again, that is so powerful, this notion of lived experience versus academic skills are not mutually exclusive. Right? And it's like this question of who? Who gets to make knowledge, right? Like, it's a question of epistemology, really, and who, who gets to, to create knowledge. And so it makes me think about why I wanted to reach out to you to do this interview, thinking about your work in the public domain, right. And that you have a very strong social media presence, of course, and can speak about different different, like on Twitter with crypto vote, but also thinking about the Disability Visibility Project. And the way you're kind of work in those areas can help academics. You know, people who are, are in the, in, you know, academic spaces, really think more expansively about this idea of knowledge production. So do you mind sharing with us a little bit about the Disability Visibility Project, sort of how it emerged, what it is? And we can go from there?

Alice 17:47
Yeah, sure. Before I get to that response, I want to also say, you know, think who gets to ask and form research questions is really central in terms of just really everything. Not just for creating knowledge.But who gets to ask the question, because even

Emily 18:21
a step before that, right.

Unknown Speaker 18:22
I think that asking the question is really about identifying that something is a phenomenon? I feel like, you know, what people did before in all disciplines that academia is more people with, you know, a variety of perspectives, but also located different places, different different contexts. You know we don't ever use the term research questions. Disabled people ask a lot of amazing questions all the time. But this is actually such a rich, you know, rich kind of intellectual work. But the think is that it doesn't take place within certain structures, so it's not recognized as intellectual work. So, you know, we need to also kind of unpack all of that stuff about, you know, really research. Yeah, asking question to produce in new knowledge, because, again, it's often Those who do have the means of production are the ones driving the qeustions. You know should it really be in the hand of those who are the focus of inquiry.

Emily 20:16
I know, like I asked a previous question, I brought this up, but this thing even brings up this notion of like, I mean, I think a lot about this and some of the partnerships I have with community scholars about like, what do we then do with like, those questions and what comes out of them? Right, and how do we not use it? How do we use it for the purposes of the individuals that have framed the questions? Right, versus the purposes that people in the academy often use use them for? That?

Alice 21:02
All of these kind of feelings and thoughts about who has control, you know creative control, just the ability to essentialize and articulate ideas, you know, that doesn't take place in a vacuum. These things happen, you know, in collaboration with others, did offer, you know, building on, you know, past work or past ideas. I think that leaves a lot of people out. Right now, I'm kind of not limiting myself to do stuff inside or outside the academy. I feel like I can be wherever I want to be, you know. I might just like have a day pass. [inaudible] that's fine by me. Because, you know, I like to kind of, kind of get by. You know, [inaudible] at a bit of [inaudible] but also, they will be engaged, to be what's really exciting that I don't think of these days as separate. I believe that disabled people belong everywhere.

Emily 22:48
Yes.

Alice 22:49
And you know while I have clearly, just to be honest, I do think that I have been driven out of academia. For a lot of reasons, But I don't regret it. You know, I just I think it was probably the smartest decision I ever made. To be honest.

Emily 23:26
Can I offer before you start, like, I want to say that this project and thinking about this project as research, is, to me so transformative and powerful. And when we think about wanting to win, we're a part of an upcoming book project that I have with another colleague and our purposes in this edited volume to I think we called it quote, radical possibilities, maybe I can't quite remember but thinking about how something like the Disability Visibility Project can allow us to think so much more expansively. Right about this question of what counts, right. So I just wanted to give that intro of why of the super important connection, I think, between the DVP and qualitative research and the qualitative research community.

Alice 24:32
I did yeah, we could use the terms content, media, culture and research of us interchangeably. whatever you want to call it. It's, it's useful. it's valid its a certificate. So the reason why I started it was out of my own frustration at the history about disabled people by disabled people. Yeah, I started in 2014. it was stories by disabled people here at artist history, nonprofit or storyboard, it leads up to the 25th anniversary. Yeah, what is it? 2015. I did that as a way to generate and document our stories, not to kind of wait around for historians. You know, I feel like that today was one of the most exciting days. Yeah. Because people say like, your story matters. You don't have to be an icon. You don't have to be a leader or famous. You know, your story is part of this growing collective of like, what is the disability experience like in the 21st century? Why can't we participate in the creation and documentation of our history? And the fact that story core has a relationship with our library of congress, that allows participants to have their story archived there. You know, this isn't just for academics for historians. It's for the public. And that's, that feels powerful. Yeah, feels really good. It feels like a something that we're putting out to the world that is for the future. Yeah. Which is precisely I think, so much of the intention of research. That's, it leads to

Emily 27:34
orientation.

Alice 27:37
Yeah, so I think that's where the idea started and You know, I'm just one person. So, you know, I just, I didn't know, like, I really didn't know,

Emily 27:53
your impact is so huge, you know, that. I hope you know, that.

Alice 27:57
You know, I guess but, to be honest, I just used the tools that I had in front of me, which is a website, which was social media advantage, you know these are the things I had available to me. You know, this snowballed. I thought it would just be to the detriment of what you're doing. And I think it's part of your interest to interview hundreds that's you know, people don't want always to tell their story.

Emily 28:49
You don't need a history to create a history and knowledge base that has not existed before.

Alice 28:56
Yeah. You know, clearly I didn't want to give of myself to only histories which could be you know, form a lot of perspectives and oddest form just a ball too. You know, people who are deaf and hard of hearing so, you know, I branched out and started publishing just essays about website. I started a podcast in 2017 which is really amazing because here I am talking to you in December 2020. I just published my 92nd episode.

Emily 29:44
Oh my gosh.

Alice 29:47
That's wild to me. Yeah. It's been a real adventure and a real labor of love to be able to jump around, try different methods, use different formats, for community to be involved in multiple ways. And I think thats for researchers and academics to have so much work. You're a qualitative researcher and you just do a page or a study or projects. There's so many jumps in your work. It really needs to reach people. You know, I would hope that academics think beyond their journal articles beyond their presentations you know, just like, you know these days our jobs are not rewarded in the system and that was a part of the problem. No incentive to create.

Emily 31:38
like you're talking about like that sort of embedded forms of like, ableism, and racism and classism that exists within the Academy, and what, you know, traditional researchers are expected to produce.

Alice 31:51
Yeah, I don't get the kind of pressures that people are under, especially here or junior faculty, or, you know, adjunct or graduate students, you know, because you do have to perform at, perform up to a certain point, right, this is the reality that I experienced as well.

Emily 32:23
Ready to reality? And most places still?

Alice 32:27
Yeah, and I think anybody who claims that otherwise is not really being honest. You know, to be real. Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, this is a real reflection point where, you know, for political and cultural climate, where people and institutions are being held accountable. Yeah. This is your time, if not now. to really think about what are your intensions? How do you practice your values? Yeah. Not just in your work life. But in your everyday life. Sure. You say, oh, you're an ally, or that you're in solidarity with others? Where does that show up? Like, what are the ways that you're actually doing this. And I think that You know in one of the ways. You know I could never to be more charitable. you know, yeah, put your work out there. And to really receive the critique, to receive, you know, real questions, by the people that are the most impacted. You know I think not receive that in a defensive way.

Emily 34:22
And going beyond like, you know, in in a qualitative research class, or in most textbooks, there's something called a member check where you run your analysis by the people that participated. But I think what you're talking about speaks so much more deeply about the relational ways that researchers and participants are co researchers are engaging and allowing those who have more privilege and power to be asked really difficult questions. Yeah, thinking far beyond what gets talked about, I think in the typical typical qualitative research course or text?

Alice 35:04
It's not a checklist. It would be more thoughtful, yeah, more intentional, Also just as scholars like, was your own with this is or areas that you're just thoughts as well first there I think, You know, there's also this very weird you know, job expectation of researchers and like, you know scholars often you don't know at all and i don't i think the offer is a art fair of expectation and I think you'd use a walkway when I see scholars who are just really open it just say what they know and what they don't know Yeah. Like with that frustration research make great art never ever neutral. if we can we can all start from that place. Yeah. I feel like that's where you really start out it really effective relationships with people from the outside. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Do you know there's all those times visible labor thats never going to be compensated. Yes by the academy and I think one other activity that's really undervalued is relationship building.

Emily 37:13
Absolutely, absolutely.

Alice 37:15
And I feel like that. For those of you, you know, this is it doesn't happen overnight. Today you have a study, you're gonna be you're getting IRB approval right now. You're like, Oh, shit, like, I better, you know, do outreach. You can't rush this stuff. And people will sit here doing this with the right intention. You have to lay the groundwork. You have to be of service to others. Yeah. And be really transparent. To be able to build relationships with people, whether they're going to be participants in your study, or as you know, true creators. Absolutely. There's just a lot of kind of foundational work that requires a lot of your own labor. But I will say that this is something that is absolutely valuable. It is really it rich. It is.

Emily 38:50
I mean, it's essentially

about the kind of

the kind of research that you're that you're promoting.

Alice 38:58
Yeah. They deserve you as well. Get along. Nice to serve everyone. That's, you know, that's just their place. Yeah.

Emily 39:15
Oh, gosh, Alice, thank you so much for sharing. I feel like if I didn't, if I didn't try to wrap this up, I could stay on here with you chatting about different things for a really long time. But I want to I want to be respectful of your time and I know that everyone who's listening is so appreciative to hearing your perspective. So thank you so much for sharing your work and your thinking and your your prompts for sort of the academic community of qualitative researchers is super important.

Alice 39:59
Also, before we end, I have some more questions. So this is from a book chapter for a book that you are [inauditble], I'm going to, people might not ever read this or come across this book chapter that I wrote for Emily and Dr. Lester. So here are just some of my thoughts and questions for qualitative researchers. Number 1, how are you uplifting to amplify the scholarship of people outside of the academy? Second, are you speaking in your classes and in panels that you're presenting and coauthoring in ways that emphasize your research partners? Here is another questions, how many non-academic scholars do you cite in your work and if it is not many, why is that?

Emily
Oh gosh, that is so important. Huge questions.

Alice
And two more questions. If you are conducting research about a marginalized community, how will you solicit feedback and critique from people with that experience? And a final question, which I think is probably, the thornest question, and could actually be an entire separate podcast episode, before starting did you research about a marginalized community ask yourself if you are the best person to do this? And whether it is appropriate to defer to other scholars who have been doing the work?

Emily
That is a good one.

Alice:
And Hopefully that leaves our listeners with some food for thought.

Emily
Thank you so much Alice Wong.

In this episode, Alexandra Panos interviews Jessica Nina Lester and Trena Paulus about doing qualitative research in digital words. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for digital methods and strategies has never been stronger. This conversation addresses important practice and theoretic questions for approaching digital inquiry.

Digital Tools for Qualitative Research - Trena M. Paulus, Jessica N. Lester, Paul Dempster

Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World - Trena M. Paulus, Jessica N. Lester

The following includes the transcript of the talk. (please excuse minor transcription errors)

Alexandra
Hello there and welcome to qualitative conversations a podcast hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. I'm Alexandra Panos an assistant professor of literacy studies and an affiliate faculty member in research and measurement at the University of South Florida. I also have the pleasure to serve as program coach with Cassie Quigley for the call SIG. And I'm delighted to be here with doctors Trina Paulus and Jessica Nina Lester to talk about the role digital tools play in qualitative research. Dr. Paulus is a professor in the Research Division of Family Medicine and director of undergraduate research and creative activities, as well as an affiliate faculty member with the Applied Social Research Laboratory at East Tennessee State University. Dr. Paulus's scholarship is primarily in the area of methodological innovation, especially as it intersects with new technologies. Dr. Lester is an associate professor of inquiry methodology in the School of Education at Indiana University Bloomington. Her scholarship focuses primarily on discourse and conversation analysis, disability studies, and more general concerns related to crop qualitative research. Dr. Paulus and Dr. Lester have co authored with sage, the 2014 book digital tools for qualitative research, and an exciting new and in press volume, titled doing qualitative research in a digital world. Thank you both so much for joining it today and sharing your time and energies. Thanks for inviting us. Yes, thank you so much. I'm truly excited to learn from you both and really just want to dive right into our conversation if that's okay. And I wanted to start with

Alexandra
a question that situates us in the here and now, given the shifts that have happened worldwide over the last 10 months with the covid 19 pandemic? Can you share a bit about what from your perspective, this really means for qualitative researchers? And how digital tools might play into this?

Trina
Yeah, so it's kind of this been this weird experience of being in the right place at the right time, or being in the right place at the wrong time? I don't know. But you know, COVID-19 is impacted all researchers in significant ways, for sure. And, you know, we had started writing this new edition of the book,

Trina
fully revamped book that's coming out shortly, a couple of years ago, actually. And then when COVID-19 hits sage really asked us to try to wrap it up, because researchers really needed some guidance for how to basically do their research in a new way.

Trina
And so how do we make sense of those spaces? How do we look at online interaction as a source of data as qualitative researchers, you know, we are interested in the human experience and understanding it as qualitative researchers, and that is now completely emeshed with, you know, doing business, doing education doing everything online. So, you know, there's new opportunities here, even though you know, most people have been, you know, there there are researchers have been doing this for a while, we all kind of have to consider how online spaces might be treated as a source of data, how our experiences are different.

Trina
And so while I think kind of one of the first things people want to know is how do we do interviews in zoom? It's, it's more than that. It's that we're all now spending lots and lots of time in zoom. So how can we understand what's happening there? So we've got digital tools, digital spaces, and also the digital space as a phenomenon in and of itself. Those are just a few of my initial thoughts. Jessica, what do you think?

Jessica
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that's really helpful to keep in mind and in this moment, even though there's this you know, it feels like such a significant and even forced shift for qualitative research, I do think it's helpful to remind ourselves that this move to doing qualitative work and online spaces is not particularly new. And there's really a vast body of literature that we can draw upon to support us and offer some guidance to the questions that we're facing. And even really provoke us to think more about what it means to do qualitative research and be a qualitative researcher in a, you know, a historical moment where we're not just using technologies, but we're living through them even as researchers, and we're making meaning with them. So I think that's something for us to kind of use as a way to frame this particular moment. And that there's resources that we can turn back to, but that also, these are important questions that we should be asking ourselves about our work, and about what it means to make sense of meaning making in a space where technologies are really intersecting with everyday life.

Alexandra
Thanks, yeah, it's, it's, um, it's a lot to process. And I appreciate your point about that. Sometimes it does feel for Steven F, for we're all going through it. And it makes me think a little bit about design, designing scholarship right now designing qualitative scholarship right now. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit about how you work through as a qualitative researcher having to adjust your expectations about a research project, when what you'd hope to do isn't currently feasible. Given realities? Yeah, I

Jessica
can speak to that a little bit. You know, one thing that I often talk with about this question in relationship to students coming to me and saying, I can't do what I hope to do, particularly in this, this given moment, what are my options, and I think it is helpful to think about that, you certainly can return back to your original design and think about if there are ways that you can transform some of those methodologies and methods in engaging with digital tools, that you could digitize some of them, for instance. And then also, it is possible that you actually have to go back to the drawing board. And one of the things that you could potentially engage with is really thinking about designing a study, from the get go, that really engages in with digital spaces. And what that might mean is that you expand definitions of data. And this can be really exciting. And you can engage with new kinds of data that you hadn't even envisioned engaging with before. And so I think, you know, there are those two pathways to think about turning back to that original design and potentially, in some way, digitizing that original design or really rethinking it. And I think that this is an okay thing. I think that, you know, part of part of methodology writ large, is that it's always in the making. And so right now, our methodologies are in a really real way intersecting with technologies. And so what that means is that methodology is being remade. And that's, there's something also really both challenging, and also, potentially really exciting about kind of that moment. So at the same time, I think what that also means is, as we think about re envisioning a study, that we also have to keep in mind that the technologies that we engage with are, of course, not neutral. And they are, of course, you know, always fraught with consequences, including, you know, political consequences and equitable access. And so this is certainly something that we also want to set with as we think about our design, and particularly as we think about redesigning a study.

Alexandra
It's so helpful. I wonder if there are theoretical perspectives that have you found particularly helpful for conducting this kind of Digital Research and turning to to the stat sitting with process that you spoke of?

Jessica
Yeah, I can speak

Jessica
to this, this idea of theories that have informed our work, and I think I'll just share a little bit of a story of how we're coming to think with theory now. So. So first off, so just in general, if you were to engage with the literature around technology and qualitative research over the last, you know, about decade, you would probably conclude that qualitative researchers have historically kind of held on to this view of what's often referred to as technological determinism. So that's this orientation that humans are essentially passing And therefore, they must adapt to changes that technology forces upon them. So this particular view is one that often assumes that it's intrinsically best and most efficient technology will be adopted regardless of the context. And so this particular view is one that when Trina and I wrote the our first book, around digital tools and qualitative research, we really explicitly wanted to counter this perspective that was in the methodological literature. And in some ways, we did this implicitly, but what we really argued for was thinking about the ways in which we as qualitative researchers could really use technology to do things that we wanted it to do. So we didn't position ourselves that's passive. And so within this viewpoint, then qualitative researchers could be thought of as kind of retaining control of qualitative data analysis software, for instance, and not assuming that the software would control the study. So technology, and from this perspective, would be theorized and viewed as not just instrumental, but really positioned as what a human qualitative researcher can use it to do. But after we were wrote our first book on this topic I ran across a book that Katherine Adams and Terri Lynn Thompson had written, which was titled, researching a post human world interviews with digital objects. And in their book, they engaged with new materialistic post qualitative perspectives, and really offers some interesting ideas about how we as qualitative researchers are really intermingled intertwined with digital technologies. And as a read, I saw some references to our book. And so I immediately texted Trina and Katrina, someone has something to say about our book. And, and ultimately, it was a critique, it was a critique of our view of technology that we crafted in the first book was really not engaging and a full way with the ways in which technology really can be conceptualized and theorize as being co researchers with us that there's a dialectic. And so in our newest book, we really take up this critique and have begun to think more with you've been realistic ideas of technology, as well as some of the critical theories related to technological use. And we have found that to be really helpful, and generative, and pushing our thinking about how technologies are co researchers with us and are entangled with us in the process that is then something that we have to really think carefully about, and think about the implications of the tools that we use, and the ways that we're engaging in meaning making.

Alexandra
That I love hearing the story of how these texts evolve over time one, it also makes me wonder, the about the ethical and privacy considerations is something that's important when you do that kind of Digital Research when you are intermingled. So I wonder if you could share a little about that.

Trina
Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. Because it does these issues come up a lot. In the work that I do. And the researchers that I work with these, I'm primarily looking at Digital spaces, online communities and online groups as a source of data. So I think the first thing to think about is that, you know, we always are dealing with ethical issues and privacy considerations when we're doing qualitative research as qualitative researchers, you know, we're often looking very deeply and intensely at people's lives. And so it's always different than if you're giving a survey or doing you know, lab based research is different kinds of ethics. The good thing is that there's actually been a lot of scholarship around ethics and Digital Research for many years. In fact, when we were writing this book, I couldn't believe the proliferation of entire texts on digital ethics that appeared since we wrote the first book in 2014. So there's a lot of guidance out there for sure. A couple of the things that issues that come up frequently for me in in when I'm giving talks and talking with people about it, is the issue of digital traces. And the fact that so much of us are so much of our lives now even before the pandemic world lived on the internet and in the cloud and with mobile devices. And as we go through the world, we're live leaving digital traces everywhere. And whether or not those should be treated as a source of data is the is one of the big issues, right? Who owns those traces? And whose permission Do you need to get to look at those as a data source? institutional review boards often are getting better about having policies around this, but they don't always know how to guide researchers. And sometimes, even though technically, the IRB approves the study, because they don't consider looking at online discussion posts as human subjects research because they're publicly visible, just because they say it's not human subjects research may not automatically mean that it's ethical to look at online discussion posts as a source of data without telling anyone. So I think that thinking about who owns these spaces, who's interacting on these spaces, who has access to them? I think, you know, there, there are no hard and fast rules, because the landscape is changing all the time, right? Like we have Tick Tock now, and we didn't even have that before. So how do we think about Tick Tock as a source of research data. But a few things to think about is, you know, I'm working in a medical school context now. So I hear a lot more about you know, the do no harm, first, do no harm mandate. And so you want to first be sure you're not harming or putting anybody at risk, whether that's an entire online community that no one would have known about until you wrote a paper about it, or if it's about an individual who was posting under their real identity, about a very sensitive illness online, and you bring attention to them inadvertently, or, or on purpose. really thinking about that is, of course, the basis and the fundamental issue around ethics. I've been also thinking about privacy. Do they expect that that this community is private? You know, is it really just for insiders? How can you respect people's privacy? At what point do you need to get informed consent, which may be very difficult when people are in online communities not as themselves, but under an assumed identity assumed identity? How do you navigate that? And so keeping identities private, protecting the data? If you do store? If you do treat it as data, then how can you make it as hard to track down the original sources possible? And then if you do do that, is it changing the essence of the data, or the essence of those online interactions, so that it actually might impact how you interpret it? So those are things that we have to struggle with? how sensitive are the topics that people are talking about? And again, you know, just trying not to put people at risk. So I think the good news, like I said, is that there are lots of case studies. The one of the best sources for guidance around this is the Association of internet researchers, they're actually on their third version of their ethics guidelines that came out, I think the most recent one came out this year.

Trina
And they really, you know, cover, it's all on a continuum. And they give a lot of holistic advice in terms of things to think through. And what I will always say on this topic, really is that if you can do research with people instead of on them, these issues are going to be much easier to navigate. If you want to look at an online community, get in touch with whoever's in that community and see what kinds of topics they would like you to study, and what would they like to know more information about, so that you're actually working in collaboration with the people that you want to understand better?

Alexandra
Thank you for that for the wonderful resource. And then just the plugs, work with folks to

Trina
think about their community. Yeah.

Alexandra
So important, simple, and, and really effective, I

Alexandra
think.

Alexandra
So I want to turn a little bit towards method here. And I'm wondering what tips you have for that data collection process online? Or how to think about additional sources of data to look for once you move research into those online spaces.

Trina
Yeah, and I can talk a little bit about that, too. I think, you know, one of the first things to ask is, okay, where are people talking about the issues that I'm interested in? So your research question like and just to give you an example of one of the earliest cities I did that was outside of an educational context. I'd collaborated with Dr. Mary Alice, Varga who's at the University of West Georgia now, and she's one of her areas is grief counseling. And she was really interested in why people choose to go to grief support groups or not, when you've suffered a loss, you know, you know, you're you're advised to kind of get support, but sometimes it's hard for people to go to grief counseling either individual or in a group. But we discovered or she discovered that there Actually a lot of online grief support groups out there. And she was really curious about why are people going online to get support when we have all of this in person counseling. And so we were able to analyze an online grief support group to kind of understand how people constructed their grief in those spaces. And those findings then could speak back to how people were doing grief counseling offline, you know, so in a pandemic, you may only have access to these online spaces, because so much of our in person services are no longer operating. If you think about any kind of social human experience, phenomenon, social science topic that you're interested in, think about where people talking about it, and just do some investigating. And we make the distinction in the book between naturally occurring or pre existing sources of data, which are things that are already out in the world, Reddit forums, tick tock, lots of online support groups for people who have specific illnesses. And they're just grassroots efforts or they're supported by a certain professional organization, travel blogs, and forums, Google Groups I hear is a huge source for parents trying to school their kids in the pandemic, there's all these neighborhoods and friend groups, setting up Google Groups, test text message threads. There's lots of places where people are talking electronically, and they have been for years, but now especially there's electronic conversations going on, that might give you insight into how people are talking about things without people talking to a researcher directly. research agenda generated data is when I decide to go interview someone, they're talking to me as a researcher, so they'll give me you know, their thoughts on things up to a point up to what they're willing to disclose to a researcher that they may not know that well. So that's important data. But what's really interesting is to see how people are going about their lives in these spaces without researcher intervention. And that can give us some really interesting insights that we wouldn't get otherwise.

Alexandra
That's, that's really interesting to think about all of those spaces that we're all contributing to right now.

Trina
Exactly.

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Alexandra
I guess something else I'm thinking about is that this idea that much might be lost when doing online interviews, interviewing is such a staple. For us as qualitative researchers, I think, do you have any thoughts or tips for enriching interview data beyond the recorded audio when we're working with digital tools?

Jessica
Yeah, I can, I can speak to this. And I think a useful place to start in response to this is actually to flip the script a bit on this. So rather than assuming that, you know, much is lost, I really prefer to think about it as just being different. I think it's really important to keep in mind that, you know, historically, face to face interviews, in qualitative research have really rested on some pretty notable assumptions about what it means to do qualitative research and about what participants should be doing and how they should be doing it. I have a favorite paper that was written by two critical disability studies scholars, Stephanie Kershaw and Margaret price in I think, was 2017. And their paper was was focused on thinking about how we can center disability and qualitative interviewing. And one of the things that they noted was that interviews writ large, and they were speaking both to those conducted in face to face contacts and as well as online, but that they really rely upon normative conceptions of body mind. So people, you know, ask a verbal question. And participants are expected to respond in a particular way. And we assume that language given in a particular way, and shared in a particular way is how it will occur. So it's a very normative assumption about even meaning making. So I say that because I think it's really important that we're reflective and careful about orienting to interviewing, as it has always been done as the only or even best way to capture making sense of people's lives and experiences. You know, we do know from some groups of people that this really has not been their experience of this method and crush on price speak to that a little bit from their own experience. Um, so then, if you are conducting interviews in a virtual space, I do suggest that you, you know, really orient to it as different. And certainly, there are important considerations, some of which are similar to face to face interviews, and others that are really unique to the particular technologies that you're using. You know, so like, an example of this might be, you know, if you want to consider whether videos will be turned on or off, and what does this mean for things like rapport building, or even how participants might experience a researcher viewing their private spaces. So, you know, corresponding price. They also argued that, even though you know, there has been this writing, and kind of argument from some researchers that we need to consider the significance of digital interviewing methods, because they do create access. And some people, some participants prefer that kind of interviewing space. They even pointed out in their work that even in these digital spaces, there can be this over reliance on kind of a normative body mind way of thinking about interaction. So I think in general, the real key is just to be critical, regardless of kind of the the modality that the interview is taking place in. And so as a starting point, I always encourage folks to, to your number one turn to your participants, to invite them to share with you ways that they can share their experience and their lives. In these digital spaces. They might have ideas, first, you know, ways that they want to do screen sharing, or even apps that are really useful in their own lives for sharing how they're going about living their lives. And also, you know, there is, again, a really nice body of literature that you can turn to, to get some guidance. You know, beyond Kershaw on prices article, Janet salmons has written a lot about online interviewing. And I also think it's useful to turn to some of the critical methods writing in the disability studies community that has really problematized interviewing, and both face to face and online spaces, and also highlighted how, you know, we never want to rest easy with being armed with a bunch of methods, literature, but the real importance of turning back to our participants to really help us understand better how we can collect data that allows us then to make sense of meaning making

Alexandra
you for, for talking through that and flipping that script, I think it's so important, and I just learned so much. And I want to turn now to your point about what the data is how we how we cope, how we collected or generated. So to think about technology, I guess I'm wondering if there are any, you know, specific particular platforms, technologies, devices that you have found particularly beneficial, and that you use when you're doing digital research? Yeah, I

Jessica
mean, you know, one of the challenges is that there are so many. And so of course, it depends on the the study and the nature of the project that you're working on itself. In our in our new book, one of the things that we have throughout is, is more than 40 vignettes, so on the ground researchers that describe their work and the specific tools that supported their work and that they engaged in. And so I think one of the ways to learn about what's out there is is really to engage with the writing of on the ground researchers who are are working across a range of disciplines and therefore asking really different kinds of questions that lead them to engage with different technologies. But again, you know, it really does depend on on the study and the nature of the project project. So if, for instance, I'm working with Instagram data, there are particular applications that I would use As I would download and format my image base data, versus when I'm working with interview data collected via zoom or another video conferencing platform. So it really does depend on the design of the study. And this is something that we've described in our writing as being part of you're generating your own Digital Research workflow. So in my own work, regardless of the project, I typically use qualitative data analysis software, specifically, I'm an atlas ti user, and recently have begun to delve into learning and using max q da. I mean, I use qualitative data analysis software really to manage and organize the entirety of my research study, including things like my literature review, and also using various features within a package to write up some of my my early findings within the package itself. So in this way, I, I personally orient to qualitative data analysis software, as kind of being like the the One Stop Shop that supports many of the aspects of my digital workflow. And I think what's important is that we we all individually spend time really not just designing our study, but thinking about where it intersects with our own Digital Research workflow, and identify ways that that can support the the work that we're interested in pursuing.

Alexandra
It's really helpful. I love the idea of a digital workflow and just having that be part of a study design and thinking through it that way. And I guess another sort of staple for us as qualitative researchers is transcribing data. I wonder about your preferred methods for that process? I know there's there's a lot of literature around transcription. But what what are you guys seeing right now?

Trina
Yeah, so that is, a whole chapter of the book is about innovations in transcription, because this is one of the areas that has really changed a lot since we wrote the 2014 book, in part because of just the leaps and bounds that auto transcription, artificial intelligence supported transcription tools, what they're able to do now such as Trent temi, otter AI, there's a lot of them out there, and they are getting better and better all of the time. And and just as an example of that, for the for people using zoom, you may have noticed that if your institution subscribes to it, you will actually get an automatically generated zoom transcript, which is phenomenal, if you're doing your interviews in zoom. And I would say this is actually where online interviews are hugely advantageous over face to face because there's an automatically generated transcript at the end. Now, granted, we all know that you have to make edits. But compared to what this used to look like the edits, if it's good sound quality, standard English or standard version of whatever language you're speaking in. If the conditions are right, the transcript can really be amazing. So for, you know, video conference type interviews, you know, if there's an automatically generated transcript, that's definitely a great place to start. This summer, I actually used Trent for the first time as a first pass to transcribe some patient, patient interviews, the health care providers, students in the health professions, were interviewing standardized patients. And I had a bunch of video data. So I ran it through Trent as a first pass it automatically it timestamps that automatically you can edit the transcript within Trent. It's a great data storage, it's all cloud based. So you do have to get IRB approval, and we didn't have any HIPAA data, HIPAA protected data, so it worked for us. But I do think that looking into some of these AI based services is definitely worth it as a first pass, if you're not actually conducting the interviews in zoom, another really good tool is ink scribe i en que se RIBE. It also lets you timestamp because what that means is if you can synchronize your recording with the transcript that is just so beneficial as a qualitative researcher so that you're not just relying on the words, you can actually click anywhere in the transcript and listen to that interaction again. And so Jessica and I both do conversation analysis and discourse analysis and other language based analytic methods were how people speak is as important as what they say. And so the technology, the ability to not just rely on the written transcript, but to be able to go back and listen again to how something said that's just been invaluable. And so I think we do need to really think about transcription as part of that overall Digital Research workflow. And there are cases in which some of the qualitative data analysis platforms We'll support that as well. So if you're using the Mac version of Atlas ti, I think that you can actually transcribe within that software. And the same with in vivo and Max q da, they provide the ability to do synchronize transcripts. So it's definitely worth thinking about how that's going to be integrated into the whole process. And, Jessica, I'm not sure if you wanted to add something on this one, too.

Jessica
Yeah, I was just gonna also say that is the one of the things that I think is really interesting about new technologies as they relate to transcription is, I think it's a really vivid example of how you can see innovations and technologies shaping how we think about method and methodology. And so what I mean by that is, you know, many of the qualitative analysis software packages now allow us to do import in a fairly fluid way. sizable video based data sets, though I work with a lot of video based data in my own scholarship, and they're relatively large data sets. So working with, you know, upwards of 100 plus hours of interactional data. And one of the things that these new innovations have really pushed to the fore is questions around do we even need to be transcribing our entire data set? And why are we transcribing our entire data set? What might it mean to leverage things like directly,

Trina
directly

Jessica
analyzing with the tools that are embedded within qualitative analysis, software packages, or video, and then we're selectively transcribing our data. And these questions, of course, become really pertinent when you're working with large datasets and just thinking about transcribing, which has been the norm and conversation, analytic work and much of discourse analysis as well. You transcribe everything and you transcribe everything, using transcription systems that are really, really intense, and take an extensive amount of time. So there's this time issue, but then there's also what's I think, arising is questions around why are we doing what we're doing. And I think if we trace across time, we'll see that there is a lot of methodological shift that happens in relationship to technological innovation. I mean, even if we just think about interviewing, how we collected interview data has radically shift as the development of recording technologies came to be, and then a refinement of those. And so I think right now, a really compelling and provocative and important question that I do hope that we, as a community, spend time really wrestling with is what is the place of transcription? And what might it mean to think about transcription differently at the intersection of technology and our methodological practice.

Alexandra
But I'm really thinking a lot about what you just said, I'm gonna send you a message after. Um, so I guess another question that I'm wondering about is the tools what tools are you using for storing all this massive amounts of data and these big files, etc, in both an accessible yet also secure way?

Trina
Yeah, you know, my biggest recommendation there is to use whatever your university is supporting, because you don't want to get in so like, at my institution, it's OneDrive, right Microsoft product, and, yeah, it may not be like the easiest, most accessible in terms of, you know, efficient way because the I don't necessarily like the way that the navigation is set up. But my institution has it, it's secure, it's supported IRB, are okay with it. Everybody that I'm working with in my institution can access it. Theoretically, people at other institutions should be able to access it as well. And so, you know, I think that really sticking with what your institution supports is a good first way to think about that. I do want to say that if you are thinking about long term storage of data, you need to consider a qualitative data repository, especially if you are willing for other researchers to have access to your data for reuse. to Oregon, that's another good reason to use qualitative data analysis software, because actually, all of your data is stored in that platform. That's how it's organized. And so you've got the software package, organizing your data, then you've got the original files, you know, also maybe in OneDrive, or what other whatever other system that you're using, that can keep it all very manageable. That's, you know, and then you know, that there's, there's the There's the password protected things with, you know, sharing files in certain ways that I do think you have to think about. But one nice thing about being in a secure cloud based service, like one drive supported by the institution is you don't have to think about it as much as you used to have to when everything was stored on individual computers, or hard drives, or zip drives and jump drives, and then you had to think about how you were going to password protect each file, and then how you were going to send it in secure emails to your collaborators. So you know, just look into what your your university supports. And I do realize that's a privileged position. If you're not working at an institution that provides something like that, then you do have to kind of think through all of those steps that that we did before we had these services...

[End of the transcript]

In this episode, Maureen Flint, recipient of the QR SIG Outstanding Dissertation Award, discusses her work with the QR SIG Dissertation Award Committee Chair Jennifer Wolgemuth. You can follow more of Dr. Flint's work on her website: www.maureenflint.com.

Below is the transcript of this interview.

Jennifer
Hello, everyone, and welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. I'm Jennifer wolgemuth, the current chair of the qualitative research special interest group outstanding dissertation award committee. I am excited to be joined today by Dr. Maureen Flint, who is the recipient of the 2020 outstanding dissertation Award for her dissertation titled, methodological orientations, college student navigations of race and place in higher education. Dr. Flint is an assistant professor of qualitative research at the University of Georgia, where she teaches courses on qualitative research design, analysis and theory in the College of Education. The research agenda focuses on the theory, practice and pedagogy of qualitative inquiry. In particular, she's interested in artful methodologies, as well as questions of social justice, ethics and equity in higher education. Her research has been published in qualitative inquiry, cultural studies, critical methodologies, the review of higher education, Journal of college student development, and art slash research international and many other outlets. Her current work is interested in audio, visual and multimodal approaches to inquiry and representation. And some of her explorations in this area can be found on her website at www.maureen.flint.com. That's www.maureenflint.com Thank you for joining me today. Dr. Flynn.

Maureen
I'm really thrilled to learn more about you and your work. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.


Jennifer
I think it would be helpful for our audience just to learn a little bit more about your dissertation work. So can you talk about your dissertation? What was the scope? What was its methodological focus?

Maureen 2:27
Yeah, absolutely. Um, so my dissertation explored the socio historical context of race on campus, and particularly through new materialist and critical spatial, I'm going to critical spatial lens. So maybe we'll back up a little bit, I have a background in student affairs. And then I also have a background in the arts. And so both of those things really came kind of to the fore when I started my dissertation, as I've worked as an administrator, and it kind of started from this question, this gap between what I saw between what we was doing as an administrator, and then the things that we said that we valued and things that actually happened. And so I was really interested in kind of getting at that gap, particularly around the question of belongingness. and ended up finding theory is kind of this entry point to really work that tension. So a question of focus on place, and the way that place and the histories of place mattered, and students belongingness. And so this kind of starting there, I started with kind of traditional methods of interviews and focus groups. And then kind of found they necessarily getting at getting at the complexity of place that I kind of felt on the day to day or that my, my students kind of were alluding to in their interviews and so I started thinking about what kind of throughout my dissertation there's this question of faithfulness to theory is the way that I talked about it and how, how am I continually orienting to theory and the ways in which I'm designing and writing and representing engaging with my participants and thinking, thinking about kind of engaging with the space of campus and my research questions as a whole so throughout my dissertation, I can move in and out of these various methods and analytic approaches things like walking interviews and student I had students make maps that visually represented the police of Canvas and and kind of walk them through them. And then when I moved in de analytics started, I started to think with sound as a way to kind of explore the this layered pneus of place and and then that also, that kind of question. fullness also came out. And the ways in which I wrote through my dissertation is I can continually pausing and stopping and thinking about, you know, how is theory guiding you in this moment? Or have I fallen away from theory. And so I think, you know, that that really became the guiding threads throughout at all. And it closes and closes with this kind of question of ethics and theory, and faithfulness in the way that all those things in our twine, particularly in relationships with participants and kind of questions of futurity, and who are we as methodologists, in the future to come? So, yeah.

Jennifer
Wow, thank you. It sounds like what one of the things that I really heard you say, and I think would be really of interest to the listeners is, you you started out with what we might call traditional or conventional qualitative inquiry. And then it was a combination of engaging theory, new materialist theory and other sorts of theories that opened up different kinds of methodological possibilities for you. So can you give some advice to doctoral students who might be on that particular path right now as we speak?

Maureen 6:23
Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think, well, I now I think about it, I teach because I teach one of the classes that I teach is our design course. And one of the things that I have the students in that class do, we have an of this traditional three interview project, that's traditionally the outcome of that course. And one of the things that I do in that class is have students have do one of those interviews as a non traditional scare quotes, non traditional interview, and it opened the door for them to do something different with it, with their their dislike of their interview, the research questions, this idea of interview itself. And I think that I see that for them really opening the door to think about how other things matter beyond just like an interview script, and sitting across from someone and asking them a series of questions help.You know, things like objects, or changing the place of the interview, or even going beyond, I've had students really challenged what an interview is, and like engage interview documents or going to go into different types of analysis, but always guided by the theories and their literature and the research questions that are guiding them. So I think maybe, I think that that is an entry point. They're thinking about advice to other students. And, yeah, I think in my own work, it was also reading interdisciplinarily. So I was reading a lot in critical geography studies. I was reading in like, literary fiction, poetic authors like Claudia Rankin, and Saidya Hartman, who write in a very, like literary poetic style, speculative fiction, like nk jemisin. And so those little really inspired mythological choices that I made in terms of like, thinking differently, or thinking otherwise about representation or methodology.

Jennifer
Um, so, you mentioned new materialism and new materialist theory and philosophy. So in addition to all this interdisciplinary reading that you're doing, and this sort of practicing with innovative methodologies, what recommendations might you have for new materialist readings for students?

Maureen 9:02
Who, um, yeah, I think, Rosie Brady's My, my, my girl, um, so she was really what guided my dissertation. Um, she has a new book out on post-human knowledges that I think really speaks to this present moment that we're in a precarity and exhaustion and capitalism and white supremacy and the ways that all those things are colliding all at once. And I've also, Sara Ahmed has been although she's not necessarily a new materialist writer, she's really informed my work, particularly around thinking around feminism.

And who else in a thing. work has been really important and I think she just had she has a new website out that's beautiful. That's thinking in these really layered ways about the Anthropocene. And I guess maybe more broadly, the thing that I would say about reading is that I've really been inspired by reading with other people who are working in other spaces and places. And so I end up reading things that I never would have coming out of my discipline, in educational research, but also with this background in higher education, we become, especially in higher ed become really siloed. And so thinking with people who are in math, education, or English, or geography or other spaces has been really an expansive,expanded my reading in productive ways.

Jennifer
This is some really great sources and great suggestions, and I appreciate the injunction right to to read widely and read across disciplines. It's It's impressive what opened up for you, your dissertation?

Maureen 10:58
Well, I guess maybe what I think I found reading, really, I have always enjoyed reading a lot. And I think reading with people has been something that has been incredible. It's one of my favorite things about being an academic or getting to be an academic of thinking with people. And so me, I think finding people who you enjoy, who bring joy to your reading, is perhaps another thing. So that's great advice, finding anyone who brings joy to anything, it's probably important.So, in addition to everything that you've said, there are lots of graduate students right now who are writing dissertations. There are lots of faculty members who are writing books.

Jennifer
Can you talk about your process of writing your dissertation? What was it like what helped? What got in the way?


Maureen 12:00
You know,I guess where to start. Susan, can I actually just wrote a chapter for an edited book that you and Kelly guy have put together. And we we actually were writing converting our distributions together, we met era, through the QR SIG, which, which actually to back up a little has been huge was hugely helpful for me in a variety of ways. my academic career trajectory as a grad student from doing putting together proposals for a year a,like suddenly getting descended to a senior scholar in the field and getting feedback I think I sent you in this could be like a 40 page manuscript, and she was like, Oh, you might need to cut this little bit. Um, but I just had no idea right of what to do. And so the cure was really helpful in mentoring me along in how to become a member of qual community. And so Susan, and I had met at the mentoring session at a year and ended up reconnecting and icti. And then reading together over the summer. And then both were kind of separately told their advisors to stop reading, insert writing, because we want it both on to graduate, but spring. And so I think, you know, that was hugely helpful having someone in a similar place to talk through not just and share writing, not just around like the literal parts of the dissertation, but all of that other stuff that goes along with it, like the excesses of like the hoops in the job market, and the worry and the anxiety.And so we read about in that chapter is like the swarming of like, coming together of texts, and others, other folks that were writing within our advisors and our writing is this kind of collaborative move, even as we were writing separately, we were writing together. So finding that type of community. And I also had a group of people. It was kind of a mix of faculty and other graduate students, who we would write together really early in the mornings. We had kind of this set schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays, we're needed Starbucks or McDonald's at like seven in the morning or 630 in the morning. For me, that was really helpful because it was a time when like, there were no other distractions, or someone else who is expecting me to be somewhere there is some accountability. So that that helped a lot. And then I think starting at both the season and with the people ever with starting to think about your dissertation is like chipping away at small pieces of it, rather than thinking about it as a huge month long endeavor. I remember staring at a set, actually, my committee let me put a picture of it in my dissertation. But I stared at a stack of printed out transcripts, I think for like three weeks just staring at them not knowing what to do. So finding ways to chip away at it was helpful. And one of those things that I did, but that's how I like turned to sound, because I couldn't deal with the stack three inch stack of paper. So I started taking audio clips and layering them together to think about it differently.


Jennifer
That's, that's so interesting. Because you you notice something that wasn't working for you, right? Um, and it sounds like your dissertation emerged through that process you you had collected interviews to answer a question and you found them wanting in one way, shape, or form. And then you went to analyze that when you found that process that you were meant to do wanting. And so you chose something new. And that's something that comes out really loud and clear in your dissertation and in the rest of your work is that you're not just a scholar, you're not just an analyst, you are a creator, you're an artist. So can you talk about what being an artist and producing art?

Maureen 16:26
I know, I didn't send you this question in advance. Apologies for putting you on the spot. But it's so fascinating. How,yeah, how that how that plays into your work and your identity as a scholar? Yeah, Mmm hmm. Well, I when I was growing up, I always wanted to be an artist, my mom was an art teacher. And I went to school to be trained as a pattern maker. So what that means is like the construction of garments, so like a designer drugs, a sketch, and the pattern maker looks at it and tries to figure out how to make that real or possible. And that often means like, being very creative, or inventive, and the fabrics that you use, or like the ways in which it gets seams or cut or the ways in which is put together. And so when I took my first qualitative research class, there's this kind of click that I was like, oh, like design is really, there's this there's this a parallel ness between, you know, creation, art creation, through this pattern, making lens and then design, it's like this puzzle that you're figuring out how stuff fits together. And there might be multiple ways for things to go together. Or maybe along the way, as you're trying to put stuff together, something else becomes possible. That's way more exciting than your initial idea. And so I think that's always like an under that's always been an undercurrent of my work. And then there's other places or spaces where I've thought more explicitly with art making practices as I mean, I think this having this happens in research design, but I also think it happens in art making where there's this ethic of experimentation or process. Actually, I was in a talk with Anna Sing last week or the week before, and she was talking about, like this idea of the detour or of contingencies and following this thing.And I'm always found in art making that those are things like those are things you should follow that you should see what what they make possible. And I also find that true.

QRSIG ADD 18:49
The qualitative research special interest group was established in 1987. To create a space within the American Educational Research Association. For the discussion of ethical, philosophical and methodological issues in qualitative research. We invite you to consider joining the qualitative research they today are members of a era. The annual fee for joining qualitative research special interest group for regular non graduate student members is $10. And the annual fee for graduate students is $5. As members of the QR SIG, you will gain access to a network of fellow qualitative scholars, as well as our many activities ranging from mentoring opportunities to our podcast series to update to news related to recent qualitative publications and jobs, please visit the American educational research associations website at www dot att era dotnet to join the qualitative research thing today.

Jennifer
So can you talk about so some scholars build off their dissertation work? And sometimes like myself, they move in different directions for a period of time. So what are you engaging with and what are you thinking now?

Maureen 19:58
Yeah, um,I? Well, one of the things that's been really exciting post graduate graduation or post dissertation has, has been getting to explore, particularly in my dissertation, like some of the lines of thought or ideas that I get to like fully fleshed out there. And so my writing right now is been doing some of that. So,for example, I, there's a footnote in my dissertation about a leaf blower, and like the way that it kept coming up in the audio of my dissertation, because I was doing these walking interviews, right, where it was asking students to take me on a tour of campus Sigmund on alternative tour of campus. And throughout it, there was like this buzz of the leaf blower and in my dissertation, I have this little footnote that was like, this is really interesting, the way it keeps coming up, like listening to this as a more than human sound like how what might this do to think about the productions of place and how it matters. And so I wrote this paper, that's an I guess, it's, it's accepted with minor revision. So it's not complete day, it's still hanging out. But anyway, I'd like it to follow this leaf blower around and like unfold these practices of like lawn maintenance and the history of leaf blowers in the way that that's entangled with low paid or unpaid or historically, enslaved labor and how like listening to them, and following that thread begins, like unravel this neutrality of place, and the ways that, you know, waste supremacy and capitalism are baked into the ongoing productions of higher education. So and that's been really fun to follow some of those threads. Um,and so I guess I'm still writing with my dissertation in some ways, like that. And I've also really enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with people. That's been I mean, the that's been really inspiring and joyful, I guess, to return to joy. Um, so as soon as like Susan cannon, I can and I kept writing together, reading together and then we've been really thinking about feminist materialists theories and in conjunction with like counting practices, and metrics and how that produces academic subjects and how you might methodologically intervene and practices of counting. And then I've been writing a little bit with my friend, Carlson, Kugler at Alabama, and we've been thinking, choose a beautiful art practice around embroidery. And she's been thinking about artful ways to engage with and respond to theory.So those are a few of the collaborations, but I think that's been super cool to get to really, like lean into collaborative work and thinking postgraduation.

Jennifer 23:10
Yeah. And the the viewers can't see it, but you have this big smile on your face. That clearly shows. Yeah, the joy that that collaborative work. Like, like thinking with other people is such a creative process. Because you end up in these like unexpected spaces and places because of, like, the publicity of your ideas. That's just so cool. And, yeah,yeah, you can. Yeah. Um, can you talk about speaking of joy, the ethical aims, or ethical tensions in your work? Sort of from an axiological perspective? What do you hope that your work accomplishes or moves or shifts within the field of qualitative researcher or the other fields that you work in?

Maureen 24:07
Yeah.You know, um, interestingly, I will not ever up. It's interesting. It's interesting to me.I think that in a lot of ways, my work started off really interested in speaking to the field of higher education. great ideas, has this quote about seeking modes of representation and forms of accountability that are adequate to the complexities of the world we're living in may have mangled that a little bit but and I think that was really like an ethical move that I wanted.
As a person who came out of higher education, I have a master's degree in higher ed administration that I really wanted. I saw You know, this intersection of theory and methodology, particularly new materialist and feminist new materialist theories as this ethical move in higher education to think more complicatedly about the space of college campuses and the way that they produce in are produced by students, and faculty, etc, etc. Um, and, you know, I've been talking with when I've read with my friends, Laura Smithers and Apple Ian, and we've been reading together over the summer following, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic, and the always kind of this resurgence of racial justice movements and this anger around the ongoing violence towards black people. And all of it in this moment in the election, that's in a week. Like, I think about writing and methodology is, like a response to that, that is, like I think about it is. So we talked about, like, I feel, in some ways, like I'm writing, like, writing my way out of this moment, in some ways or way through. And I think that's actually misquoting Hamilton. But, um, but like, I like I think about methodology is this ethical responsiveness to the moment that we're in? And particularly like, as a white woman in this moment? Like, what how do I respond? And what's my place? And how do I do this in an ethical way? Like, I think about my researches, picking needing to pick up and engage with all of that, be responsive to it. And I never quite know what that's going to look like. In the moment, I guess, um, yeah, I actually, I think about a paper that a graduate student. And I wrote over the summer, that ended up in a totally different place than we expected. He proposed it last fall thinking with john lewis's good trouble. And then. And then we started reading in May, and you know, reading about good trouble, john lewis, in May of 2020, is totally different than writing with it in September of 2019. And so we really struggled through that paper with how to how to respond to this moment, in a complicated way is, and I think that's still ongoing. So, yeah.

Jennifer
So shifting gears a little bit back to advice given for graduate students. A lot of doctoral students that I work with, and I know others in our community work with, are very interested in doing critical and post informed and artistic sorts of work on and the come up against expectations for formats for what proposals like and, and so I'm just curious, from, from your experience and your perspective as the assistant professor Now, what does a proposal look like? And how did you communicate what you wanted to do to your committee? And what were their sort of questions and concerns?

Maureen 29:13
Yeah, that's a great, that's actually a question that I've had any particularly in my I'm teaching in our analysis class right now that I'm, I've gotten from a lot of my students, there's I'm sharing articles from qualitative inquiry and stuff that moves beyond traditional formats. And they always ask like, oh, like, How did this get published? How are these people taken seriously? And one of the things is, well, this isn't necessarily responding to your question. One of the things that we do in that is, look at like, we take all those like traditional things that are in paper, and then I asked them to, like, think through this non traditional paper and think about one what's the purpose of it? What's it doing? And then, you know, sometimes they'll find that Oh, like all of these pieces are here, they're just presented in a way. That's different because and then we talk about, like, why that is like how presenting this non traditional format is actually pushing you to think differently about, you know, what research could be your purpose of it all. But going back to my dissertation, I was really lucky in that. I, Kelly guyot, who was my advisor, we talked about really early on the fact that I was probably going to do something that moves beyond traditional, the traditional five chapter format.And she actually really pushed me to do that. So I remember sitting down with her after my proposal, which actually looked fairly traditional, in that it had an introduction, a statement, like statement of the problem. This is what I, this is what this is, what the literature is, this is what I plan to do the slide. Here's my theory.And she really pushed me to move beyond that and think, otherwise, if she pushed me to think about what my represents, like, how is the way that you're representing your district dissertation aligned with your theory, like you keep talking about this in your methodological section, so how like your representation should also think about that so. And as I finished my dissertation, we have continually talked about like a more than representation like art, for instance, installation or something. And so that was something I ended, I did a pop up our installation for my dissertation defense itself, where I invited my participants and one student affairs and community members. And the room where my dissertation where I defended, had, I had created these, like fabric panels with quotes from participants.There was like sheer fabric, with their quotes on it, and some, like big pieces of theory, weaving them all together. And then the sound is compilations that I've made, we're playing in different parts of the room. So as you walked around, you heard different voices and different stories being told about place. And so that was really neat. I mean, so I think I was fortunate that she really pushed me to, like, push me to do that push me to think that so I think,and I, also, um, you know, I had, I think, 26 chapters and my final dissertation. And the graduate school didn't blink an eye about that, like they, I it's like it's interwoven with images and pictures, I have, like these layered maps that show up in between chapters. And so long as it had one inch margins, and like, APA was, right, they were pretty cool with it. So I think that really taught me and that's been my experience submitting to journals, too, is that one minute, so long as you're fitting in, do follow some of these rules. There's some space there and like creating like hypertext spaces where your work can be otherwise, like that hump of installation, or I had links throughout that link to my website. So I created a website. So yeah, I think so I think and talking with your advisor about what you plan to do, along the way, in fact, finding folks, I mean, I had a five person committee that was really, really supportive of me. And we talked about that all along the way of our stuff was, might look different than they were used to. So that was, yeah. And all of that. It's hard advice to give, because, you know, I also didn't know I did, so some of the stuff that ended up in my dissertation was actually stuff that I've experimented with, in classes or experimented with. I guess it was my prospectus that was fairly nor traditional. And my proposal started to move beyond that. And I started to play with that. So I almost like showed them like these are some things that this might look like, but here's ways that I'm thinking About experimentation. And so we got to have these really cool conversations about theory. And what that could mean for a referee, or how that might inform representation or inform, or, I mean, we also talked about, like, should I be representing anything anyway? Because I was using non representational theories.But, you know, we got to have these really cool questions about a theory, and the way that that might inform my work in multiple ways. So yeah.

Jennifer
So I'm hearing if I were to summarize your main point. I'm hearing that having mentors and committee members who are supportive is really important. I hear that having examples of other people who have done this kind of work, whether it's in journals, or your dissertation for, for example, is important. I hear that even though we think journals and grad schools are very rigid in their requirements, they actually may be a lot less rigid than we think they are.And I hear that being open to thinking about alternative ways to engage your dissertation, like the hyperlinks that you were talking about.are all ways in which we can open up the idea of what a good proposal and a good dissertation looks like.

Maureen 36:32
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for summarizing all that. I tend to ramble.Oh, no, no, no, I'm the I was the last thing. One of the things you said reminded me some of the best advice I got, especially when I was in my perspective, sir proposal stage was Kelly guyot told me to go and look at ICQI, experimental dissertations, who had won over several years. And that works, who won and the arts based research thing. And that was really helpful for me, I remember reading a David Bright's dissertation where he really plays with footnotes. And like, it was just, you It's beautiful. And like this, like kind of happening in my brain where it just was like, oh, like, you can really play with the format of this and neat ways. So that's some more concrete place, perhaps you're the best. Because you're so good at giving concrete advice.

Jennifer
And because you're in a fabulous position at the University of Georgia. So you're now an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, just in case fabulous didn't communicate. Um, so can you talk about your experience being on the academic job market? And do you have any tips for those who were starting to get that right now? Or soon?

Maureen 38:06
Yes, I was trying to think I think, um, you know, the the way, as someone who is now working in the field as a new professor, I've been asked to be on like, all these panels of like, how do you get an academic job? And I never, even though I can, like, I think there are multiple levels of tips like there's like, the logistical, like, when should you like having conversations with having lots of people look at your CV and give you advice on it was really helpful to me talking really early in your academic career with your advisor about like, what you want to do, like I remember my first or second year talking with Kelly, about like that I wanted to actually have the time I was on the fence between the illustrator and going the academic route. But that chief after,after I had a middle manager job as an administrator and realize that no world I wanted to live in. Um, but anyway, we sat down and like, recognized that one area, like one gap area that I had was I didn't have a lot of experience teaching. And so she and I co taught a class with her and then also ended up reaching out to a faculty member in the higher ed program to co teach a class and Student Affairs because when I went on the market, I was actually doing a double search of methodology positions and higher ed position. So having experienced teaching in both of those was helpful.

Maureen 39:46
So, I mean, there's like that logistical advice. And I think, I mean, some of the best advice that I got was about not not taking it personally. That the job mark is like this weird...


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