Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry [1 ed.] 1611323266, 9781611323269

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Theory
1. Qualitative Inquiry and the Challenge of Scientific Status
2. Qualitative Research in a Glocalizing World
3. Remix Cultures, Remix Methods: Reframing Qualitative Inquiry for Social Media Contexts
Part II: Praxis
4. The Role of Indigenous Languages and Focus Groups in Qualitative Inquiry: Experiences from the Global South
5. On a Bead and a Prayer: The Importance of (Re)membering African Womanhood in the Diaspora
6. Border Crossing: Bridging Empirical Practices with De/colonizing Epistemologies
Part III: Method
7. Dewey, A/r/tography, and Ab-Use of Global Dialogue
8. Beyond the Autoethnography versus Ironist Debate: Using Charles Sanders Peirce and Cornel West to Envision an Alternative Inquiry Practice
9. Navigating the Terrain of Social Justice: Multiple Voices in Mixed Methods Research
Coda: Are You Serious? Playing, Performing, and Producing an Academic Self
Index
About the Authors

Citation preview

Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry

INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry has been hosted each May since 2005 by the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This volume, as well as preceding ones, are products of plenary sessions from these international congresses. All of these volumes are edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina and are available from Left Coast Press, Inc. Series volumes include 8. Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry 2013, based on the 2012 Congress ISBN 978-1-61132-325-2 hardcover 978-1-61132-326-9 7. Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Advocacy 2012, based on the 2011 Congress ISBN 978-1-61132-162-3 hardcover 978-1-61132-163-0 6. Qualitative Inquiry and Global Crises 2011, based on the 2010 Congress ISBN 978-1-61132-021-3 hardcover 978-1-61132-022-0 5. Qualitative Inquiry and Human Rights 2010, based on the 2009 Congress ISBN 978-1-59874-537-5 hardcover, 978-1-59874-538-2 paperback 4. Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice 2009, based on the 2008 Congress ISBN 978-1-59874-422-4 hardcover, 978-1-59874-423-1 paperback 3. Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Evidence 2008, based on the 2007 Congress ISBN 978-1-59874-321-0 hardcover, 978-1-59874-322-7 paperback 2. Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research 2007, based on the 2006 Congress ISBN 978-1-59874-140-7 hardcover, 978-1-59874-141-4 paperback 1. Qualitative Inquiry and the Conservative Challenge 2006, based on the 2005 Congress ISBN 978-1-59874-045-5 hardcover, 978-1-59874-046-2 paperback For more information on these publications, or to order, go to www.LCoastPress.com,

Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry Norman K. Denzin Michael D. Giardina Editors

First published 2013 by Left Coast press, Inc. Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Global dimensions of qualitative inquiry / Norman K. Denzin, Michael D. Giardina, editors. pages cm.—(International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61132-325-2 (hardback : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-1-61132-326-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-61132-327-6 (institutional ebook)—ISBN 978-1-61132-718-2 (consumer ebook) 1. Social sciences—Research—Methodology. 2. Qualitative research— Methodology. I. Denzin, Norman K. II. Giardina, Michael D., 1976– H62.G527 2013 001.4'2--dc23 2013003889 ISBN 978-1-61132-325-2 ISBN 978-1-61132-326-9

hardcover paperback

Contents

Introduction Norman K. Denzin & Michael D. Giardina

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Part I: Theory

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2. Qualitative Research in a Glocalizing World Nigel G. Fielding

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3. Remix Cultures, Remix Methods: Reframing Qualitative Inquiry for Social Media Contexts Annette Markham

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Part II: Praxis

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1. Qualitative Inquiry and the Challenge of Scientific Status Kenneth J. Gergen

4. The Role of Indigenous Languages and Focus Groups in Qualitative Inquiry: Experiences from the Global South Bekisizwe S. Ndimande

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5. On a Bead and a Prayer: The Importance of (Re)membering African Womanhood in the Diaspora Cynthia B. Dillard (Nana Mansa II of Mpeasem, Ghana, West Africa)

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6. Border Crossing: Bridging Empirical Practices with De/ colonizing Epistemologies Kakali Bhattacharya

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Part III: Method

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8. Beyond the Autoethnography versus Ironist Debate: Using Charles Sanders Peirce and Cornel West to Envision an Alternative Inquiry Practice Jerry Lee Rosiek

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9. Navigating the Terrain of Social Justice: Multiple Voices in Mixed Methods Research Donna M. Mertens

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7. Dewey, A/r/tography, and Ab-Use of Global Dialogue Richard Siegesmund

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Coda 195 Are You Serious? Playing, Performing, and Producing an Academic Self Laura L. Ellingson Index 213 About the Authors

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In memoriam Harold Lloyd “Bud” Goodall, Jr. 1952–2012 Nick Trujillo 1955–2012 Harry Wolcott 1929–2012 Scholars. Activists. Friends.

Acknowledgments

We thank our publisher of all publishers, Mitch Allen, for his continued support and guidance throughout the years. We also thank Carole Bernard for expert copyediting, Hannah Jennings for superb production design, and Katie Flanagan for assistance in gathering the index. Many of the chapters contained in this book were presented as plenary or keynote addresses at the Eighth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in May 2012. We thank the Institute of Communications Research, the College of Media, and the International Institute of Qualitative Inquiry for its continued support of the congress as well as those campus units that contributed time, funds, and/or volunteers to the effort. The congress, and by extension this book, would not have materialized without the tireless efforts of Katia Curbelo, Ted Faust, Bryce Henson, Melba Hoffer, Li Xiong, Yiye Liu, Robin Price, Mary Blair, Karla Palma, and James Salvo (the glue who continues to hold the whole thing together). For information on future congresses, please visit http://www.icqi.org. Norman K. Denzin Michael D. Giardina December 2012

Introduction

Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry Norman K. Denzin & Michael D. Giardina

If teachers are truly concerned about how education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world, they will have to take more seriously how pedagogy functions on local and global levels to secure and challenge the ways in which power is deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside traditional discourses and cultural spheres. —Giroux (2012)

Proem On November 6, 2012, the world looked on as U.S. President Barack Obama was reelected by an Electoral College landslide of 332 to 206 votes; he also recorded 51% of the popular vote, thus becoming the first presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower to top 51% twice (Benen, 2013).1 Yet, despite this seeming-if-fleeting affirmation of liberal values (i.e., gay rights, women’s rights, New Deal social welfare programs, environmental

Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 9–26. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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concerns, engaged global vision, and so on) and public rebuttal of the regressive racial, economic, and political politics of contemporary American conservatism and its fundamentalist Tea Party faction (i.e., lower taxes for the wealthy, unregulated free-market economics, an anti-gay, anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-immigrant agenda, etc.), the campaign season was a brutal reminder of a divided, fractured, and dislocated U.S. body politic. From Mitt Romney’s “Randian callousness” (Sullivan, 2012) in decrying that 47% of Americans are self-described victims, to his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) raising the specter of a “clash of civilizations” and equating Roe v. Wade to the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that upheld slavery, the mainstream of the American Right has become ever-more fundamentalist, and a sizable portion of the population seems to have drifted along with it, especially at the local level. To consider but two examples: In just the last electoral season (i.e., 2012), we witnessed elected members of Congress take not only extreme public positions but positions that resided at the level of the absurd. For example, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) made waves with his statement on rape that “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down” (quoted in Saletan, 2013, para. 1). Although the furor caused by his statement contributed in large measure to his loss in the Missouri senate race, he wasn’t the only candidate for political office making such outlandish statements about rape. In fact, William Saletan (2013) reminds us that Akin’s “gaffe” wasn’t really a gaffe at all; in fact, it was but a very public pronouncement of the political right’s ideological entrenchment on the issue of women’s reproductive rights. 2 And, more recently, in the wake of the tragic shooting that took place at an elementary school in Connecticut—one that saw the death of twenty innocent schoolchildren and six staff members—we have witnessed common-sense gun safety recommendations shouted down from powerful gun lobbies (i.e., the National Rifle Association) and politicians alike, blaming the tragedy not on easy access to highpowered assault rifles or poor access to mental health treatment but on everything else: the usual litany of demonized targets— video games, Hollywood fi lms, secularism, etc.

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Previous volumes in our series (see Denzin & Giardina, 2006b, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) have been largely grounded within and positioned as a response to such a U.S.based (if not driven) context of social-political life brushing up against the (politics of the) research act, 3 ebbing and flowing in rhythm to the contextual specificities that, since we started our ongoing project, has been framed against the backdrop of: • a global economic downturn, precipitated in large measure by a perfect storm of liquidity crises; the bursting of the housing bubble (and attendant foreclosures); large-scale government bailouts of banks that had engaged in risky and unregulated financial products such as credit default swaps (but were deemed “too big to fail” based on their importance to the global economic system); and the resulting if problematic austerity measures enacted throughout many countries to stabilize the economy from collapsing into another Depression (to name but a few key aspects); • the ongoing military engagement with, and presence in, Afghanistan since 2001, which, when coupled with the occupation of Iraq that occurred through much of the same time, cost an estimated US$3 trillion (see, e.g., Stiglitz & Bilmes, 2008) and the lives of at least 6,000 U.S. troops and several hundred thousand civilians in those two countries (not to mention the tens of thousands of troops injured in combat). These conflicts also gave rise to the sanctioned and systemic use of torture(!) by the United States during the Bush administration (see Sullivan, 2009) as well as contributing to further damaging the U.S. economic landscape; • frightening patterns and incidences of climate change, which saw three devastating weather events cripple New Orleans in 2005 (Hurricane Katrina), the New York/New Jersey tristate area in 2012 (Hurricane Sandy), and the South Asian region in 2004 (Indian Ocean tsunami), the latter of which resulted in the deaths of more than 230,000 people in one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history; • ongoing public policy assaults on public employees, teachers, and union members by right-wing politicians such as Gov.

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Scott Walker (R-WI) and Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL), which include, but were not limited to, radical measures against collective bargaining rights, retirement and pensions, and health insurance; • exploding technological innovations in personal and mobile communication, such as the launch of social media sites Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as well as the now-normal global use of Smartphone technology pioneered in the likes of Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, and Samsung’s Galaxy products; and • the continued cultural and legislative assaults on women, racial and ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians, including restricted access to and demonization of family-planning clinics and services, increases in state-level legislative attacks on immigrant populations (e.g., Arizona’s SB-1070 bill), and the demonization of same-sex marriage. Put differently, for much of the last decade we have been writing within and against: a post-9/11/01 neoliberal social order of increased surveillance, militarism, and conflict and diminished equality, civil rights, and social justice; a university system that privileges “reemergent scientism” (see Maxwell, 2004), bibliometrics (see Cheek et al., 2006), and the commodification of knowledge; a political context in which higher education is mocked or derided by extremist politicians, held suspect by an ever-growing number of citizens, and at odds with itself on how best to reform and remake itself for the future; and an economic condition that privileges the free-market status quo in all quarters of life. As such, our viewpoint is necessarily colored through such a kaleidoscopic lens. This volume seeks to chart new a new course—a new direction, if you will—for our community of scholars. In taking up “global dimensions” of qualitative inquiry, however, we readily acknowledge the contested terrain on which such an idea is premised. As such, our use of the term is meant to suggest the need for us to look beyond our (own) borders and comfort zones and engage with the rapidly changing landscape outside of our midst, in all its myriad forms. Indeed, as Michael Skey (2012) reminds

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us, “One of the key challenges facing the social sciences at the current time is developing new theoretical frameworks for understanding what has been labeled a ‘borderless world’” (p. 471). In their book Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method, and Policy, Cameron McCarthy and his collaborators (2007) laid the groundwork for such work, arguing that qualitative researchers in the present moment should endeavor to write against “the Anglocentric ethnographic gaze” that has saturated a substantial amount of interpretive inquiry, and that has used the White male gaze of the West as the “paradigmatic subject-object of history and the motivator for critical research and cultural and political interventions” (p. xvii). They likewise implore researchers to confront the “unreflexive dualism” that tends to dominate work conducted on and in “the global” (especially in and from the Global North); that is, a false dualism that views global/izing processes as occurring “out there” or away from us in a mobile, dynamic sense, and as such not impacting local particularities of poverty, health, or immobility. Instead, they suggest, those engaging with “the global” must be cognizant of a global order and the global processes embedded therein that are actively “articulated to both micro and macro dimensions of contemporary life” and that point to: the cultural work entailed in the organization of globalizing effects, not “at a distance” but in our neighborhoods, in our everyday lives, and in our bodies, as we negotiate social distinctions and cultural and political choices relating to home, identity, nation, and language, and raced, gendered, sexual, and class-based forms of affi liations. (p. xix)

As Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (2008b) frame it, to theorize the global in the present tense is to view it as a form of “neocolonial fragmentation” that calls for “new research styles, styles that take up the reflexive, queer, polyphonic, narrative, ethical turn” (p. 26). Writing on methodological challenges to and interdisciplinary analytical possibilities embedded in the negotiation of such geographies of power in an ever-more globalizing cultural frame, James R. Faulconbridge (2012) suggests (albeit in a slightly

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different context) that researchers must engage with the pace of change circulating around them, acknowledge the “qualitative variability” of such processes “across space and leading to the continued geographical unevenness of the economy,” and actively situate themselves within the “spatial reach” of power relations (pp. 748–751). In a similar vein, Garth L. Lean (2012) has, following the work of Mišela Mavrič and John Urry (2009) and Michael Haldrup (2011), argued that traditional forms of qualitative fieldwork “needs to be coupled with ‘new’ techniques that establish a broader, more holistic view of mobile social practices” and that account for interpretive inquiry being conducted across various social media platforms and spatial geographies (p. 156). On this front, we need look no further than Grant Kien’s (2009) work on and espousal of global technography as a field of inquiry (i.e., ethnographies of technology in everyday social situations, especially those dealing with transnational forms of mobility). Such approaches or practices, of course, must go beyond merely studying (post)colonial, transnational, or cosmopolitan objects, discourses, and spaces. In considering qualitative inquiry at the confluence(s) of the global-local nexus (see Morley & Robins, 1995), Michelle Fine, Eve Tuck, and Sarah ZellerBerkman (2008) present us with a way of inquiry about/with those “in a place, across places, and then those who dare to trace global footprints of domination and resistance” (p. 158; emphases in the original). For Fine et al., this means understanding that participants in such projects have “sovereign rights” and “complex personhood[s]”, which as a “prerequisite to democracy involves the cease-and-desist of Eurocentric, colonizing power formations,” including the rights to: “resist or reject Eurocentric theory,” resist or reject versions of themselves that are fantasies of the power elite,” “explore epistemological differences,” “choose what is and what is not on the table for documentation,” and “work and learn and exist in wholeness and to thrive in their relations with other peoples” (p. 170). Thus, there is a need to move away from necessarily considering simply the geographic and cartographic dimensions of the research act (especially with respect to what George Marcus [1995] terms multi-sited ethnography) to taking a stance in favor

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of “overtly politicized inquiry with an explicit mandate to pursue social justice while prioritizing indigenous and subjugated knowledges” (Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011, p. 187). For as Paulo Freire (1998) maintained (and here we are paraphrasing), the capitalist system and globalization theory that speaks of ethics hide the fact that their ethics are those of the marketplace and not the universal ethics of the human person. It is for these matters that we ought to struggle courageously if we have, in truth, made a choice for a humanized world (Freire, 1998, p. 114). Marcelo Diversi and Claudio Moreira (2009) caution us, however, to think about how we formulate our role as researchers, both personally and professionally, within such a project. They ask us to consider questions such as: “Who can speak for whom? Under what power relations? Which bodies continue to determine what constitutes legitimate scholarship? Which bodies continue to be excluded from the making of scholarship?” (Diversi & Moreira, 2009, p. 230). To this end, questions of “who speaks for whom and who owns the past—are, in their purest form, ethical issues” that need to be reformulated so that we may “participate morally and authentically” with such communities (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008a, p. 568). These are not questions that exist in the abstract, especially for those working within the spaces of qualitative inquiry, and who on a daily basis are faced with the necessity of defending their status as researchers. Julianne Cheek (2008), for example, notes that at the same time qualitative researchers write and celebrate the growth and expansion of “the field”: We also hear a loud and clear message about the continued contraction of spaces for both qualitative research and researchers. These contracted spaces are bounded by narrowing understandings about research and what constitutes research evidence. Such a contraction is an outworking of the politics of evidence. (p. 122) This is not a lonely vantage point. Deconstructing Bush-era cultural politics, Joe L. Kincheloe and Kenneth Tobin (2006) similarly note that: “Many of the gains many of us thought we had made twenty years ago are under assault and many of the epistemological fights for the benefits of multiple ways of doing

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educational research in which we were forced to engage in the 1980s are breaking out again” (p. 3). They use the term “recovery moment” to refer to “a reeducation of the public to accept Eurocentric and often male ways of both being and seeing” that has taken hold within social, cultural, political, and economic realms, including the ways we “conceptualize and validate research” (p. 3). On this point, we agree with Lauren Berlant (1997), who suggests that such an institutional backlash against critical scholarship (especially of the cultural studies or interpretive strands): is frequently a euphemism for discomfort with work on contemporary culture around race, sexuality, class, and gender. It is sometimes a way of talking about the fear of losing what little standing intellectual work has gained through its studied irrelevance (and superiority) to capitalist culture. It expresses a fear of popular culture and popularized criticism. It expresses a kind of antielitism made in defense of narrow notions of what proper intellectual objects and intellectual postures should be. (p. 265; emphasis added)

This shouldn’t surprise us. Consider the example put forth by Deborah Ceglowski and colleagues (2011) in their article “Aced Out: Censorship of Qualitative Research in the Age of ‘Scientifically Based Research.” They contend that, from the inception of graduate school, most researchers are “socialized into understanding, accepting, and perpetuating the master narrative” of gold standard scholarship—one that “narrowly specifies and controls acceptable kinds of research, as defined by a limited number of researchers—mostly White and male” (p. 680). This view is largely supported by Vance Randall et al. (1999), who, drawing from the work of Sandra Harding (1992), Phil Carspecken (1996), and John Stanfield (1994), posit that the institutional structures of the university and the academy necessarily “leads to the creation of a conventionalized system that judges which inquiries warrant publication or adoption, and ultimately which constructs of truth and knowledge are given public voice to influence educational practice itself ” (p. 10). Or, as Michael Silk and colleagues (2010) put it, the current context of (evidence-based) research is one in which “the training that most

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doctoral students receive, and in particular the orientation provided in most research design courses, results in the vast majority of students gaining an implicit and explicit understanding of, and comfort with, foundational (see Amis & Silk, 2005; Smith & Hodkinson, 2005) beliefs of how to ‘do’ rigorous research” (Silk et al., 2010, p. 112; emphases in original). At the same time, as Henry Giroux (2012) wrote in a recent essay on “gated intellectuals” and the role they play in establishing boundaries to protect the status quo and isolate citizens from one another: Higher education is increasingly being walled off from the discourse of public values and the ideals of a substantive democracy at a time when it is most imperative to defend the institution against an onslaught of forces that are as anti-intellectual as they are anti-democratic in nature […] it is one of the last strongholds of democratic action and reasoning and one of the most visible targets along with the welfare state. (para. 7)4 Against this tide, Giroux calls for a project of “borderless pedagogy that moves across different sites—from schools to the alternative media—as part of a broader attempt to construct a critical formative culture” that enables us “to reclaim [our] voices, speak out, exhibit moral outrage and create social movements, tactics, and public spheres” in the service of a radical, progressive democracy (2012b, para. 10). It is a project that writes itself against the narrow compartmentalization of knowledge and standardization of experience, against the calls for the professionalization of the academy and the neoliberalization of higher education, and against “the dominant and structural status quo” (Ortiz, 2012, para. 7). A project that, in fact, “refuses the insular, overly pragmatic, and privileged isolation of the academy” (Giroux, 2012a, para. 22). A project that calls on us to “assertively join in the battle over ideas, reclaim the importance of critique, develop a discourse of hope and occupy many quarters and sites so as to drown out the corporate funded ignorance and political ideologies that strip history of its meaning, undermine intellectual engagement and engage in a never-ending pedagogy of deflection and disappearance” (Giroux, 2012b, para. 13). It is, in short, a project that demands that we

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take up the mantel of public intellectualism across the divides and disciplines once more, reorienting us toward fulfilling a pro-active scholar-activist agenda. For let us never forget: “The very notion of being an engaged public intellectual is neither foreign to nor a violation of what it means to be an academic scholar, but central to its very definition” (Giroux, 2012a, para. 31). This volume is one step in this direction. From essays on social media and remix culture to indigenous communities of research in the Global South, from postcolonial border crossings to new developments in arts-based research, our collected authors have heeded this call. Their chapters indeed contribute to this notion of a borderless pedagogy, of engaging not only the spatial locations and practices of research, but of pushing (if not smashing) through the gates of the academy, of laying down a challenge to the proverbial "methods establishment" (see Fielding, this volume), of what it means to do research in the highly contested place of the historical present.

The Chapters Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry is comprised of three parts: Theory, Praxis, and Method. Kenneth J. Gergen (“Qualitative Inquiry and the Challenge of Scientific Status”) begins our volume with a critical overview of the hegemony of empiricist foundationalism and the turn to social epistemology before turning to the social construction of scientific knowledges and the possibilities it presents for qualitative inquiry. In his chapter “Qualitative Research in a Glocalizing World,” Nigel G. Fielding focuses on the growth of citizen research, crowdsourcing, and convergence culture as embedded within social media and the global interconnectedness of people. To wit, he considers the need to engage with what he terms “the globalization of methods,” to push back against the “methods establishment,” and look to what research outside the academy might herald (including but not limited to cyber-activism and -research and Indigenous methodologies). In so doing, he also asks us to consider the political economy of such a course, mindful of how the “professorial filter” and marginalization of viewpoints remains a very real impediment to the promise such a future of research holds.

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Annette Markham concludes this opening section with a chapter titled “Remix Cultures, Remix Methods: Reframing Qualitative Inquiry for Social Media Contexts.” In it, she situates qualitative inquiry in a digital age in which “we are witnessing a startling transformation in the way cultural knowledge is produced and how meaning is negotiated,” which includes a “de-privileging of expert knowledge, decentralizing culture production, and unhooking cultural units of information from their origins.” We might think of this as YouTube videos that mash together music, words, and video in forms of protest (as we saw in Egypt), crowdsourcing, and alternative forms of (noncommercial or noncorporate) journalism. To this end, she examines particular elements of (qualitative) remix that move us toward disrupting traditional ways and means of conducting research in and among digital culture and contexts. Part II directs our attention to methodological praxis as it relates to Indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonizing contexts and ways of being. To begin, Bekisizwe S. Ndimande (“The Role of Indigenous Languages and Focus Groups in Qualitative Inquiry: Experiences from the Global South”) challenges us to consider the importance of language and setting when conducting research (especially with communities whose first language is not English). Drawing from his interview and focus group research with Indigenous communities and parents in South Africa, Ndimande (himself an Indigenous South African researcher fluent in several of the languages spoken in the Gauteng Province where he conducted his research) shows the decolonizing potential of conducting research in the participants’ native tongues. This was especially important in the case of focus group settings, where “the researcher’s use of the Indigenous languages of the groups adds to the informality” of the setting and helps foster a “joint effort and commitment” between the researcher and participants. While acknowledging that “a decolonizing agenda has been hindered by ‘othering’ the Global South in the post-colonial era,” Ndimande is nevertheless hopeful that research in this vein can aid in bringing “all communities to the center, especially those who are still on the margins.” Cynthia B. Dillard’s chapter (“On a Bead and a Prayer: The Importance of [Re]membering African Womanhood in the

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Diaspora”) is next, drawing specific attention to the memory work associated with the (literal) metaphor of handmade beads “as containers and symbols of cultural memory, helpful in examining questions of identity, spirituality, knowledge, subjectivities, and the complexity of African cultural production.” Writing from an endarkened feminist perspective, Dillard challenges us to engage with the sacredness of the Diaspora through the art of storytelling and ritual in method, which, in turn, has the potential to create new stories, new memories, and new spaces of resistance and change. Kakali Bhattacharya’s chapter (“Border Crossing: Bridging Empirical Practices with De/colonizing Epistemologies”) concludes Part II, offering a self-reflexive interrogation of border crossing, colonizing discourse, and the decolonizing possibilities “created, re-worked, or re-imagined through these crossings.” Specifically, Bhattacharya presents two examples drawn from her own classroom pedagogy in which she is forced to come to terms with her own lenses of resistance and critique in the face of the messy realities of life for her students. In both cases, she meditates on the “rupturing of binaries” that are revealed in what she might otherwise have assumed to be oppressive discourses, and discusses the implications this might hold for border intellectuals. Part III highlights three methodological issues for research in, of, and among global dialogue and discourse. Richard Siegesmund (“Dewey, A/r/tography, and Ab-Use of Global Dialogue”) begins by addressing arts-based educational research (ABER) and the particular method of a/r/tography. Although he situates a/r/ tography as being “heavily postmodern,” he also links it to John Dewey's and Gayatri Chaktravorty Spivak's work on aesthetics (among others) and shows the “intellectual historic connectedness” that ties their perspectives back to the Enlightenment. Through their work, he argues, “there is an appeal that our research must deal with authentic human sensory response,” one that may open up a space for an “aesthetic inquiry that risks to care … in a time of anaesthetizing globalization.” Jerry Lee Rosiek’s chapter (“Beyond the Autoethnography versus Ironist Debates: Using Charles Sanders Peirce and Cornel West to Envision an Alternative Inquiry Practice”) considers the

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relevance of pragmatism to contemporary methodological discussions. He engages C. S. Peirce’s view of semiotics (and his triadic view of the sign) and Cornel West’s explication of prophetic pragmatism, the confluence of which points “to the possibility of a methodological practice in which interpretations of social phenomena would be warranted, not by an implied exclusive correspondence to some preexisting metaphysical presence, but by the appeal of the ontological possibilities generated by an interpretation.” Part III closes with Donna M. Mertens’s chapter (“Navigating the Terrain of Social Justice: Multiple Voices in Mixed Methods Research”), which engages with multiple paradigms (e.g., constructivist) in arguing that mixed methods research presents potential avenues toward social justice that “are not possible using a single methodology.” To that end, she focuses considerable attention on the transformative paradigm, and the promise it holds for social justice research. The volume concludes with Laura L. Ellingson’s timely Coda (“Are You Serious? Playing, Performing, and Producing an Academic Self ”), which powerfully suggests that researchers need to find room among our seriousness for the “play” of research. She goes on to detail the “passion and pleasure” we might endeavor to locate within our research acts; the “playful immersion” (or deep attention) we might find within our analysis of empirical material; the possibilities heralded by “playing outside the box” (or being creative) with research design; deploying the notion of “the trickster” and “playing the fool” (or active performer) to subvert and rethink boundaries; and, methodologically speaking, being an epistemic player who takes pleasure from multiplicity (i.e., one who moves freely among methodological and epistemological possibilities). Taken collectively, Ellingson reminds us of the productive place of “play,” and how we might use it to our benefit in spite of the rigid and serious boundaries in our professional midst.

Coda “We have a job to do. Let’s get to it.” Just as we invoked this phrase to conclude last year’s volume, and in the volumes that came before it, we do so here yet again

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to signal that our work is not done. To reinforce, yet again, that we have a moral and professional obligation to our communities and ourselves to actively, consciously, and politically insert ourselves into debates such as those outlined above and throughout this volume. Howard Zinn, the late American activist historian, once said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” History is still on the move. What are we waiting for? Go out, and change the world.

Notes 1. Benen (2013) also notes that Obama is only the sixth president in U.S. history to achieve such a feat, joining Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower.

2. Saletan (2013) goes on to list numerous other instances during the 2012 election cycle in which this ideological entrenchment is quite clear, including Rep. Joe Walsh’s (R-IL) claim that there are never any instances in which abortion is necessary to protect the life of the woman and Richard Mourdock, the Republican nominee from Indiana for the U.S. Senate, intoning that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” As Saletan concludes, “Every time the GOP claims to have purged rape mythology, rape theology, and rape extremism, another congressman opens his mouth. What worries me isn’t how many Republicans have repeated this stuff in public, but how many more believe it.” 3. Our engagement with the post-9/11 context goes well beyond these previous conference volumes, saturating most if not all of our research in that time period (see, e.g., Denzin, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2013; Denzin & Giardina, 2006a; Giardina, 2005; Giardina & Denzin, 2011, 2012, Newman & Giardina, 2011).

4. Although Giroux is specifically referring to gated intellectuals as being public figures like Thomas Friedman or David Brooks who, through their standing and visibility in newspapers such as the New York Times legitimate the harshest realities of neoliberalism, we think it is fair to apply that term to academics, for although their gate-keeping may not reach the level of public influence as those listed above, they nonetheless impact the nature of research and scholarship on a fairly broad level.

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References Amis, J. & Silk, M. L. (2005). The philosophy and politics of quality in qualitative organizational research. Organizational Research Methods, 11, 456–480. Benen, S. (2013). Obama’s popular vote totals put him in a small club. Maddow Blog. http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/01/04/16352089-obamas-p opular-vote-totals-put-him-in-small-club (accessed January 5, 2013).

Berlant, L. G., (1997). The queen of America goes to Washington City: Essays on sex and citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Carspecken, P. F. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research. New York: Routledge. Ceglowski, D., Bacigalupa, C., & Peck, E. (2011). Aced out: Censorship of qualitative research in the age of “scientifically based research.” Qualitative Inquiry, 17, 679–686. Cheek, J. (2008). A fine line: Positioning qualitative inquiry in the wake of the politics of evidence. In M. D. Giardina & N. K. Denzin (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry and the politics of evidence (pp. 119–134). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

Cheek, J., Garnham, B., & Quan, J. (2006). What’s in a number? Issues in providing evidence of impact and quality of research(ers). Qualitative Health Research, 16, 423–435. Darnell, S. C. & Hayhurst, L. M. C. (2011). Sport for decolonization: Exploring a new praxis of sport for development. Progress in Development Studies, 11, 183–196.

Denzin, N. K. (2003). Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Denzin, N. K. (2007). Flags in the window: Dispatches from the American war zone. New York: Peter Lang.

Denzin, N. K. (2008). Searching for Yellowstone: Race, gender, family and memory in the postmodern West. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Denzin, N. K. (2011). Custer on canvas: Representing Indians, memory, and violence in the New West. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

Denzin, N. K. (2013). Indians on display: Global commodification of Native America in performance, art, and museums. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2006a). Contesting empire, globalizing dissent: Cultural studies after 9/11. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2006b). Qualitative inquiry and the conservative challenge: Confronting methodological fundamentalism. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

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Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2007). Ethical futures in qualitative research: Decolonizing the politics of knowledge. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2008). Qualitative inquiry and the politics of evidence. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2009). Qualitative inquiry and social justice. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2010). Qualitative inquiry and human rights. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2011). Qualitative inquiry and global crises. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2012). Qualitative inquiry and the politics of advocacy. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008a). Epilogue: The lions speak. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 563–571). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2008b). Locating the field: Performing theories of decolonizing inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 21–30). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Diversi, M. & Moreira, C. (2009). Betweener talk: Decolonizing knowledge production, pedagogoy, and praxis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Faulconbridge, J. R. (2012). Economic geographies of power: Methodological challenges and interdisciplinary possibilities. Progress in Human Geography, 36, 735–757.

Fine, M., Tuck, E., & Zeller-Berkman, S. (2008). Do you believe in Geneva? Methods and ethics at the global-local nexus. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 157–180). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage (P. Clarke, Trans.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Giardina, M. D. (2005). Sporting pedagogies: Performing culture & identity in the global arena. New York: Peter Lang.

Politics of posGiardina, M. D. & Denzin, N. K. (2011). Acts of activism sibility: Toward a new performative cultural politics. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 11, 319–327.

Giardina, M. D. & Denzin, N. K. (2012). Policing the “Penn State Crisis”: Violence, power, and the neoliberal university. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 12, 259–266.

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Giroux, H. A. (2012a). The disappearance of public intellectuals. Truthout. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/08/the-disappearance-of-publicintellectuals/ (accessed January 20, 2013). Giroux, H. A. (2012b). Gated intellectuals and ignorance in political life: Toward a borderless pedagogy in the Occupy Movement. Truthout. http:// truth-out.org/opinion/item/8009-gated-intellectuals-and-ignorance-inpolitical-life-toward-a-borderless-pedagogy-in-the-occupy-movement (accessed December 12, 2012). Haldrup, M. (2011). Choreographies of leisure mobilities. In M. Büscher, J. Urry, & K. Witchger (Eds.), Mobile methods (pp. 54–71). London: Routledge.

Harding, S. (1992). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kien, G. (2009). Global technography: Ethnography in the age of mobility. New York: Peter Lang.

Kincheloe, J. L. & Tobin, K. (2006). Doing educational research in a complex world. In J. Kincheloe & K. Tobin (Eds.), Doing educational research: A handbook (pp. 3–13). Rotterdam: Sense. Lean, G. L. (2012). Transformative travel: A mobilities perspective. Tourist Studies, 12, 151–172. Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117.

Mavrič, M. and Urry, J. (2009). Tourism studies and the New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP). In T. Jamal & M. Robinson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of tourism studies (pp. 645–657). London: Sage. Maxwell, J. (2004). Reemergent scientism, postmodernism, and dialogue across the disciplines. Qualitative Inquiry, 10, 35–41.

McCarthy, C., Durham, A. S., Engel, L. C., Filmer, A. A., Giardina, M. D., & Malagreca, M. A. (Eds.). (2007). Globalizing cultural studies: Ethnographic interventions in theory, method, and policy. New York: Peter Lang. Morley, D. & Robins, K. (1995). Spaces of identity: Global media, electronic landscapes, and cultural boundaries. London: Routledge.

Newman, J. I. & Giardina, M. D. (2011). Sport, spectacle, and NASCAR Nation: Consumption and the cultural politics of neoliberalism. New York: PalgraveMacmillan. Ortiz, M. (August 4, 2012). Taking Henry Giroux’s borderless pedagogy to our institutions of higher learning. Truthout. http://truth-out.org/opinion/ item/10549-continuing-toward-girouxs-borderless-pedagogy (accessed January 20, 2013). Randall, E. V., Cooper, B. S., & Hite, S. J. (1999). Understanding the politics of research in education. Educational Policy, 13, 7–22.

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Saletan, W. (2013). The party of rape: Every time the GOP claims to have purged rape extremism, another Republican opens his mouth. Slate. http:// www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/01/ phil_gingrey_todd_akin_and_richard_mourdock_the_gop_s_rape_ problem_is_spreading.html (accessed January 14, 2013). Silk, M. L., Bush, A., & Andrews, D. L. (2010). Contingent intellectual amateurism, or, the problem with evidence-based research. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 34, 105–128. Skey, M. (2012). We need to talk about cosmopolitanism: The challenge of studying openness towards other people. Critical Sociology, 6, 471–487.

Smith, J. K. & Hodkinson, P. (2005). Relativism, criteria, and politics. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 915–932). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Stanfield, J. H. (1994). Ethnic modeling in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 175– 188). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Stiglitz, J. & Bilmes, L. (2008). The three trillion dollar war: The true cost of the Iraq conflict. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Sullivan, A. (2009). Dear President Bush. Th e Daily Dish. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/10/dear-president-bush/307663/ (accessed January 20, 2013).

Sullivan, A. (2012). Romney’s fatal word: “Victims.” The Daily Dish. http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/09/romneys-.html (accessed January 3, 2013).

Part I

Theory

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Chapter 1

Qualitative Inquiry and the Challenge of Scientific Status Kenneth J. Gergen

Is qualitative research truly scientific? This is no small question in the halls of academia, and it is not insignificant in many quarters of society. It has been an especially heated issue in my field of psychology. Few of the major research journals in psychology will even submit qualitative research papers to peer review. And the recent attempt to establish qualitative research as a sanctioned section of the American Psychological Association required five years of intense struggle before achieving success. This may strike one as paradoxical, as the grounding work of many of psychology’s major theorists—including Freud, Ebbinghaus, Piaget, Lorenz, and Vygotsky, among others—was primarily qualitative in nature. We may properly ask, then, how did qualitative research lose its scientific status? And, if such research is without credentials in the scientific community, then what promise is there that such efforts can acquire global significance? In what follows, I first touch on the rise of empiricist foundationalism and the consequent fall of qualitative inquiry from scientific grace. I then turn to the more recent erosion of Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 29–45. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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foundational science within the intellectual world more generally. This erosion has, in turn, set the stage for a paradigm transformation—from an empiricist to a social constructionist epistemology of science. It has simultaneously fueled the explosion in qualitative inquiry across the social sciences. Finally, I propose that, within this latter context, we find the global potentials of qualitative inquiry to be far greater than what could ever be offered within the empiricist tradition.

The Hegemony of Empiricist Foundationalism While this history is well known and well documented, a brief recounting is useful for understanding the potentials of qualitative inquiry today. The tension separating the quantitative and qualitative orientations to scientific understanding can be traced to at least the German intellectual debates of the late 1800s. As scholars moved to develop a science of human behavior, a major split took place between those believing such a science should emulate the natural sciences and those holding that the nature of human action demanded a far different orientation to knowledge. Scholars such as Dilthey (1896) and Weber (2011 [1917]) argued, for example, that human action largely issues from individual thought, experience, and intention. Unlike natural science orientation, in which the attempt is to observe and analyze from a dispassionate distance, understanding the subjective world of the actor requires immersion in an engaged process of nuanced and possibly empathic interpretation. This emphasis on the interpretive character of qualitative inquiry remains today. However, largely because of the visible success of the natural sciences in contributing to commerce, medicine, military might, and the economy, the argument for a seemingly nebulous science of behavior held little appeal. Because of the dramatic successes of the natural sciences, early in the 20th century philosophers were interested in establishing rational foundations for scientific activity. If these foundations could be properly articulated, then it would be possible for scholars in all realms of the academic world to become scientific—and thus “productive.” Drawing from longstanding empiricist and rationalist epistemologies, various amalgams emerged; what came

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to be known as “logical empiricism” was the preferred term used in many scientific circles more generally. This term came to serve as the rational grounds for what many social scientists see as “mainstream science” within their respective fields. From this standpoint, the primary task of science is to generate systematic accounts of the world that accurately represent its nature. These accounts (descriptions and explanations) are objective only insofar as they can be verified by others; their universality depends on the range of observational settings in which they are verified (or fail to be falsified). Their ultimate utility in prediction and control depends on establishing causal (if/ then) relationship among observables. Political, ideological, and moral values are irrelevant to the process of establishing objective knowledge. At worst, they may bias the process of observation. Methods of research were established essentially to ensure that the scientists’ accounts realized these ideals. Experimental methods could warrant propositions about cause and effect; standardized measures could ensure that the research is replicable; large, representative samples lent themselves to broad generalizations; statistics added credibility to such generalizations; and a wide range of controls (e.g., double blind experiments, standardized protocols, multiple item measures) protected against value biases. On these grounds, it is clear that qualitative research is indeed a degraded form of inquiry; it fails on virtually all of the above criteria. Yet, within the empiricist perspective a place—however minuscule—is reserved for qualitative research. Influential here is Popper’s (1959) early distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. As he proposed, there is, strictly speaking, no foundational logic for the development of an idea (abstract propositions, theoretical conceptions). However, the full arsenal of rigorous methods, sampling, and statistical analyses are required for the justification of any scientifically sound proposition. For this, the place for qualitative research is to be found in the context of discovery. It is typically argued that as Freud listened to his patients or Piaget interacted with children, important theoretical ideas emerged. In no way did these initial observations

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justify the truth value of their theories, but they were useful as creative catalysts. Truth value depended on rigorous scientific test. Although qualitative researchers themselves seldom use this logic, it has left them a small place at the table of mainstream psychology. As the qualitative movement has mushroomed in the social sciences more generally, other means have slowly developed for justifying the scientific status of qualitative inquiry. Of special appeal to mainstream empiricists has been the argument for mixed methods. Mixed methods research advances the idea that while standardized measures, sampling, statistics, and so on are essential in establishing objective accuracy, qualitative research is useful in locating more subtle features of the subject matter. And, too, qualitative research can be used to assist in justifying explanations for the observed phenomena. Many qualitative researchers add that qualitative approaches are actually more acceptable for reflecting the nature of certain subject matters, for example, the personal experience of the research subject. More recently, scholars such as Westerman (2011) and Yanchar (2011) have attempted to demonstrate how quantitative methods can be used in the service of qualitative and humanistically invested research. Importantly, however, all of these arguments remain “in paradigm”; they all assume that the function of science is to generate accounts that are true to the world as it is.

From Empiricist Foundations to Social Epistemology During the past several decades of scholarly inquiry, an enormous and far-reaching transformation has taken place in the concept of knowledge and the attendant concepts of truth, objectivity, and validity. Briefly, the transformation can be traced in its earliest phases to a number of insoluble conceptual problems inherent in attempts to establish rational foundations for scientific knowledge, especially empiricists’ accounts of such knowledge. Included among the insoluble problems is the challenge of matching words to world (Quine, 1960), accounting for the origin of theory (Popper, 1959), and sustaining falsification in light of the infinite plasticity of theory (Duhem, 1954). However, with the growing

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critiques of the dominant orders—government, commerce, law, and military, and the resulting oppression and bloodshed of the past century—a new wave of critical work began to emerge. From this work, an alternative to what Mislevy (1997) characterized as a “discarded epistemology” came about. To appreciate the implications for a world-relevant psychology, three of these critical movements need particular attention: (1) ideological analysis; (2) linguistic and literary theory; and (3) the social construction of scientific knowledge. Ideological Analysis

Central to the positivist/empiricist movement is the view that empirically grounded descriptions carry no ideological biases. As proposed, properly supported scientific accounts of the world do not reflect the values, moral prescriptions, or religious beliefs of any particular group. This view met an early challenge from Marxist theorists, who argued that capitalist economic theory—despite all the research and analysis in its support—was essentially a mystifying means of fortifying the existing class structure. Such critique gained additional depth as scholars began to study the rhetoric of scientific accounts (see, e.g., Gross, 1996). One could begin to see how social science terms such as “conformity,” “prejudice,” “obedience,” “aggression,” “altruism,” “development,” “mental illness,” and “intelligence” were saturated with value, and how such values would not only color the interpretation of findings but the way in which such findings were presented to and used by the public. This early critical work subsequently unleashed a broad and continuing critique of scientific accounts in terms of their subtle biases in matters of gender, race, economic class, religion, culture, and more. Whose voices, they continue to ask, are being silenced, exploited, or erased? Many critics found their work galvanized by the writings of Michel Foucault (1978, 1980). As Foucault argued, when authoritative claims to knowledge are circulated through society, they act as invitations to believe. As people embrace these claims, they come to act in ways that support them. Or, in Foucault’s terms, claims to knowledge function to build and sustain structures of power. Thus, for example, when an authoritative group singles out certain behaviors and calls them

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indicators of “intelligence,” develops measures that claim to be valid indicators of intelligence, and uses these to grant privileges to certain people and not others, they sustain a position of power in society. More broadly, these critiques raise questions regarding the ideological and social implications and outcomes of all representations of the world. Linguistic and Literary Theory

A second major challenge to empiricist foundationalism emerged from linguistic and literary theory. To appreciate what is at stake, it is useful to consider two broad implications of de Saussure’s classic work, Course in General Linguistics. In simple terms, de Saussure first proposed that the relationship between words and their referents is ultimately arbitrary. For example, each of us is assigned a name, and this assignment is useful in sustaining longstanding social conventions of identification. Yet, there is no inherent reason we could not have been given other names (or no name at all). Or, more generally, all naming is essentially arbitrary. In this light, it is interesting to consider the empiricist concepts of accuracy, objectivity, and truth. All depend on the assumption that certain words correspond to or mirror what is the case. In this view, certain utterances are truth bearing, while others are exaggerated or untrue. If, however, the relationship between words and world is ultimately arbitrary, then multiple possible utterances could be used to represent any state of affairs. What privileges any particular arrangement of words as being “true” is established solely through social convention. In terms of observations, it is no more true to say that objects are propelled to Earth by the force of gravity than to say that they are thrust downward by God’s will. Thus, when claims are made to truth, objectivity, or accuracy in reporting, we are being exposed to one way of putting things that is privileged by certain groups of people. Following the preceding discussion on value saturation, the question that must then be asked is to what extent does a given way of putting things serve particular interests? de Saussure’s second significant proposal was that words function within rule governed systems of usage. Put simply, our language functions in terms of various conventions, most particularly

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in terms of rules of grammar and syntax, but more generally in terms of genres, idioms, definitions, and vernaculars. It may be said that all descriptions of the world will be significantly affected by conventions of writing. Or, more extendedly, all descriptions and analyses of the nature of the world will necessarily be driven by the demands of a tradition of representation. This line of thinking has subsequently led to substantial study of the ways in which scientific accounts are governed by linguistic devices such as metaphor (e.g., Leary, 1990) and narrative (e.g., Genette, 1980). In the latter case, for example, evolutionary theory is only intelligible by virtue of its drawing from narrative traditions of storytelling (Landau, 1993). The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge

These preceding critiques, emerging in quite separate domains of scholarship, are amalgamated in a third and perhaps the most essential contribution to a viable replacement for empiricist epistemology. The movement here is also essentially toward a social epistemology. Its origins may be found in Mannheim’s (1952 [1929]) volume, Ideology and Utopia. As Mannheim proposed: (1) the scientist’s theoretical commitments may usefully be traced to social (as opposed to empirical) origins; (2) scientific groups are often organized around certain theories; (3) theoretical disagreements are therefore issues of group conflict; and (4) what we assume to be scientific knowledge is therefore a byproduct of a social process. This seminal work was followed by a substantial number of influential contributions, including those of Fleck (1981), Winch (1946), Gurvitch (1966), Berger and Luckmann (1966), and Habermas (1971). However, in terms of ultimate impact, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is unparalleled. Most importantly, this work represented a frontal challenge to the longstanding presumption that scientific knowledge is progressive, that with continued research—testing hypotheses against reality—we come ever closer to the truth. Thus, proposed Kuhn, the shift from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican account of the relation of the Earth to the sun is not progress toward truth; nor is the shift from Newtonian theory to quantum mechanics in physics.

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Rather, Kuhn proposed, our propositions about the world are embedded within paradigms, roughly a network of interrelated commitments (to a particular theory, conception of a subject matter, methodological practices, and the like). Even our most exacting measurements are only sensible from within the paradigm. A look into a microscope tells you nothing unless you are already informed about the nature of the instrument and what you are supposed to be looking at. What we call progress in the above cases of astronomy and physics is not, then, movement from a less to a more objectively accurate account of the world. They represent shifts in paradigm, different ways of thinking and observing. In recent decades, this social view of science has been buttressed by an enormous body of scholarship centered on the cultural and historical contingency of scientific knowledge. As broadly acknowledged, the philosophical attempt to establish logical foundations for empirical knowledge, is now moribund. Rather, summarizing the three critical waves outlined above, we find that scientific knowledge is a byproduct of negotiated agreements among people concerning the nature of the world. Whatever exists makes no fundamental requirements regarding our attempts to describe and explain. But once we have entered into a particular tradition of understanding as represented in a shared language, this tradition will provide both direction and limits on our explanations, descriptions, and observations. Further, all such traditions will be wedded to particular ways of life; that is, they will carry certain implicit or explicit values or desired goals. The implications here for globally relevant inquiry are substantial. This turn to a social epistemology—often viewed as social constructionist—invites a radical expansion in ways of thinking about and practicing inquiry itself. No methodology can claim transcendent superiority and all may add dimensions to our ways of understanding the world. So, too, does a constructionist shift invite critical creative deliberation on the politics, values, and cultural assumptions carried by any particular form of inquiry. By the same token, we are invited into curiosity about forms of inquiry emerging from other cultural climes.

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The Global Potentials of the Qualitative Movement In my view, with a shift from an empiricist to a constructionist vision of science, the global potentials of the qualitative movement are vastly enhanced. By global potentials, in this case I primarily mean the capacity to bring together engaged researchers from around the world into productive dialogue with world-changing intent. In many respects, the qualitative movement has already begun to realize these potentials. And, to be sure, these realizations can only partially be traced to the emergence of the abovedescribed transformation in the conception of knowledge (Wertz, 2011). However, the pluralist consciousness invited by our increasing immersion in the global communication flow does lend itself to much the same sense of socially constructed worlds. Regardless of the source—philosophical or experiential—there are at least five ways in which the qualitative movement holds great promise. Inviting All Voices

Within the empiricist tradition, participation in the dialogues of science is legitimated by embracing the tradition’s epistemic assumptions. Unless one follows the tradition’s restricted rules of reasoning and evidence, one has no audience. Discussions of personal experience, deeply held values, spiritual concern, political ideology, and aesthetic taste, for example, are simply irrelevant to the demands of the science qua science. In contrast, one of the most noteworthy features of the contemporary qualitative movement is its radical pluralism. Within relevant organizations, conferences, and journals, for example, one finds phenomenologists, hermeneuticists, discourse analysts, action researchers, narrative researchers, ethnographers, autoethnographers, collaborative researchers, performatively oriented scholars, and more. To be sure, within this spectrum there are deep divisions concerning, for example, the conception of the person, political values, and theoretical orientation. Yet, seldom are discussions directed toward establishing preeminence—a “right,” “superior,” or “necessary” way of proceeding. Nor are there explorations of consilience, the convergence of evidence on a single, objective, and accurate

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understanding of the world. Productive dialogue replaces hegemonic expansion. As I see it, the common assumption underlying this gracious acceptance of multiplicity is the absence of commanding foundations—rational, evidential, valuational, or otherwise—to which one can justifiably lodge a case for preeminence. Rather, consistent with constructionist reasoning, there is a common understanding that all our practices emerge within historically and culturally bounded traditions. Fighting it out for a “first philosophy” squanders both time and resources. It is far more enriching to explore the multiplicities and to probe both their potentials and limits. In this way, qualitative researchers are also open to the Indigenous movement in the social sciences, as one may learn from virtually all the world’s traditions of understanding and inquiry. Further, most realize that empiricist practices of research, shorn of their foundational claims, may similarly hold promise. In terms of global potentials, then, the qualitative movement is optimally situated to bring into common conversation the voices of scholars and practitioners from around the world. Grappling with “the Good”

As discussed earlier, traditional empiricism attempts to escape deliberation on issues of ideology, morality, or human values. Science is supposed to accurately reflect on the nature of the world, not make moral and political judgments on its nature. We have also touched on the flaws inherent in this posture. In contrast, within the qualitative movement there is a pervasive awareness of the interpretive processes involved in conducting research and drawing conclusions, and with this an consciousness of the ways in which values are inherent in these processes. There is also something important about the way in which most qualitative methods imply a deep respect for the participants. The way in which qualitative researchers listen to others, take them seriously, and often sympathize with them reveals a strong humanistic investment in research. It should come as little surprise that the one division of the American Psychological Association that has emphasized qualitative methods over the decades is the division on humanistic psychology.

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This concern with issues of ideology, politics, and values becomes boldly articulated in Denzin and Lincoln’s (2011) The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, and the Denzin and Giardina (2008) volume, Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice. In both cases, the authors/editors view the achievement of social justice as the major aim of qualitative inquiry. This view is also amplified in Steinberg and Canella’s (2012) Critical Qualitative Research Reader. In my view, however, the qualitative movement has provided an opportunity for researchers to use their work for wide-ranging political and ideological purposes, including, for example, the promotion of peace, deconstructing psychodiagnostics, the creation of collaborative relations, undermining the naturalization of psychological categories, the generation of shared decision making, generating understanding of criminal activity, the creation of community, and fighting against psychopharmacology, among many others. The important point is that within the qualitative movement more generally, methods do not provide an escape from issues of “the good”; rather, one chooses qualitative inquiry as an expression of one’s values. Transforming Society

Within the traditional empiricist perspective, the challenge for the scientist is to establish basic knowledge—in this case about human behavior. It is not the scientist’s task, qua scientist, either to apply this knowledge or to disseminate it to the general public. In contrast, because of their investments in issues of political or societal consequence, participants in the qualitative movement are very often engaged in projects of social transformation. Typically, these are indirect, as many hope their published works can stimulate public and classroom debate and thus lead to change. However, in terms of actual change, the most promising forms of inquiry lie within the range of action initiatives, especially participatory and community-based action research. The journals Action Research and the International Journal of Action Research, along with Reason and Bradbury’s (2008) The SAGE Handbook of Action Research, provide ample illustrations of the potentials of such initiatives for social change. Favorite exemplars of mine include Fine and Torre’s (2006) research assisting women

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in prison, Lykes’s (2001) community-building work with rural Guatemalan women, and Russell and Bohan’s (1999) innovative resistance to anti-gay legislation. Within the action arena, a special place should be given to the development of innovative practices; that is, moving beyond specific and discrete action initiatives, to creating practices that may be used in wide-ranging settings. For example, David Cooperrider and his associates have developed the practice of appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2000). Although developed primarily for purposes of organizational change, the practice has been used globally in helping otherwise conflicted groups develop more viable forms of relationship. The practice has also been used to develop the new national constitution in Nepal and by the world’s religions to develop a United Religions organization. In another exemplary case, therapists in the Boston area have developed a powerful dialogic practice for reducing intense or deep-seated conflict. Termed the Public Conversations Project (1996–present; www.publicconversations.org), this particular practice has been used in numerous situations to defuse antagonisms—civil, religious, and political among them. The practice itself is an entirely new mode of conversing, drawn together from a range of therapeutic and non-therapeutic practices in cultural life more generally, and orchestrated to achieve effective change. Communicating with Society

The goal of traditional empirical science to generate knowledge, cut away from issues of its application and dissemination, has implications for its forms of research and communication. On the side of research, there is little interest in listening to the surrounding society in terms of its views or conceptions of the world. To be sure, these views and conceptions may be subject to study, but seldom do they inform (in any direct way) the theory and research themselves. Similarly, in the case of experimental research, researchers are at pains to ensure the “subjects” are not aware of their ideas; nor are subjects’ views of why they acted as they did treated seriously. On the side of communication, most scientific books and journals are addressed to fellow scientists, in effect, the enclave of the knowledgeable. Those in the guild who

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attempt to translate science for the masses may be discredited for their pecuniary interests and popularization. Thus, the results of the countless hours that may go into a given research study are not transparent to virtually anyone outside the particular guild. Seldom do the “objects of the scientific gaze” learn about the results of such research, nor are they engaged in discussion of the scientist’s viewpoint and its implications. The poor, the minorities, the imprisoned, the aged, the deviant, the immigrants, the terrorists, and so on are left “out of the loop.” In sum, the outcome is a scientific community largely isolated from society. This condition stands in sharp contrast to what takes place within the qualitative movement. Partly owing to the loss of foundations of knowledge, the welcoming of all voices and a concern with values, social change, and the relationship between the qualitative community and the surrounding society is far more fluid. There is first an increased sensitivity to the voices outside the science. In terms of research, this sensitivity is manifest in range of qualitative methods that give voice to those outside the halls of science. For example, phenomenology, narrative research, interviewing, psychobiography, and ethnography are all listening as opposed to controlling methods. They take seriously, or accord honor to, the words of the participant. In the case of collaborative and action research, the researcher works side by side with colleagues outside the scientific community. Turning to communication, the qualitative movement has shown increasing concern with their capacity to reach out to society. In part, this sensitivity results from the abiding societal concerns that drive research endeavors. If the research reaches no one outside the scientific community, its potentials for social transformation are minimal. This sensitivity has also resulted from the increasing charges of elitism in scientific writings, that is, the tendency for highly educated groups of professionals to write only for themselves. Qualitative researchers with a performative orientation are particularly concerned with communicative capacities (Gergen & Gergen, 2012). Such researchers expand exponentially the capacities for relating effectively with the broader society. Not only are multiple forms of writing employed (e.g., short stories, poetry, autobiography), but so, too, is the entire range of

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communicative forms, including theater, music, art, dance, photography, multi-media, and more. In this context, questions of audience understanding are paramount. “Who is this for,” the scientist asks of his or her pursuits. “Can they take it on?” “Will it be meaningful?” “What can they do with this?” All become significant questions. Expanding the Vistas of Science

There is a strong tendency within any community to form a consensus about the best or right forms of action, and this is no less the case with scientific communities than others. It is indeed such tendencies—converging around an empiricist view of knowledge—that many view as strangulating the social sciences through its narrow vision of “good science.” In contrast, in breaking with the empiricist tradition and residual fundamentalisms, accompanying the emergence of the qualitative movement is a mushrooming of new visions and practices. The development of Denzin and Lincoln’s Handbook of Qualitative Research, through four editions in less than two decades, and its continuous addition of new chapters is but one indication. And, with the pluralist posture described earlier, there is a continuous influx of new voices with fresh ideas and insights. The profusion of practices carries with it a clarion call: “Think creatively and expansively about our activities.” Further, as the range of practices expands, so does reflection on the nature and potential of inquiry. Age-old concepts of validity, accuracy, and objectivity demand continuous reflection, and new concerns with such issues as responsibility, transparency, and relativity begin to invite debate. In effect, the qualitative movement functions as a continuing catalyst for creative expansion, a continuous testing of the perimeters of possibility.

In Conclusion

If qualitative inquiry fails to achieve more than marginal status within the scientific community at large, its global potentials will be highly delimited. Such has been the case in disciplines such as psychology, in which scientific knowledge has been based on empiricist foundations. However, in recent decades several lines of argument emerged across the scholarly world that leave little if

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anything that could otherwise stand as a rational foundation for scientific knowledge. These lines of argument also converge in a promising alternative to empiricism, namely a non-foundational social epistemology. When understood in this constructionist context, we find that the qualitative moment has far more potential to bring about global dialogue and change than anything envisioned in the empiricist tradition. Especially significant are the potentials of qualitative inquiry to bring the world’s voices into dialogue, to link research to investments in positive futures, to bring about social change, to generate dialogues between the sciences and society, and to act as a continuous catalyst in expanding the horizons of knowledge.

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Denzin, N. K. & Giardina, M. D. (2008). Qualitative inquiry and social justice. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2011). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Yanchar, S. C. (2011). Using numerical data in explicitly interpretive contextual inquiry. Theory and Psychology, 21, 179–199.

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Chapter 2

Qualitative Research in a Glocalizing World Nigel G. Fielding

Changing Social Science for Turbulent Times Those who lived through the 1960s in North America and Western Europe tend to recall it as a time of rapid social change and political turmoil. Social science saw its own upheavals—the emergence of grounded theory, the first interventions of postmodernism, and new perspectives based on the view from the counter-culture, feminism, and ethnic and sexual minorities. This chapter sees the contemporary equivalents of such upheavals in the social science academy as the growth of “citizen research,” the globalization and emergent glocalization of methods, the debate over Indigenous research methods, and renewed struggles over what research is for. Science is a set of conventions about how intellectual communities solve problems together. These conventions include peer review, practices for citing previous research and for presenting evidence, and procedures regulating how credit is given for discoveries. In the abstract, this business model makes clear who did what. But examples like the neglect of Rosalind Franklin’s part in Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 47–62. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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the DNA discoveries alongside James Watson and Francis Crick show that the model did not work without bias even in its heyday, before feminists and others launched critiques that have raised awareness of the workings of power and authority in the scientific discovery process. Moreover, luck still counts in that process. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by luck, although chance discovery partly relies on the discoverer having sufficient knowledge to recognize the importance of what serendipity has brought to them. The probability of one person being lucky is small, but social media can assemble enough people to increase the chances of discovering something worthwhile. For example, the Galaxy Zoo project lets any of its participating 200,000 members of the public classify galaxies. One of them, a Puerto Rican housewife, discovered two hypervelocity stars (the project circulates sky maps to participants showing celestial regions that astronomers lack resources to yet have studied). In another mass participation science project, Brazil is creating a digital catalogue of every plant species in the Amazon ecosystem, with teachers, children, and citizen scientists building “Wiki Flora” (The Garden magazine, Royal Horticultural Society, November 2011, 8). Such initiatives are not confined to the natural sciences. Indeed, they extend increasingly into matters of politics. Collective action using online resources has enabled David and Goliath victories like bloggers rebutting the British Chiropractic Association’s evidence when it sought to sue the social critic Simon Singh for libel. The equivalent of the mass participation science projects via social media are activities such as “crowdsourcing,” where large numbers of people sharing a single interest work together to produce an online resource, such as a UK example that produced a catalogue of parliamentary candidates’ views on local matters in their constituency, information that was otherwise not available without collating reports in scores of local newspapers. To see where the changing circumstances of research in the age of social media might lead us, Giampietro Gobo (2011) has advocated what he calls a “glocal” methodology, the practice of methodologically thinking globally but acting locally. Of course,

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thinking is always embodied in a specific context but Gobo’s argument, to which I will return, is based on the idea that there is nothing wholly local or indigenous in the Information Age. For now, my interest is in the message that this has for contemporary methods of social research, particularly for changes in the purposes of social research and in who conducts social research. The starting point for examining the changing contemporary currents of social research is the observation that the core social research methods, the survey and the interview, share an understanding of the research subject that is rooted in an individualist social philosophy derived from the doctrines of Christianity, the Enlightenment, and American utilitarianism (Gostkowski, 1966). Essentially, these schools of thought view society as a collection of individuals. This position is at odds with approaches like interactionism, constructivism, and phenomenology that are better suited to our contemporary connectionist world because they see society as a network of relations and communicative exchanges. Moreover, the network approach is one that maps strongly onto the cultures of many African and Asian nations and, as the practice of social research extends the schools of sociological thought that focus on a network perspective and methods that reflect it, this approach may be better placed to capture the nature of contemporary sociality. However, the research practice I begin by profiling is not so much associated with shifts in the world balance of power but in disruptions and innovations caused as we come to grips with the affordances of the new online social media.

The Growth of Citizen Research Citizen researchers have always been a part of the knowledge scene. Since doing research involves the investment of time without the immediate prospect of a return on the effort, the practice of citizen research in the past has largely been the province of the economically secure. Despite the image of the poverty-stricken lone inventor in his or her freezing garret, citizen research has largely featured the amateur scientist and the gentleman scholar. That is no longer so. The rising practice of citizen research is born out of a convergence of steadily rising personal incomes and

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living standards worldwide, the rapid growth of online resources, the increasing number of people with some knowledge of social research and its methods, and the difficulties that modern states have in controlling the online world, at least when online innovations first emerge. The rise of citizen research is likely to bring with it changes in the practice and purposes of social research that we cannot predict because we would have to go back to the invention of the printing press for a socio-technological development of equivalent magnitude. Even so, the historical context of that invention was a much less developed socio-political frame when literacy was still confined to social elites. Computer literacy is very different, and what is happening with citizen research is due to global developments that are opening up methods, notably, but not confined to, the rapid growth in technological means of conducting social research. Among the themes of the early engagement of the social sciences with citizen research are the emergent research possibilities of new digital media and the broadening of the research community, bringing with it new purposes for doing research and new understandings of what research is. These things make the longer-term scope of citizen research unpredictable, but also suggest that we are heading for a considerable expansion of social research and that the research community will contain many new practitioners, most of whom will not hold credentials conventionally associated with membership of the social research community and may have different aims to those conventionally associated with social research. Citizen researchers have no formal social science qualifications, experience, or baseline qualification. Rather than credentials, the essential thing about citizen research is its purposes. Citizen researchers largely do research for purposes other than adding to academic knowledge. For instance, they may wish to research schools in different parts of a town to find the one with the best exam results so as to select an area with schools they judge to be best for their children, or they may engage in research to lobby government or criticize a policy in which they have an interest. They use bureaucratic records from open government (such as http://www.directgov.uk) and Web 2.0 techniques for

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information discovery like crowdsourcing and information “mash ups” mixing data types and methods. As well as official and institutional sources, citizen researchers draw on a range of information sources and tools, including the blogosphere, social simulation, and gaming sites (e.g., Farmville, Second Life), social media such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and the increasing range of freeware (paid for by the advertising it carries) for analysis of online communication such as Google Analytics. In a short span of time, web resources have emerged that provide free analytic tools for the new social media. For instance, the three most popular social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, and blogs in general) are served by analytic resources such as Facebook Insights, Socialbakers, Tweetreach, Hootsuite, and Wordpress Analytics. These tools allow one to discover the demographic breakdown of an audience: how many people are on a site; where they come from; how old they are; and their gender. It is also possible to establish how many people one’s own outputs reach and to assemble information enabling analysis of information flows, identification of social networks and “influentials” in them, and assembly of textual databases for content analysis (e.g., what the Twitter conversation between senders of messages entailed, what comments from others it elicited in apparently unrelated conversations by senders other than those who initiated the conversation, and a variety of other details). While there is a good deal of hype associated with the possibilities of the new social media, and although this chapter will itself engage in a measure of debunking at a later point, one does not have to look to the relatively sophisticated technologies of Web 2.0 for information technologies that are changing the research world by extending it. One recent cultural innovation enabled by some quite straightforward information technology is software that allows people to compile their family trees, such as Family Tree Maker. The success of infotainment like the BBC’s “Meet the Ancestors,” and “Life Story,” a company providing a studio where users record their own life history interview on DVD, accompanied by digitized photos and mementos from family albums and scrapbooks, demonstrate the hunger to study this kind of personal connection with the past.

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Another factor contributing to the growth of citizen research is that there are more people around with knowledge of social science—graduate numbers were up 50% across Europe in the last decade. Since the majority of social science graduates do not become academic researchers, there are increasing numbers of citizens who do not rely on social science knowledge for their livelihood but who have some skills and competencies that allow them to apply these in the pursuit of issues that interest them, either instrumentally (the search for a good school, leisure interests) or in the pursuit of their affiliations and wider concerns (religion, politics, environmental issues, charitable causes). As to the professional practice of social research (and bearing in mind that academics share this practice with market researchers and researchers in applied settings such as government), the way that information technologies are changing social research will be apparent to anyone in the field. Academics tend to be early adopters of IT innovations, although there are interesting variations in the openness of particular academic communities to the offerings of information technology. By 2010, 30% of social researchers were already using wikis and blogs in research (“Show scholars how to tap potential of digital research tools,” Times Higher Education, July 1, 2010). But the assumptions we make about methods and research populations are not just challenged by the Internet, Web 2.0, and social media. Xenitidou and Gilbert (2010) reported methodological innovations including using avatars as interviewers, online ethnography as a non-linear dynamic system, stakeholder incorporation in research design, collecting data via RSS feeds, and using panels to improve online survey response rates. Innovation also comes from the new purposes of online engagement. Greek researchers have identified online petitions as a free source of quantitative and qualitative data (Briassoulis, 2010). The post-2009 fiscal crisis in Greece, the unconvincing responses of politicians, and the availability of Internet access to a highly literate population have led to a drastic proliferation of online petitions, as much a vent for the frustrations of the situation as a hope of their having an effect.

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Online media can access terrifyingly large numbers of people, as a fourteen year old found when she made her address and telephone number public on Facebook and ended up with 21,000 guests for her birthday party. Police roadblocks were needed to turn them away. Over 3.5 billion pieces of new content are shared each week on Facebook; there are over 1.3 million tweets an hour, over 900,000 new blog posts every day (enough to fill the New York Times for nineteen years); and twenty-four hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every forty seconds. So making connections is the new trope, the historical hallmark of our time. We are in a world where people die at home alone for lack of friends, family, or neighbors to look in on them, but where a moment’s loss of connectivity is an affront to our sense of well-being.

The Globalization of Methods The changing nature of contemporary society brings with it a changing sense of sociality, and if people relate to each other differently than before, then the research methods we use to understand society also need to change. It is, as is usual with major social change, a mixed picture. Certainly there are new research approaches and practices afoot, but equally there is a social science establishment that only slowly accommodates change. To take a current example, computer software to facilitate analysis of qualitative data emerged in the 1980s, and there is well-accepted evidence that qualitative methods are now more widely used in social research than quantitative methods (Hammersley, 2008). However, qualitative software is still not part of the standard methods curriculum, even in graduate schools (whereas that curriculum normally includes SPSS and other statistics software). It is not because qualitative software is shunned; the CAQDAS (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS) Networking Project at the University of Surrey has trained over 6,000 people to use CAQDAS packages since the project was founded in 1994. The project is (deliberately) not affi liated with any particular software developer or package, but the developers all also conduct training of their own. No doubt, many more thousands have been trained via package-specific courses run by the package’s

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developer or one of the many commercial trainers in this field as well as the many who gain their understanding by self-learning via online resources. The conservatism (or, more charitably, caution) of the research methods establishment relates partly to who sponsors social research. The origin of methods is often linked to the needs of the state, such as tax purposes leading to the census, and anthropological ethnography emerging so the colonized could be made Christian. Methods have “sponsors” in the form of government and religion. The case of focus groups—group discussion method re-engineered by market researchers—shows us that methods can still be shaped outside the academy. Uckan (2003) describes a new relationship of government and online citizens as non-central and horizontally self-coordinated rather than the classical vertical top-down model. In conditions such as those Uckan describes, the assumptions that social science customarily makes about methods are more open to challenge than is usually imagined. They are based on a particular construction of the nature of society and of research, and that construction is exposed as fragile and narrow when applied in non-Western societies and outside the mainstream. The export of standardized survey questions developed in the West is bundled with a particular understanding of public opinion and appropriate concepts for describing it (Smith et al., 2011). For instance, the 2010 Eurobarometer survey (a regularly repeated survey of social attitudes across the European Union) found high public concern with farm animal welfare, but that is only a finding if Europe is enacted as an entity comprised of stratified individuals. Europe is, in effect, performed through the survey. It is moot as to what exactly that finding means when one considers other evidence that the “European” public does not have a particularly profound sense of “Europeanness,” but instead derives its sense of identity from much smaller, local collective entities (Barrett & Short, 2011). Between the 1920s and 1950s, the social research methods literature assumed that society and social relations needed a certain level of development for survey and interview fieldwork to be done (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995). As U.S. society became more homogeneous, American social science increasingly spoke of “generic

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methods” and “standardized procedures,” despite evidence that standardization could not be reliably achieved even in advanced societies, as revealed by Peneff ’s study of French survey researchers (2008). Peneff showed that the fieldworkers who customarily provided the most reliable and valid data actually violated the survey director’s standard sampling procedures. Using their familiarity with the community, they sampled people they knew had useful opinions and experiences to express. In other words, they worked qualitatively. Following Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) book on grounded theory, and the more recent rise of postmodernism and cultural relativism in the social sciences, qualitative and mixed methods researchers have increasingly questioned the idea that research methods are generic rather than based on particular cultural assumptions. We increasingly accept Liamputtong’s (2010) argument that methods need to fit the culture being studied. To take one issue, methods textbooks tell us we can minimize the effect of our presence and monitor it so it can be taken into account in analysis. However, anyone who does cross-cultural research will doubt that we can ever be sure what effect our presence has when we are in the field. We acknowledge that in many countries it is unacceptable to take photographs of people but still want to believe that behavior will not be modified when observed by a stranger. Too often, researchers from “advanced” democracies also assume that research is not seen as threatening and is generally welcomed, that research participants will not actively mislead the researcher, and that the community being studied has linguistic and cultural conventions about groups and individuals similar to those found in North America and Western Europe. Against this, we might consider the case of one of the language groups in India, speakers of Marathi. That language has no word for the generalized other (“they,” “them,” “society”). A researcher who asks a Marathi respondent what Indian society thinks of the caste system would literally be asking that respondent to answer an incomprehensible question. Western researchers also tend to assume that everything we observe results from a practical purpose. This is partly because

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of the individualist philosophy underpinning the social sciences mentioned earlier and partly because of the decline in religious adherence and practice in many Western societies. But in the religious cultures of the developing world, people do things because their belief system tells them to rather than for some practical purpose. In such cases, we need methods that are good at documenting beliefs rather than reported actions.

Indigenous Research Methodologies Recognition of the cultural loading of methodological assumptions finally reached the mainstream of the methods community in the 1990s, but what have come to be called “Indigenous research methodologies” (Smith, 1999) are not confined to developing societies. For women, minorities, oppressed communities, and people with disabilities, research epistemologies and methodologies read differently in the advanced democracies, too (Denzin et al., 2008). This takes us back to the roots of our social science disciplines in a socially committed reformist stance (Chilisa, 2011), and in an orientation to understanding the unfamiliar and the unexpected. Globalization requires us to connect the seemingly unconnected to understand what our methods tell us. When the Japanese sociologist Isamu Ito interviewed Japanese farmers, he noticed that they deliberately identified themselves using a politically incorrect term for “farmer” (hyakusho) that connotes inferiority, instead of using the term that government and the media use—similar to how some African Americans use the “N word” among themselves. Japan has the lowest food self-sufficiency in the world, and contemporary Japanese urbanites romanticize farming and are buying up farms. But hyakusho isn’t just a sign of rural resentment, because Ito also found that farmers use it to describe those newcomers who maintain the rural way of life (Ito, 2011). The “incorrect” term has become an ironic badge in the endless tension between city dwellers and those on whom they rely for food. A sociology that revels in such unexpected connections, rather than imposing its own theoretical dogma on what it finds, benefits from openness to new methods of discovering what people really think and do.

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The sociologist Roland Robertson (1992) pioneered globalization theory and popularized the term “glocalization” (which had its origin in business and marketing); it is worth remembering, of course, that Robertson (2000) understood glocalization as the tempering effects of local conditions on global pressures. The reason it is worth remembering is that, if we divide methodology into the epistemological and the technical, the critique of the established epistemology in contemporary social science far exceeds the discovery of new techniques. For instance, take the list of Indigenous methods shown in Table 2.1 from Evans et al.’s (2009) work with the Okanagan (First Nation) community in Canada. The methods itemized by Evans et al. (2009) are close to accepted good practice in mainstream qualitative research. In fact, the essence of Indigenous methods connects with well-established, longstanding themes of qualitative methodology familiar to generations of researchers. As Nicholls (2009, 118) asserts, practicing Indigenous methods is to “engage with reflexive evaluation of collective and negotiated design, data collection and data analysis to consider the interpersonal and collective dynamics during the Table 2.1: Evans et al.’s (2009) methodology for fieldwork with the Okanagan (First Nation) community 1. Informal conversations in fieldwork.

2. Talking circles (speaker turns are distributed sequentially around the circle and confrontational argumentation styles are shunned). 3. Discussions about the preliminary analysis via community meetings. 4. Commitment to honor people’s narratives and insights when crafting results and reports and ensuring some outputs are accessible to all participants. 5. Interviews with people who provide services to Indigenous communities. 6. Collective workshop using break-out groups of likeminded individuals who hone and represent distinctive perspectives to create a multiplex understanding.

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Table 2.2: Gobo’s (2011) steps toward a glocal methodology 1. Publish accounts of experiences and reflections of researchers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to show the differences in surveying, interviewing, and observing in those places. 2. Narrow down the universal claims in methods texts and highlight limits and cultural embeddedness of Western methods. 3. Change traditional methods from within, changing their colonialist elements rather than rejecting them completely. 4. Make methodology journals and texts truly international.

research process, and any effects that the research may potentially have into the future.” Indigenous methods accord with Robertson’s idea of the “tempering” effects of local conditions on global currents, rather than representing a total “transformation.” It is in this spirit that Gobo (2011) and others have argued that if we are going to find better ways to do research with Indigenous people, we need an “inter-localized methodology.” We should not try to start completely afresh, but we should expunge the obsolete assumptions whose long shadow still darkens social research methods and we should be open to bringing in what is genuinely new where it helps us answer research questions that reflect the new realities of contemporary society and sociality. For Gobo (2011), there are four main steps by which we should re-cast our methods to better capture the glocal character of the contemporary social world. These are shown in Table 2.2.

Conclusion: The (New) Purposes of Social Research The trends I’ve discussed relating to citizen research and to Indigenous research methods can contribute to a more culturally sensitive and expansive understanding of social research. But we also need to move toward a more grown-up political economy of research, one that is alert to the challenge posed to new practitioners by limited resources and the part that researchers in the

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prosperous countries play in perpetuating such problems. Citizen researchers and those in developing social science communities have to negotiate the expense of equipment, software, access, and the cost of getting trained and credentialed. We should not underestimate the barriers these represent. Many social scientists may feel that, in addition to the relatively arid and inward-looking nature of the debate about how our methods need to change, we should also take compensatory action that helps new practitioners of social research overcome the barriers set by limited resources. In mixed methods research, this approach is championed by Donna Mertens (2009), among others. Those with expertise in particular methods can, and often do, play a part by conducting free workshops for researchers outside the usual Western circuit and not worrying too much about whether the participants occupy the “right” place in the usual hierarchy of undergraduate, graduate student, applied researcher, professor, and so on. Earlier, I highlighted how online resources, which benefit from citizens’ willingness to join with people they don’t know but who share an interest, have led to advances in scientific knowledge and social advocacy. Another element in this is the steady institutional moves toward an open access publishing environment, where anyone can access scholarly publications without paying journal subscriptions or book publishers. This sounds good, but, as before, the picture is mixed. One irony is that, in the transition to an open access environment, the “author pays” model predominates, which poses obvious problems for researchers in fields that do not attract significant project funding that can be used to pay article charges. This is an issue for the social sciences in general and for qualitative researchers in particular. Open access also poses problems for learned societies, since they are largely supported by income from subscriptions to the society’s journal. Another irony relates to the increasing reliance of open access science on collective online efforts by non-professionals. Open access hasn’t penetrated fields like climate science and medicine, although these fields feature the biggest collective engagements and are of keen concern to most citizens. In medicine, whole countries contribute human data that their citizens then have to

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pay to read. Above, I mentioned Wiki Flora. There is another part to that story. Although new entries are provided by anyone, they are assessed by researchers before being included. The professional filter still operates. The big issue here is that we can shun citizen science and Indigenous research as work done by untrained knownothings or by people who are not motivated by a “pure” sense of dispassionate inquiry, or we can help their practitioners gain technical competencies and engage with them in the debate over the new purposes of social research. In pre-industrial societies, embodied presence was the touchstone of social relations. But in contemporary society, people also live in part in the media, the Internet, Facebook, and the world of virtual play. There is a shift to lateral relations and connections with others with whom we have no overweening shared interests except that single connecting point. The new technologies and social media increasingly penetrate outside the Western circuit, too, but are part of the even richer and more complex encounter of traditional collectivist or communal identities with the modern. In both cases, instead of the drive for an agreed-on and solidary analysis, these new circumstances encourage an interest in examining different interpretations from different perspectives with multiple data sources. We should not see these developments as a crisis in the hegemony of social science but as its coming of age, and qualitative methods as the main arena for making connections around the new realities of social research.

References Barrett, M. & Short, J. (2011). Images of European people in a group of five to ten year old English schoolchildren. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 10, 339–363.

Briassoulis, H. (2010). Online petitions: New tools of secondary analysis? Qualitative Research, 10, 715–722. Chilisa, B. (2011). Indigenous research methodologies. London: Sage.

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Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Smith, L. T. (Eds). (2008). Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Evans, M., Hole, R., Berg, L. D., Hutchinson, P., & Sookraj, D. (2009). Common insights, differing methodologies: Toward a fusion of Indigenous methodologies, participatory action research, and white studies in an urban aboriginal research agenda. Qualitative Research, 15, 893–910.

Glaser, B. & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. Chicago: Aldine.

Gobo, G. (2011). Glocalizing methodology? The encounter between local methodologies. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14, 417–437. Gostkowski, Z. (1966). Some assumptions and postulates concerning the empirical research of the research techniques in sociology. Polish Sociological Bulletin, 1, 3–33. Hammersley, M. (2008). Questioning qualitative inquiry. London: Sage.

Holstein, J. A. & Gubrium, J. (1995). The active interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ito, I. (2011). Globalizing the rural. International Review of Qualitative Research, 4, 279–290.

Liamputtong, P. (2010). Performing qualitative cross-cultural research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mertens, D. (2009). Transformative research and evaluation. New York: Guilford Press.

Nicholls, R. (2009). Research and Indigenous participation: Critical reflexive methods. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 12, 117–126.

Peneff, J. (1988). The observers observed: French survey researchers at work. Social Problems, 35, 520–535. Robertson, R. (1992). Social theory and global culture. London: Sage.

Robertson, R. (2000). Social theory, cultural relativity and the problem of globality. In A. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization and the world system (pp. 69–90). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Smith, S. N., Fisher, S. D., & Heath, A. (2011). Opportunities and challenges in the expansion of cross-national survey research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14, 485–502. Times Higher Education (2010). Show scholars how to tap the potential of digital resource tools. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?story code=412256 (accessed January 20, 2013).

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Uckan, O. (2003). E-Devlet, E-Demokrasi ve Turkiye (E-government, e-democracy, and Turkey). Istanbul: Literatur Yayinevi.

Xenitidou, M. & Gilbert, N. (2010). The processes of methodological innovation: Successful development and diff usion. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-576-25-0011/outputs/read/a66f6089-75e8-4fcd-ba6f-d0ec67bcaf8a (accessed January 20, 2013).

Chapter 3

Remix Cultures, Remix Methods Reframing Qualitative Inquiry for Social Media Contexts Annette Markham

In early 2011, I started getting all of my news of the world exclusively through my social media networks, specifically Twitter and Facebook. I wanted to immerse myself in the premise that “while people using media are simultaneously and instantaneously connected with large and multiple groups and networks, they are also increasingly ascribed with a deeply individualized and self-centered value system” (Deuze et al., 2012, para. 28). Homophily, a concept describing the way people tend to flock toward similar others, is one way to describe how our understandings of the world are idiosyncratic, narrowly channeled through our social networks, and therefore polarized. Not only did I experience homophily, but I soon found myself saturated in situations that I would not otherwise experience. I saw certain tragedies very up close and personal, like the Queensland floods and the New Zealand earthquakes (two of my colleagues lived in Brisbane, Australia; one lived in Christchurch, New Zealand). I learned a lot about the music scene in Britain (I followed a musician who tweeted a lot and lived only one Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 63–81. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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time zone away from me). I watched a lot of Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart (as most of my friends in both Facebook and Twitter would forward these clips). I read scholarly articles that were posted when I was awake (and, since I was in Denmark, this meant my stream was primarily European). As Deuze et al. (2012), write, “the whole of the world and our lived experience in it can and perhaps should be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by pervasive and ubiquitous media” (para 3). This became clearer to me on January 25, as the Egyptian Revolution started to flood my Twitter streams. The speed at which tweets flowed on hashtags like #jan25 limited me to quick flashes of statements before they disappeared. Clicking on links became a fairly random act, but led to some amazing pathways of meaning. On January 27, 2011, my mom watched MSNBC News on her TV, listening to the anchor talk about growing concerns about rioters getting ready for a “day of rage,” while a video clip over the anchor’s shoulder showed crowds of rioters shouting with fires visible in the distance. She learned that rioters had injured eighty-seven police officers and that one was killed (Bloggit, 2011). Meanwhile, halfway around the world, I cried as I watched a remix created by Tamar Shaaban (2011) that clipped footage from various news agencies as well as on-theground local video clips. Over a stirring soundtrack, I heard the passionate and committed voices of the Egyptian people, bloodied on the streets of Cairo.1 We are witnessing a startling transformation in the way cultural knowledge is produced and how meaning is negotiated. The digital era does not mark the beginning of this sort of activity by any means, yet it has facilitated a remarkable acceleration toward de-privileging expert knowledge, decentralizing culture production, and unhooking cultural units of information from their origins. One way to think about this is through the lens of remix. Although remix has long been associated with hip hop music forms, it is now a general term referring to the processes and products of taking bits of cultural material and, through the process of copy/paste and collage, producing new meaning to share with others. As I experience social reality that has been remixed by my interactions with my social media networks, I

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gain a particular understanding of the world, remix it again, and distribute this to others. Inspired by my experiment of saturating myself in the way our understanding of the world is remixed by our engagement with social media, 2 I have been thinking about the ways in which remix is a powerful tool for thinking about qualitative, interpretive research practice. The form and cultural practice of remix offers a lens through which we may be able to better grapple with the complexity of social contexts characterized by ubiquitous Internet, always-connected mobile devices, dense global communication networks, fragments of information flow, and temporal and ad hoc community formations. Rather than inventing new methods, a remix approach offers a different way of thinking about what we do when we engage with particular methods to make sense of phenomena. Taking a remix approach begins with the premises of a bricolage approach (Kincheloe, 2001, 2005) and then shifts to a level we might call “below method,” where we engage in everyday practices of sensemaking. The concept of remix highlights activities that are not often discussed as a part of method and may not be noticed, such as using serendipity, playing with different perspectives, generating partial renderings, moving through multiple variations, borrowing from disparate and perhaps disjunctive concepts, and so forth. Although methods texts offer extensive descriptions of how one might design research questions, collect data, manage and sort data, and apply analytical tools to this data, much of the actual process from data to conclusion remains a black box. Most often, especially in disciplines where interpretive reflexive inquiry is not taken for granted, these processes are not included in anything the audience might read. Instead, we see the tidiedup version of a long, messy, creative process of sense-making. Adaptation and creative innovation is sorely needed to study the complexity of digital life. Internet research has been plagued by a constant reinvention of the wheel and a significant degree of trying to force fit methods that were invented for and function best in local face-to-face settings. I argue that by engaging in a greater level of attention to our everyday processes of sense-making within research projects, we can

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identify and then submit these practices to greater scrutiny. Remix is a metaphor that can help us get to this sort of reflexive attention to practice, product, and purpose and also is a fruitful mindset for engaging in highly responsive, ethically grounded, and context sensitive cultural interpretations. In what follows, I discuss some of the complications associated with studying Internet-mediated contexts. I offer a research-centered definition of remix and then describe particular elements of remix that have proven to be valuable pedagogical tools for helping disrupt traditional frames for conducting qualitative research in digital contexts: generate, play, borrow, move, and interrogate. As a brief caveat, remix is a generative tool for thinking creatively about methods, not a new method, or even a framework. It resides alongside other metaphors that seek to challenge how we envision research, such as dance (Janesick, 1994), jazz (Oldfather & West, 1994), crystallization (Richardson, 1994), bricolage (Kincheloe, 2001, 2005), or facets (Mason, 2011). These sorts of metaphors remind us that the process of research is, among other things, exploratory and creative, a mix of passion and curiosity. And that the products of our inquiry, whether an article, a graph, a poem, a story, a play, a dance, or a painting, is not something to be received, but something to be used; not a conclusion but a turn in a conversation; not a closed statement but an open question; not a way of declaring “this is how it is” but a means of inviting others to consider what it (or they) could become. (Bochner & Ellis, 2003, p. 507)

Social (Research) Contexts in the 21st Century The past three decades mark tremendous growth in digital social interaction, from early experiments in virtual reality, text-based communities, and role-playing games to today’s saturation in social media, where we are always on, tethered to mobile devices, enacting what Neilson in 2012 labeled “Generation C” (for connected). At the turn of the 21st century, technologies for communication became much more pervasive through mobility and convergence. The collaborative and distributive features of the web were more

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fully realized at this time with the rise of blogging. The capacity to easily connect—via commenting, tagging, and sharing—facilitated a huge growth in complex networks among people both locally and globally, across any media form imaginable. In both the blogosphere and commercial spheres, a system developed whereby value was linked to reputation and connectivity in these networks. This reputation and sharing economy has shifted our traditional understandings of authorship, blurring the boundaries between producer and consumer. Throughout this time, frameworks for understanding and defining identity and social constructs have continued to shift away from the individual and toward networks and information flows. The performance of everyday life is seen as increasingly inseparable from the technologically mediated and mediatized confluences in which our information flows, with or without our attention or intention. Materiality in this mobile epoch is better understood as connection, process, and relationship. Gergen (1991) discusses this as an inevitable but slow-incoming recognition of the relational self. Turkle (2011) describes it more in terms of fragmentation, or a cycling through of various virtual personae, each with sets of attributes to suit particular situations. Scholars such as Latour (2005; Latour et al., 2012) go further, emphasizing that in contemporary culture, we need to move beyond the notion and privileging of the individual to better understand the multiple agencies influencing any social situation. Characteristic of actor network theorists, the actor is not just embedded in networks but is “defined by its network … entirely defined by the open-ended lists in the databases” (Latour et al., 2012, p. 3). From this perspective, anything we might call an individual is simply a temporary constitution of attributes. For social researchers, this means that many taken-for-granted techniques for identifying discrete situational boundaries, individuals, or other objects or for analysis are far less useful than they may have once seemed. As I have noted elsewhere (Markham, In press), at least four complications emerge when we consider the entanglements of the social contexts involving humans, Web 2.0 technologies, and smart mobile devices:

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1. Boundaries between self and other are often unclear, particularly when information develops a social life of its own, beyond one’s immediate circumstances. 2. Boundaries of situations and identification of contexts are often unclear as dramas play out in settings and times far removed from the origin of interaction. 3. Agency is not the sole property of individual entities, but a temporal performative element that emerges in the dynamic interplay of people and their technologies for communication. 4. Performativity can be linked not only to individuals but actions of the devices, interfaces, and networks of information through which dramas occur and meaning is negotiated. To deal with the challenges of conducting qualitative research in mobile, global, and fragmented mediatized and mediated environments, do we cling to tradition, hoping for steady grounding? Or do we continually experiment? These questions are complicated by other axiological questions. Part of the difficulty of being innovative is linked closely to the persistence of positivist models and procedures. Whether discussed within the larger backlash against interpretivism or postmodernism, or within the economydriven shifts toward evidence-based research models, it still feels like academia is battening down the hatches. This occurs in the midst of a cultural explosion—outside the walls of the academy— of collaborative, open source, reputation knowledge production. This becomes an ethical concern on many levels, not the least of which relates to how and whether we are interrogating our methods adequately to protect people (our participants, their communities, and ourselves) from harm. With the automated scraping of data occurring on massive levels across all media platforms and by various agencies, individuals, and privatized interests, how can we ensure data privacy? How can we be sure our techniques for anonymizing sources will work? The simple answer to this question is we can’t, unless we adjust our methods of representation. Or take the issue of privacy and informed consent. There are no easy answers, as was emphasized in the latest ethics guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers (Markham & Buchanan, 2012). People engage in activities that would traditionally be

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considered highly sensitive, even when understanding that their actions are public and the potential audience is vast. It’s not just that we have blurred the boundaries of what constitutes public and private spheres, it’s that the concept itself is changing (see, e.g., boyd & Marwick, 2012; Markham, 2012; Nissenbaum, 2011). To add to this dilemma, technological advances teach us that we cannot predict how our information will be used in the future. Now, more than ever, we have the obligation to try to proactively protect participants or to consider ways of doing inquiry that minimize the risk of future harms. My effort to invoke innovative metaphors for thinking about inquiry is embedded, then, in a larger argument that interpretive studies of digital experience would be not only stronger but probably more ethically grounded if we more radically disrupted—or revisited previous disruptions of—still taken-for-granted parameters for qualitative inquiry.

What Is Remix? Remix is a term that came into usage in the late 20th century to refer to the practice and product of taking samples from audio tracks and putting them together in new and creative ways. The history of remix is most often linked to the music form of Jamaican Dub, represented well by artist King Tubby. King Tubby, whose work influenced generations of hip hop artists engaged in dub, scratch, rap, and DJ, began deconstructing and reconstructing musical tracks in the late ’60s. We’re now very familiar with the way songs are remixed in ways that extend or reinterpret them for different audiences. But remix goes well beyond music. Remix has become a term that is used to describe the widespread practice of mashup videos, most evident on YouTube, or the phenomenon of Internet memes, which are typically composed of small units of cultural information (a phrase, an image, a short audio or video clip) that get mixed in different ways, generally for comedic effect. A meme is characterized by its evolution—in effect, it doesn’t exist unless it morphs through reproduction and dissemination. We could say remix is everywhere, or that “everything is a remix” (Ferguson, N.d.), as both a practice and outcome in all forms of cultural production. Navas (2006) notes that “cut/

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copy and paste, the fragmentation of material, is today part of everyday activities both at work and at home thanks to the computer” (para. 13), whereby easy-to-use software applications allow people to develop sophisticated mashups. Lessig (2008) and Ferguson (N.d.) offer extensive discussions of remix, offering many historical as well as contemporary artists and contexts to argue that it’s the content of an idea, not the originator, that matters, and that borrowing, sampling, and creatively remixing ideas is an inherent aspect of any culture. Conceptualized broadly, remix is not something we do in addition to our everyday lives, it is the way we make sense of our world, by transforming the bombardment of stimuli into a seamless experience. If we take seriously the idea that everything we take to be real is a constant negotiation of relationships between people and things, and that culture is habit writ large, remix as a form of sense-making embraces this framework. For purposes of talking about qualitative inquiry and the study of digital experience, I find two aspects of remix to be critical: First, remix relies on sampling, borrowing, and creatively reassembling units of cultural information to create something that is used to move or persuade others. The key to the power of remix is that it doesn’t matter where the elements are drawn from as long as the resulting product has resonance for the audience. Remix is about working in the liminal space to create a particular way of connecting the familiar with the unfamiliar, or the original elements and the remixed. Second, remix always occurs as part of a larger community of remix. It is a process of creating temporary assemblages that change almost immediately after initial production. The very power of remix relies on the participation of others as “produsers”3 or collaborative remixers. Producers of any remix understand that once their product leaves their hands and is distributed, others will potentially remix it, again and again. The form of the remix will change over time. It might grow in quality and cohesion over time through various iterations. Or it might morph into something completely unrecognizable, with very few elements to trace it back to the origin points (or it might wither and die from neglect). A meme might appear to have a life of its own as it

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morphs and changes. But it is negotiated, interactive. It is transformed and it transforms its users and creators. Remix is an inherent part of digital culture. As we surf, we create momentary meaning structures, mini-remixes that get remixed again and again, every time we surf similarly, with different outcomes. Our own actions yield these remixes at one level, yet these remixes are influenced by many other factors. Indeed, remix undergirds the infrastructures of everything we understand to be part of the Internet. As Navas points out (2012), Google is an excellent example of a very different sort of remix, one that selectively presents us with results based on a complex (and often hidden) set of algorithms. Amazon.com recommendations, YouTube’s “related content,” and Facebook feeds are likewise remixed for us, based on proprietary algorithms that function beneath the surface of activity. Remix may not be the only lens for thinking about this, but it highlights the ways that meaning, contexts, and structures can be seen as temporary outcomes of interaction, emerging and fading, morphing into something slightly new every time we engage. Thinking about digital culture through the lens of remix offers powerful means of resisting the focus on individuals and objects to get closer to the flows and connection points between various elements of the media ecology system, where meaning and assemblages and imaginaries are negotiated in relation and (inter)action. At the meta-level, thinking about qualitative research practice through the framework of remix offers a means of reconfiguring some of the practices associated with qualitative research. It allows us to embrace and grapple with complexity (rather than trying to simplify) by focusing less on methods (as templates to either apply to experiences and organize these experiences into particular categories and structures) and more on meaning as derived from a creative process of inquiry. My application of remix as a concept embraces the essence of bricolage, as described by Kincheloe (2001, 2005). Extending the concept of bricolage, remix focuses on everyday practices of enacting method, as well as the way inquiry is—or can be—situated within a Web 2.0, social media-saturated, remix culture. Remix focuses our attention on the way temporally situated arguments

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are assembled and reassembled as they traverse various audiences. Each of these renderings has meaning and will be assessed by the reader/viewer/listener, but the quality and credibility of each is not predetermined by the way the data (cultural material) is collected, or the tools used to manage, sort, and categorize this data into something that can then be reorganized and edited by the remixer. Rather, quality is embedded in the extent to which the production (whether we call it argument, story, or finding) demonstrates resonance with the context, and also has resonance with the intended audience. Instead of marginalizing the concepts of copy/cut & paste, collage, pastiche, and mashup, these practices become resonant and thus appropriate lenses for thinking about cultural formations as well as adaptive modes of inquiry. By letting go of the idea that our academic projects should provide answers, remix provides the researcher with a greater freedom to build creative and compelling arguments that enter larger conversations, both inside and outside the academy.4 This approach also tackles the difficulty of accomplishing the practices that Latour (2005) and others advocate through actor network theory. As Latour notes: Any given interaction seems to overflow with elements which are already in the situation coming from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency. This powerful intuition is as old as the social sciences. As I have said earlier, action is always dislocated, articulated, delegated, translated. Thus, if any observer is faithful to the direction suggested by this overflow, she will be led away from any given interaction to some other places, other times, and other agencies that appear to have molded them into shape. (2005, p. 166) Remix is a way of following the overflow, being willing to flatten the social by considering all elements to be equal, without trying to identify individuals or contexts or distinguish the local from the global. The outcome of one’s activities—if considered an act of making an argument—influences one’s process in that it matters less where one begins or ends, because patterns and possibilities always emerge. It also shifts one from matters of fact to matters of concern.

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Looking under Methods to Find Remix Practices: An Experiment in Play A significant percentage of scholars who study digital culture, Internet-mediated contexts, or social media are new to qualitative inquiry. This is an important consideration when it comes to imagining the common models informing the definitional parameters for how qualitative inquiry gets done. Even when defined as a non-positivist process, procedures still retain linear and compartmentalized foundations. One begins with a phenomenon that informs one’s research questions, which, in turn, inform particular strategies for data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Various stages are described as separate moments, and findings are written up at the end. Although the process can be displayed as iterative, the fundamental working metaphors are not nearly as innovative as those of us with extensive background or experience with innovative qualitative inquiry might imagine. From the standpoint of researchers entrenched in positivist forms of inquiry, understanding the strength of interpretive qualitative inquiry requires going back to the basic question: What do we do when we engage in qualitative inquiry? These are the five elements of remix: Generate Move Play Borrow Interrogate

These terms have proven very successful in cross-disciplinary workshops exploring innovative or creative approaches, as they help disconnect the practice of inquiry from methodological or epistemological baggage. These five activities of inquiry actually look a lot like what we might think people are doing when they are engaged in the practice of remix. Each of these terms will be conceptualized and operationalized in different ways for any researcher, depending on his or her perspective, discipline, project,

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and so forth. Likewise, the terms will take on different meaning at different stages of the project. Thus, the following brief descriptions of each term serve as only a starting point, illustrating how I might situate these terms in my own world of research. Generate

When I think of this term, I immediately visualize the physical stacks of material that would collect on my desk over the course of a study. It was easier to understand what the term meant when the stuff of our research was more physically noticeable. The changing dimensions—in width and height—of the stack over time would indicate a state of progress. The more I investigated, the more stuff was generated: draft documents, field notes, concept maps, sketchbooks full of doodles, photos, and drawings, notes on literature I was reading, printed copies of theory and concept articles, untouched transcripts from interviews, the same transcripts coded the first time, the same transcripts coded a second time or in a different way, and on and on. I considered this teetering pile a treasure trove, full of data. Picking up random objects might trigger certain connections among ideas. Flipping open a research journal might spark a memory and open a floodgate of new information to consider. This wonderful chaos of inquiry is less visible when we work digitally. Much of this generative quality of inquiry is forgotten, never experienced, or lost. We might think about the process of generating as one whereby we transform data according to different thematic classification schemes. Every iteration of this presents a new (in that it is different) data set, which represents the phenomenon in a new way. The act of transformation is one of interpretation and remix. Likewise, we generate a “new” participant every time we transform their raw activities into a different form, such as a written text, an edited version of their talk, a grammatically corrected version of their discourse, or a summary of themes emerging from their activities and interactions. Reflecting on these and other practices, we can see that inquiry is not only about simplifying and narrowing, but generating layers upon layers of informational units that influence our interpretations. Focusing only on the first layer of data (the original stuff we collected) doesn’t allow us to fully appreciate what is

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actually at play when we engage in the long, involved, inductive, and explorative art and science of “writing culture.” When this inherent generative process is understood, it can enable fuller analysis of multiple layers of meaning. Simply put, more stuff is laid out on the table to be considered as data. Play

Play is sometimes a guided or rule-driven activity, as when we play games. At other times, play is an open-ended leisure activity, as when we play with or play around. It’s easy to see remix as a product of both types of play. As a process of inquiry, remix relies on experimenting with various combinations of elements to produce something meaningful. Successful remixes are inventive and often yield outcomes that seem quite new, despite the fact that the elements that are being combined are borrowed from other sources. So remix is a highly open-ended process. And, like most artistic endeavors, passion and innovation work in tandem with the skillful if not expert performance of one’s art/craft. At the same time, most remix occurs in a larger community of remix, where certain goals and guidelines apply. In academic contexts, we have been far less willing to characterize research as play, or playful (see Ellingson, this volume). Particularly if one’s practices are closely directed or controlled by outside forces such as supervisors or funders, play may seem a disrespectful, lazy, or non-rigorous form of activity. In qualitative inquiry, this is a mistake, since what we do in the best moments of the interpretive process is just that. As any athlete or musician will say, getting in the zone of play or engaging in improvisation requires at least some element of skillful application of certain techniques and also functions as an important tool for honing one’s skills. Curiosity and exploration mark a significant type of play. Experimentation without any particular purpose allows the researcher to move beyond what is already known to a point of learning, making new connections. Imaginative play allows one to let go of what ought to be done or thought and work in the realm of possibilities. As Marantz Henig (2008, para. 39) notes, “[f]or all its variety … there is something common to play in all its protean forms: variety itself. The essence of play is that the sequence

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of actions is fluid and scattered.” Bekoff likewise describes play as “training for the unexpected. … Behavioral flexibility and variability is adaptive; in animals it’s really important to be able to change your behavior in a changing environment” (in Marantz Henig, 2008, para. 39). In terms of exploring complex social media contexts, play can actually become a critical turning point for research design that resonates better with contexts of flow, analysis that moves with or into these flows rather than abstracting and isolating objects arbitrarily and artificially, finding forms of representation that have contextual integrity and finding rather than simply applying conceptual models that help make sense of these phenomena. Borrow

In the context of copyright, Lessig (2008) reminds us that a basic foundation of writing is quoting from other works. Referring to the writing of a particular individual, he says, “Were it music, we’d call it sampling. Were it painting, it would be called collage. Were it digital, we’d call it remix” (p. 51). In academic research, borrowing is essential, in this and other ways. To make sense of any phenomenon, we borrow all the time, whether or not we recognize it. We borrow ideas about sampling strategies, genres of writing, tools for analyzing data, and so forth. As I take short-term engagements at various universities, I often end up sitting for days, weeks, or months in other scholars’ offices. While I think or write, I wander around the offices of computer scientists, feminist technoscientists, linguists, postphenomenological theorists, or actor network theorists, gazing at the titles on their bookshelves. Flipping through books, gazing at art on walls, and reading articles left on desktops, it’s no surprise I find a lot of useful concepts, theories, and phrases that I would never otherwise encounter. Through serendipity, I make new connections and find alternate perspectives. All of this broadens my perspectives, no matter the topic. Of course, it’s messy when I leave the comfort of my home discipline to struggle with new concepts. But it makes good sense when I consider the target of my inquiry. Most aspects of

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Internet-related phenomena occur across multiple platforms, media, and/or devices. Interactions that seem cohesive or complete are just partial traces of interactions, abstracted from lived experience, displaced in time and space. When we consider the way in which people use and relate to technologies for communication, the variation is endless. Borrowing approaches, perspectives, and techniques from not only outside one’s discipline but from outside the academy seems not only natural but essential to figuring out creative ways to grapple with these contexts. Move

Everything discussed above, whether applied to the activities of remix or the activities of qualitative inquiry, is about moving and being moved. Inquiry is always situated, but never motionless. This is an important thing to remember, particularly in globally entangled networks of cultural flow that comprise ever-shifting terrains of meaning. George Marcus (1998) uses the term “follow” to describe creative ways to engage in multi-sited ethnography: Follow the story, follow the people, follow the metaphors. We can add to this many other ways of thinking about following: shifting one’s perspective, changing the questions, moving in and out of the flows of information, following the silences, gaps, and absences. In many ways, what’s most important is not how one moves but acknowledging that movement is inevitable, natural, and productive. It is also not necessarily forward, in that many movements will take us back to the beginning or will cause us to see the entire project in different ways, forcing us to mark our current point as a new beginning to move from. Interrogate

Successful remix interrogates pieces of culture, torquing and integrating them into something unique so the audience can see each piece or the whole in a different way. This has happened throughout time, in literature, painting, architecture, design, fi lm, music, and so forth. Now, we see it in fan fiction, mashup videos, street art, Internet memes-everywhere we see the production of culture, we know we are witnessing the outcome of a process of reflexive interrogation.

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Perhaps interrogate seems too forceful to describe the act of reflexively questioning everything we’re doing, seeing, feeling, or everything about the project and the phenomenon itself. I use this term to highlight that any close reading, detailed analysis, or inductive interpretation requires a steady stream of questioning. Sometimes we direct this interrogation at the object, to see how it is situated, to focus on what surrounds, embraces, encompasses, or encloses it, to wonder how it might look or be otherwise, to think about its existence in time and space. At other times, we direct this interrogation inward, to consider why we’re interested in this and not another phenomenon, to ask how we are situated in relation to this stuff of our curiosity, to consider how we might think otherwise, by focusing critically on what surrounds, embraces, encompasses, or encloses us. This constant questioning may not be directly acknowledged as part of one’s method, but it comprises a powerful everyday practice of all inquiry. Noticing it allows us to get better at doing it well, with purpose, and to incorporate the processes and products of our interrogations more clearly, or rigorously.

Searching for Resonance These five elements of remix—generating, playing, borrowing, moving, and interrogating—usefully resist disciplining and can prompt more freedom to innovate when exploring contexts that defy easy encapsulation. As with bricolage or layered accounts (see Rambo Ronai, 1995), remix presumes that the resulting pastiche will never constitute a complete or whole picture. Rather, each outcome is an iterative rendering. Each is a work in progress. All are possibilities. Each builds on the others, informs the others, and influences the overall perspective one ends up with at the end. This is an unending process, one that invites conversation, collaboration, and further remixing. Remixes might show connections among elements or present a beautifully cohesive piece, as we see in Eric Whitacre’s virtual choirs (http://ericwhitacre. com/the-virtual-choir). Or remixes can illustrate juxtaposition, disjuncture, or discontinuity. Rather than trying to resolve complexity in the research project, a remix might illustrate very clearly the irresolvable complexity of the phenomenon.

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To be sure, questions of quality and credibility arise. There are many ways to think about criteria for quality,5 but here I just mention one: The most successful remixes are those that have longevity and can be seen by many to hold a mark of quality. Whether this quality is closely analyzed by experts or simply felt by cultural members, and whether this quality is in the way something is made or in the story it tells, it likely has something to do with how much the product resonates. Successful remix reaches beyond the merely sufficient to the monumental. Ethical, contextsensitive, creative research does the same, if, in the end, it captures the attention of the reader, moves the reader to think differently, or causes the reader to want to engage, contribute further to the conversation, and continue the playful process of remix.

Notes 1. For more information and to view video, go to http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ThvBJMzmSZI 2. Also inspired by the work of Lashua and Fox (2007), using remix as a method of action research. 3. “Produser” and “prosumer” are both terms that have come to represent the collapsed roles of producers and users and producers and consumers.

4. Th is sort of work has long been projects of Yvonna Lincoln and Norman Denzin (e.g., 1994, 2003), Art Bochner and Carolyn Ellis (e.g., 2003), Laurel Richardson (e.g., 1994), and many others who comprise the late 20 thcentury interpretive movement in the United States.

5. See, for example, various writers in Denzin and Lincoln’s Handbook of Qualitative Research (all editions, published by Sage). Questions of criteria for quality are considered paramount and comprise a consistent theme throughout these volumes.

References Bloggit, H. (2011). The world is changing—Tahrir Square revolution spreads (Jan. 27, NBC). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-0Hm-n_LAM (accessed January 4, 2013).

Bochner, A., & Ellis, C. (2003). An introduction to the arts and narrative research: Art as inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 9, 506–514.

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boyd, d. & Marwick, A. (2011). Social privacy in networked publics: Teens’ attitudes, practices, and strategies. Unpublished manuscript. http://www. danah.org/papers/2011/SocialPrivacyPLSC-Draft.pdf (accessed August 11, 2011). Deuze, M., Blank, P., & Speers, L. (2012). A life lived in media. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 6, para. 1–37.

Fergusen, K. (N.d.). Everything is a remix. (Four-part video series.) http:// everythingisaremix.info (accessed January 4, 2013).

Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary society. New York: Basic Books. Hayles, K. (2012). How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. “Introducing Generation C: Americans 18-34 are the most connected.” Nielson. (2012). http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/introducinggeneration-c/ (accessed January 20, 2013). Janesick, V. J. (1994). The dance of qualitative research design: Metaphor, methodolatry, and meaning. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 209–219). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kincheloe, J. (2001). Describing the bricolage: Conceptualizing a new rigor in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 679–692.

Kincheloe, J. (2005). On to the next level: Continuing the conceptualization of the bricolage. Qualitative Inquiry, 11, 323–350. Lashua, B. & Fox, K. (2007). Defining the groove: From remix to research in the beat of Boyle Street. Leisure Sciences, 20, 143–158.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S., & Boullier, D. (2012). The whole is always smaller than its parts: A digital test of Gabriel Tarde’s monads. British Journal of Sociology, 63, 590–615.

Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York: Penguin Press. Lincoln, Y. S. & Denzin, N. K. (1994). The fi fth moment. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.). Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 575–586). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Lincoln, Y. S. & Denzin, N. K. (2003). Turning points in qualitative research: Tying knots in a handkerchief. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Marantz Henig, R. (2008). Taking play seriously. New York Times Magazine, February 17. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/magazine/17play.html ?pagewanted=all (accessed December 1, 2012).

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Marcus, G. (1998). Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Markham, A. (2012). Fabrication as ethical practice: Qualitative inquiry in ambiguous Internet contexts. Information, Communication, & Society, 15, 334–353.

Markham, A. &. Buchanan, E. (2012). Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Version 2.0. (Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Committee.) Chicago: Association of Internet Researchers. Markham, A. (In press). Dramaturgy of digital experience. In C. Edgley (Ed.), Handbook of dramatugry. London: Ashgate Press.

Mason, J. (2011). Facet methodology: The case for an inventive research orientation. Methodological Innovations Online, 6, 75–92. Navas, E. (2006). Remix: The bond of repetition and representation. http:// remixtheory.net/?p=361 (accessed January 4, 2013).

Navas, E. (2012). Remix theory: The aesthetics of sampling. New York: Springer/ Wein Press. Nissenbaum, H. (2010). Privacy in context: Technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books.

Oldfather, P. & West, J. (1994). Qualitative research as jazz. Educational Researcher, 23, 22–26. Rambo Ronai, C. (1995). Multiple reflections of child sex abuse: An argument for a layered account. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 23, 395–426.

Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. New York: Basic Books. Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A form of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 516–529). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Shaaban, T. (2011). The Most AMAZING video on the internet #Egypt #jan25. YouTube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThvBJMzmSZI (accessed January 4, 2013). Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.

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Part II

Praxis

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Chapter 4

The Role of Indigenous Languages and Focus Groups in Qualitative Inquiry Experiences from the Global South Bekisizwe S. Ndimande

This chapter discusses the importance of Indigenous languages and focus group interviews in conducting research with communities whose first language is not English. My argument is part of a larger discourse about decolonizing research. This discourse problematizes the failure of researchers to recognize and respect the Indigenous communities’ perspectives and cultures in research (Cannella & Manuelito, 2008; Denzin et al., 2008; Iseke-Barnes, 2004; Manuelito, 2004; Mutua & Swadener, 2004; Ndimande, 2012; Smith, 1999; Swadener & Mutua, 2008). These scholars argue that researchers should disrupt colonialist tendencies at multiple levels by incorporating local languages and research methods that are acceptable in the value systems of Indigenous communities. I first discuss the importance of Indigenous languages in research that involves Indigenous communities. I argue that using Indigenous languages can elicit better and more detailed accounts from participants than when they are required to speak in their second or third language and that culturally affirming linguistic Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 85–102. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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choices have the potential to return marginalized epistemologies to the center of the research. My argument reinforces Denzin and Lincoln’s (2005) examination of the historical role of research, particularly in the colonial era, where Indigenous communities were not adequately respected by researchers and research institutions. Second, I discuss the role of focus group interviews rather than individual interviews with Indigenous participants. I argue that what participants say in focus groups is influenced by the presence of others from similar backgrounds. They support each other psychologically, understanding and sometimes amplifying each others’ answers, and they often add detail and ask relevant questions that would not be raised in an individual interview. In discussing these recommendations, I offer examples from my research with Indigenous communities in South Africa to suggest how they can affirm democratic practices in qualitative inquiry.

Indigenous Languages in Research with Indigenous Communities Interviews in qualitative inquiry require skill in eliciting in-depth responses from participants. They are most effective when participants are given an opportunity to use languages in which they are proficient. The languages used are crucial because it is through language that people formulate their thoughts (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1993). The use of Indigenous languages also situates the research within the sociocultural and political contexts of the participants. They affirm the importance of the local cultural context in research connected to Indigenous communities. Numerous scholars (e.g., Alexander, 1989; Bokamba, 2007; Darder, 2012; Dei, 2011; Hamza, 2004; Iseke-Barnes, 2004; Iseke-Barnes & Brennus, 2011; McCarty, 2009; McCarty et al., 2006; Ndimande, 2004; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1993; Nieto, 2002; Seepe, 2001) have argued that mother tongues are forms of cultural identities and they deserve recognition, preservation, and promotion in all social institutions, including research institutions. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1993) argues that Indigenous languages are our common heritage. He states:

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A world of many languages should be like a field of flowers of different colours. There is no flower which becomes more of a flower on account of its colour or its shape. All such flowers express their common “floralness” in their diverse colours and shapes … [therefore] all our languages should join in the demand for a new international economic, political, and cultural order. (p. 39)

This is a call to recognize those languages that are constantly pushed to the margins. Hamza (2004) reminds us that the conduct of research in Indigenous languages can be framed as a “decolonizing” method. She observes that the de-emphasis on the colonial language (often English) in interviews is important in interrupting the colonial and hegemonic practices in research. She condemns what she calls the “sole use of or primacy of colonial language” in research with Indigenous populations: “To encourage change, native researchers need to realize their own impact in conducting studies using their linguistic and sociocultural skills and the decision to include the ‘illiterate’ people’s perspectives about the issue tackled” (p. 132). Creating conditions for “illiterate” people’s perspective is crucial.1 Indeed, most educational research in the Global South is conducted in schools, higher education institutions, and other distant settings; few, if any, researchers go to local communities to inquire about their perspectives on issues related to schooling or social policy that affect their public institutions. Historically, public schools, higher education institutions, and other distant settings have systematically excluded Indigenous communities and marginalized their cultures. The marginalization is due, in part, to attitudes about the neighborhoods and socioeconomic conditions in which the participants live, a point I will elaborate later. Even researchers with good intentions often conduct interviews in a language foreign to the people whose lives they are researching. This can make inhabitants of local communities feel foreign to the research. Above all, it diminishes the hope of what the research can do to improve their lives and thereby reduces motivation to participate fully. Hamza’s argument is a call to understand the sociopolitical and cultural connection between

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research and the people whom the research purports to support. This is what McCarty (2009) refers to as empowering Indigenous communities through Indigenous mother tongues, repositioning their languages from the margins to the center. Let me illustrate the importance of Indigenous languages with examples from my own research with Indigenous parents in South Africa (see Ndimande, 2005). This was a qualitative study to explore the ideological beliefs and common-sense assumptions that inform the school choices of Black parents in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. South Africa has a population of approximately 51.8 million, and Gauteng is the most populous, with 12.3 million people (Statistics South Africa, 2011). It is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse provinces in South Africa. As an Indigenous South African researcher, I can speak several of the languages spoken in this province, including IsiZulu (my mother tongue), Sesotho, IsiXhosa, and IsiNdebele. I asked Indigenous parents to reflect on their hopes for the education of their children as it relates to their sociopolitical situations and their lived experiences. Many parents elaborated on their responses, linking their broader perspectives to issues I asked about. They did not hold back from presenting real concerns and issues they grappled with on a daily basis. The excerpt below is not unusual. It is an example of a parent, Mama Ntombi, 2 whose twelve-year-old daughter previously attended a formerly White-only school and now has switched back to a Black township school. In this interview, Mama Ntombi was so comfortable talking in Sesotho (translated into English in this chapter) that when asked about her hopes for her daughter’s education, she reflected also on other issues beyond the question asked: BSN: What are your hopes for your child? MAMA NTOMBI: I wish that my child could respect others and our culture. She has to have her own culture. Even if she changes [culture] I want her to know what is right because, if you observe carefully, most people now are returning to their cultures, hence people begin to question things and also to complain about things. For instance, do you remember “Dube on Monday?” BSN: No, what is it?

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MAMA NTOMBI: There is a show on South African Broadcasting Cooperation (SABC), Channel Two. In that show [Dube on Monday], someone mentioned that she would rather be a baboon than be a Shangaan.3 That statement caused a lot of pain to most of us and to the nation. The whole thing caught the national government’s attention. I have noticed that people are beginning to think about their culture. As Black people, we are lost [culturally speaking]. We are after a White culture, yet we don’t know it. This is the reason I want my daughter to be in a township school. In that school she will get to meet the very same Shangaan persons that the TV show talked so disparagingly and disdainfully about. She will also meet the Xhosa, Venda, and Pedi, you know. And when she comes home, then we can talk. We will say: “In Sepedi we do things this way. But the Shangaans do things that way.” This will enable her to accommodate those who are culturally different from the Pedis. You know, these are [our] people [the Shangaans]. We shouldn’t ridicule and mistreat them. Some day my daughter may wind up getting married to a Shangaan man, you know. They are also people, you know. She should have respect for other people. She can live with White people but she should know where she belongs.

This excerpt bears testimony to how marginalized peoples open up if researchers reach out to them in their own language, which conveys a valuing of their knowledge and their perspectives on these issues. The use of Indigenous language enabled this mother to elaborate on her thoughts with examples and give responses that revealed other issues related to the research. Let me hasten to add that although the interviews were conducted in the parents’ first language, this does not imply they could not speak English. Using Indigenous languages in research presents its own challenges. A researcher has first to translate an interview schedule that was originally created in English into Indigenous languages and later translate the responses back into English for data analysis. As Hamza (2004) points out, it is quite a challenge to do this and remain true to the original meanings of the data. Such translation probably cannot be done perfectly, but it is important to try to avoid distortions of the meanings. Researchers who do work

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with Indigenous languages must translate carefully to capture the meanings of the original responses from the participants.

Focus Groups and Indigenous Communities Fontana and Frey (2005) maintain that the term “focus group” applies to a situation in which the researcher asks specific questions after having completed considerable research on the topic. In other words, a focus group is enhanced by the researcher’s knowledge of the context in which the participants live and their experiences in it. The focus group is appropriate for interviewing Indigenous communities because it straddles the line between formal and informal interviewing (Fontana & Frey, 2005). Because a focus group is informal, participants may feel more comfortable, may be better able to recall specific examples of pertinent issues, and may stimulate others to tell of experiences that they otherwise might not have recalled or have been willing to describe. The informal character of a focus group discussion has a strong influence on it. And, of course, the researcher’s use of the Indigenous languages of the group adds to the informality. Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2005) highlight the critical contribution of focus groups to research that seeks to understand real world problems and inequalities in people’s lives. They say that within the critical tradition, “focus groups are unique and important formations of collective inquiry where theory, research, pedagogy and politics converge” (p. 888). Focus groups are not simply a neutral method of collecting data; rather, they are critical methods to address concerns about social justice issues and inequalities in local and/or marginalized communities. The conversations that emerge from focus groups are not simply words responding to questions but a representation of the world in which the participants live (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005). A social justice lens in qualitative inquiry facilitates a joint effort and commitment between the researcher and participants to change practices because societal and global concerns should be at the core of critical inquiry (Charmaz, 2005). Fontana and Frey (2005) state: The new empathetic approaches take an ethical stance in favor of the individual or groups being studied. The interviewer becomes

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an advocate and partner in the study, hoping to be able to use the results to advocate social policies and ameliorate the conditions of the interviewee. (p. 696)

Being seen as an ally and advocate for equity and being willing to use the results to address concerns of social justice in people’s oppressive conditions can shape the focus group in a positive manner. How participants respond to questions in focus group interviews is influenced by the extent to which they are comfortable with the researcher’s willingness to connect to their lived experiences. The following is an example of this from my study.

Performing Social Justice Parents in these focus group interviews seemed to be comfortable sharing their concerns and the problems their children face in White schools. The groups provided a space for them to talk, supporting each other’s experiences and sharing specific things that happen to their children in these schools. They were not simply describing events but taking positions to the hegemonic nature of these experiences and hoping for social justice to prevail. I asked parents what they regarded as bad experiences of their children in desegregated schools. All parents agreed there was racism, discrimination, and segregation, and this is how they narrated their experiences, talking in turns: MAMA SIPHIWE: I remember one time my child told me they got into a fight with White children. You know what happened? The principal and the school disciplinary committee disciplined all the Black children, but none of the White children. It was claimed that Black children started the fight. So, racism is still rife [in those schools]. MAMA MAPULE: I wanted to say that when they [Black children] get punished we are not sure if they were indeed in the wrong or if it was the other [White] children. You can’t get both stories. All that you get is a notice that your child will be detained, no elaboration or proof about your child doing something wrong. It might mean that the other child started the whole thing, yet it is your child who gets punished. Really you don’t know what has been going on in that classroom—you have Black children and

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White children in a classroom. It has occurred to me that Black children tend to be punished most. When I asked my daughter about who else got punished with her, she mentioned names of Black children only. MAMA MSITHINI: [They] still discriminate. One of my children attended a White school in Pretoria and she noticed that most White children get stars in their homework books. Black children did not. My child then asked the teacher why she gave more stars to White children and less to Black students since they [Black students] did as well. The teacher answered that it was because Black children are not leaders, they won’t be leaders, therefore they don’t deserve stars. MAMA ZONDO: [Our] children change classrooms. They have two minutes only to move from one class to another. If a White child comes in about three minutes, the teacher would accept the apology. However, if a Black child comes in one minute late, the teacher will keep them outside the classroom for that entire lesson, hence our children miss some lessons. This means we really experience racism through most school practices. MAMA LUTHULI: My child complains about racism. While they accept Black students, they are not treated the same as Whites. My son complains about one of their head teachers who makes remarks such as: “You coloured boy” or “You black girl” when referring to our children. I think this is problematic. … I once called the principal up and complained about this. She told me that she would attend to it. This teacher’s remarks are less racist now. You see, if a coloured or a Black child did something wrong, that is when you hear the noise, but there won’t be any if a White child did a wrong thing. MAMA THANDEKA: Let me cite an example of racism in these schools. There is this school, I won’t mention its name. … [They] used to call parents’ meetings. However, the parent meetings were called on different days for different parents. The principal would call a meeting for Black parents today and the next day another meeting for White parents. So it was just segregated. There was not even a single complaint from the school governing

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body. … You know, even if you went to the principal and talked to him about this, he would just tell you that it has been like this from the beginning

In this example, the parents seem to be supporting and stimulating each other to share their experiences, which appear to be similar. They felt free to talk about their children’s difficult experiences with schools. While these issues could be raised in an individual interview, it is unlikely that they would stimulate narratives and examples in such detail.

Indigenous Languages and Focus Groups as a Decolonizing Agenda Smith (1999) and numerous others (e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Denzin et al., 2008; Manuelito, 2004; McCarty et al., 2006; Mutua & Swadener, 2004; Rogers & Swadener, 1999; Swadener, 2000; Swadener & Mutua, 2008) have reminded us that decolonizing approaches in research are culturally affirming and can help us (re)position marginalized peoples and their epistemologies to the center. The incorporation of Indigenous languages in focus groups that involve Indigenous participants is part of the larger decolonizing agenda in qualitative inquiry. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) provides provocative thoughts on how to engage in social research without appropriating and/or marginalizing the knowledges and cultures of Indigenous communities. Defining decolonization, Smith states: “Decolonization is a process which engages with imperialism and colonialism at multiple levels. For researchers, one of those levels is concerned with having a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values which inform research practice” (p. 20). For Smith (1999), decolonizing approaches challenge the relentless wave of exploration, discovery, exploitation, and appropriation in research in late-modern and late-colonial contexts. She continues: The methodologies and methods of research, the theories that inform them, the questions which they generate and the writing styles they employ, all become significant acts which need to be considered carefully and critically before being applied. In other

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words, they need to be “decolonized.” Decolonization, however, does not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all theory or research or Western knowledge. Rather, it is about centering our [Indigenous] concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our [Indigenous] own perspectives and for our [Indigenous] own purposes. (p. 39)

Mutua and Swadener (2004) express similar ideas about research in cross-cultural contexts. They argue that traditional research often serves a colonizing agenda and/or reproduces colonizing power relationships. The attempt to decolonize one’s research not only shows solidarity with local communities, colleagues, and social movements, it also privileges those whose epistemologies have been marginalized and colonized. Historically, the ideas of marginalized communities about social issues were neither solicited nor included. Decolonizing research seeks to change this practice. Swadener (2000) argues that qualitative inquiry should not treat communities as “data plantations,” an act that benefits the researcher’s interests at the expense of research participants. If the participants are treated as data plantations, the act itself invokes the colonizing character of Western colonial research. A decolonizing approach is one that identifies with participants’ concerns, needs, and values and allows them interaction as equal partners. The persistent binary discourse of “us and them,” especially in the media, the divide between communities that are normalized and those that aren’t, is one of the issues that qualitative inquiry has to address. Th is is also a racialized discourse because of the still segregated nature of Indigenous communities’ neighborhoods. The colonialist discourse of the media has created images of such neighborhoods as being problematic and unsafe. Phrases such as “Don’t go there,” “The streets are chaotic and dangerous,” “They are barbaric,” “They are lazy and immoral” or “They have HIV/AIDS” confi rm the racial divide and the “Othering” of Indigenous neighborhoods. Manuelito (2004) reminds us that describing a neighborhood as chaotic or as deviant is a direct description of people who live in those areas. Th is

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is one reason why it is so important to engage the participants in their own languages. Manuelito (2004) emphasizes the importance of respect for Indigenous communities. She argues that the concept of respect is unique within Indigenous communities. She asks: “Did you bring food to the interview?” “Were you patient with participants?” “Were the questions respectful of the participants?” “Did you take your shoes off when you entered the house?” These are the kinds of considerations and practices that need to be observed by a researcher working within this discourse. In focus groups, it is important to listen with patience and avoid cutting off participants’ responses, even when they seemed to be off-topic. This is not an acceptable norm in most cultures, especially within Indigenous communities. Displays of sincerity and respect are important, even when participants’ responses relate less to the actual research questions. Taking the principles of decolonizing research seriously, researchers should not enter communities with the aim of appropriating their thoughts, experiences, personal life stories, and their daily struggles. Instead, they should establish a sociocultural understanding that connects the world of academic research with the world of the marginalized communities. Researchers must be concerned about the participants’ lived experiences and use the research to improve their lives. This could begin a conversation about the real issues that impact marginalized communities. Research itself has too often been a colonizing act (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Grande, 2000; Mutua & Swadener, 2004; Smith, 1999; Soto, 2004). Denzin and Lincoln (2005) argue that research can carry foreign practices, cultural appropriation, and epistemological hegemony. This has been true in the social science field for many years, especially in ethnographic research. Too often, the chief purpose of research, particularly in the anthropological tradition, has been to use data gathered for the advantage of the researcher, not the participants. According to Denzin and Lincoln (2005), ethnographic research in the early 1900s was largely conducted by foreigners, mostly White settlers, who observed the habits and customs of the Other. They remind us that:

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Qualitative research in sociology and anthropology [ethnography] was “born out of concern to understand the “other” … this “other” was the exotic Other, a primitive, nonwhite person from a foreign culture judged to be less civilized than ours. Of course there were colonialists long before there were anthropologists and ethnographers. Nonetheless, there would be no colonial, and now no neocolonial, history were it not for this investigative mentality that turned the dark-skinned Other into the object of the ethnographer’s gaze. (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 2)

While I completely agree with this assertion, I also consider Smith’s (1999) argument that we should not single out anthropology over other disciplines as representative of what colonialist research has done to Indigenous peoples. She says: “Western disciplines are as much implicated in each other as they are in imperialism. Some, such as anthropology, made the study of us [Indigenous peoples] into ‘their’ science, others were employed in the practices of imperialism in less direct but far more devastating ways” (p. 11).

How Far Has Qualitative Inquiry Reached Postcoloniality? A decolonizing agenda has been hindered by Othering the Global South in the postcolonial era (Soto, 2004). Soto argues that this Othering is complex and is an integral part of the daily lives of those being “Othered.” According to Soto: For most scholars of color and their allies we are the “colonized,” feeling the consequences of the Eurocentric, scientifically driven epistemologies in which issues of power and voice are drowned by the powerful “majority” players reflecting the “master’s ideology.” For us, there is no postcolonial, as we live our daily realities in suffocating spaces forbidding our perspectives, our creativity, and our wisdom. (p. ix; emphasis in the original) Soto’s argument points to struggles that should have been resolved in a postcolonial era. According to Mutua and Swadener (2004), “It is nearly impossible, given the contested issues it embodies, to articulate what postcoloniality is, what seems more possible is the articulation of what it is not” (p. 8; emphases in original). It is also important that we understand that postcoloniality is not the

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equivalent of “after” colonialism (McLeod, 2000). Postcoloniality does not suggest that the values and practices of the colonial era are now gone, nor does it suggest that a new radical discourse has been established to address the problems of colonialism. Mutua and Swadener (2004) state that the term “postcoloniality” has allowed the masking of material histories of violence that Indigenous people faced under colonialism and continue to face under neocolonialism. The contradictions and tensions that hinder decolonizing projects are inherent in the current social policies implemented in countries across the globe, particularly in education. I am referring to the increasing marketization and neoliberalization of the education sphere (Apple, 2001; Lauder & Hughes, 1999; Lubienski, 2008; Ndimande, 2010; Zeichner & Ndimande, 2008), which are part of the persistence of neocolonial patterns. For instance, policies that ask parents to send their children to schools outside their communities to receive a better education typically have detrimental effects on the public good. A decolonizing approach should directly address such neoliberal policies. Markets in education do not promote Indigenous languages nor do they seek to address social inequalities. As Miron (2008) puts it, neoliberalism has spawned a counter-narrative to the critical discussion of the oppressed because it masks issues of inequalities, especially of race. Denzin (2005) similarly argues that neoliberal political economies turn knowledge about Indigenous community into a commodity and drive research toward a Western standard regulated by positivism. Researchers, argues Denzin, should resist this mainstream discourse by incorporating a culturally relevant method that connects research to the local communities. I do not, however, want to paint an overly glum picture. Partial victories have been made. Over the years, qualitative research has evolved from its emphasis on the anthropologist’s ethnographic gaze into more progressive and collaborative approaches. It has appeared in many different incarnations, such as structural feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, the neo-Marxist tradition, and the decolonizing methods that I have discussed in this chapter. There has been notable progress in decolonizing research internationally, especially since the ground-breaking work of Linda Tuhiwai

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Smith in 1999. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have used Smith’s work to interrupt the dominant discourse in educational research. For instance, in Canada, Iseke-Barnes and Brennus (2011) collaborate directly with Indigenous communities, engaging their lived experiences in the colonial past to help nurture the understanding of cultural traditions, spiritual healing practices, and language education. Romero-Little et al. (2011) have conducted collaborative research with Indigenous communities in the southwestern United States. My own research in post-apartheid South Africa (Ndimande, 2005) collaborates with Indigenous parents about issues that affect their children in schools, expressing themselves in mother tongues and Indigenous knowledges. In Kenya, Mutua and Swadener (2012) have done collaborative research with Indigenous communities. In the United States, scholars have called for the inclusion of different cultural backgrounds and recognition of the marginalized epistemologies in the critical tradition (Denzin, 2005; Kincheloe, 2007; McLaren, 1997). Asking how far qualitative inquiry has reached postcoloniality can help researchers interrogate what it is we know and who benefits from that knowledge (Rogers & Swadener, 1999). Swadener and Mutua say “Decolonizing research is a messy, complex, and perhaps impossible endeavor … [but] a project worth pursuing, in solidarity with local colleagues and [social justice] movements” (2008, p. 36). The task, for all of us, is to interrogate all hegemonic tendencies in qualitative inquiry so we can bring all communities to the center, especially those who are still on the margins.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to Michael Parsons for elaborate feedback on this chapter. I am also grateful to the voices of the parents in the text. I thank Norman Denzin and Michael Giardina for encouraging me to contribute to this volume.

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Notes 1. Often, Indigenous peoples who are not educated in Western education are labeled illiterate. Th is is a stereotype that has to be challenged. There are many other ways of knowing and of being literate outside Western education discourse. 2. Th is is a pseudonym.

3. The Shangaan nation is one of the nine ethnic nations in South Africa.

References Alexander, N. (1989). Language policy and national unity in South Africa/Azania. Cape Town: Buchu Books. Apple, M. W. (2001). Educating the “right” way: Markets, standards, God, and inequalities. New York: Routledge. Bokamba, E. G. (2007). Arguments for multilingual policies in public domains in Africa. In E. A. Anchimbe (Ed.), Linguistic identities in postcolonial multilingual spaces (pp. 27–65). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Cannella, G. S. & Manuelito, K. D. (2008). Feminisms from unthought locations: Indigenous worldviews, marginalized feminisms, and revisioning an anticolonial social science. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 45–59). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Charmaz, K. (2005). Grounded theory in the 21st century: Applications for advanced social justice studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 507–535). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Darder, A. (2012). Culture and power in the classroom: Educational foundations for the schooling of bicultural students. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Dei, G. J. S. (Ed.). (2011). Introduction. In Indigenous philosophies and critical education: A reader (pp. 1–13). New York: Peter Lang.

Denzin, N. K. (2005). Emancipatory discourses and the ethics and politics of interpretation. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 933–958). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 1–32). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Smith, L. T. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Fontana, A. & Frey, J. H. (2005). The interview: From neutral stance to political involvement. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rded., pp. 695–727). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Grande, S. (2000). American Indian identity and intellectualism: The quest for a new red pedagogy. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13, 343–360.

Hamza, H. M. (2004). Decolonizing research on gender disparity in education in Niger: Complex of language, culture, and homecoming. In K. Mutua & B. B. Swadener (Eds.), Decolonizing research in cross-cultural contexts: Critical personal narratives (pp. 123–134). Albany: SUNY Press.

Iseke-Barnes, J. (2004). Politics and power of languages: Indigenous resistance to colonizing experiences of language dominance. Journal of Thought, 39, 45–81. Iseke-Barnes, J. & Brennus, B. (2011). Learning life lessons from Indigenous storytelling with Tom McCallum. In G. J. S. Dei (Ed.), Indigenous philosophies and critical education (pp. 245–261). New York: Peter Lang.

Kamberelis, G. & Dimitriadis, G. (2005). Focus groups: Strategic articulations of pedagogy, politics, and inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 887–907). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kincheloe, J. L. (2007). Critical pedagogy in the twenty-fi rst century: Evolution for survival. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? (pp. 9–42). New York: Peter Lang. Lauder, H. & Hughes, D. (1999). Trading in futures: Why markets in education don’t work. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Lubienski, C. (2008). The politics of parental choice: Theory and evidence on quality information. In W. Feinberg & C. Lubienski (Eds.), School choice policies and outcomes: Empirical and philosophical perspectives (pp. 99–119). Albany: SUNY Press. Manuelito, K. (2004). An Indigenous perspective on self-determination. Paper presented at the Indigenous Perspectives of Educational Research and Schooling in Global Context, Distinguished Scholar Colloquia, Arizona State University, Tempe, April 8. McCarty, T. L. (2009). Empowering Indigenous languages—What can be learned from Native American experiences? In T. Skutnabb-Kangas, R. Phillipson, A. K. Mohanty, & M. Panda (Eds.), Social justice through multilingual education (pp. 125–139). Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters. McCarty, T. L., Romero, M. E., & Zepeda, O. (2006). Reclaiming the gift: Indigenous youth counter-narratives on Native language loss and revitalization. American Indian Quarterly, 30, 28–48. McLaren, P. (1997). Revolutionary multiculturalism: Pedagogies of dissent for the new millennium. Boulder, CO: Westview.

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McLeod, J. (2000). Beginning post-colonialism. New York: St. Martin.

Miron, L. (2008). Transnational, national, and Indigenous racial subjects: Moving from critical discourse to practice. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 547–561). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mutua, K. N. & Swadener, B. B. (Eds.). (2004). Decolonizing research in crosscultural contexts: Critical personal narratives. Albany: SUNY Press.

Mutua, K. N. & Swadener, B. B. (2012). Semiotics of dis/ability in Kenya: The convergence of culture and postcoloniality. Paper presented at the 20th Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education Conference, State College, Pennsylvania, November 7.

Ndimande, B. S. (2004). [Re]Anglicizing the kids: Contradictions of classroom discourse in post-apartheid South Africa. In N. K. Mutua & B. B. Swadener (Eds.), Decolonizing research in cross-cultural contexts: Critical personal narratives (pp. 197–214). Albany: SUNY Press. Ndimande, B. S. (2005). Cows and goats no longer count as inheritances: The politics of school “choice” in post-apartheid South Africa. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ndimande, B. S. (2010). Neoliberalism and teacher struggles in post-apartheid public schools. In R. Verma (Ed.), Be the change: Teacher, activist, global citizen (pp. 275–288). New York: Peter Lang. Ndimande, B. S. (2012). Decolonizing research in post-apartheid South Africa: The politics of methodology, Qualitative Inquiry, 18, 215–226.

Ngugi wa Th iong’o. (1993). Moving the center: The struggle for cultural freedoms. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Nieto, S. (2002). Language, culture, and teaching: Critical perspectives for a new century. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Rogers, L. J. & Swadener, B. B. (1999). Reframing the “field.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 30, 436–440.

Romero-Little, M. E., Ortiz, S. J., McCarty, T., with Chen, R. (2011). Indigenous languages across the generations: Strengthening families and communities. Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Indian Education.

Seepe, S. (2001). We should talk the talk of Africa: Nature’s laws are not written in English. Africa News. http://www.lexisnexis.com (accessed November 23, 2011).

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press.

Soto, D. L. (2004). Foreword: Decolonizing research in cross-cultural contexts: Issues of voice and power. In N. K. Mutua & B. B. Swadener (Eds.), Decolonizing research in cross-cultural contexts: Critical personal narratives (pp. ix–xi). Albany: SUNY Press.

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Statistics South Africa. (2011). Census 2011—census in brief. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa.

Swadener, B. B. (2000). Problematizing “decolonizing research” in cross-cultural contexts. Paper presented at the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education Research, Theory and Practice around the World Conference, Brisbane, Australia, July 12. Swadener, B. B. & Mutua, K. (2008). Decolonizing performances: Deconstructing the global postcolonial. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.). Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 31–43). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zeichner, K. M. & Ndimande, B. S. (2008). Contradictions and tensions in the place of teachers in educational reform: Reflections on teacher preparation in the USA and Namibia. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 14, 331–343.

Chapter 5

On a Bead and a Prayer The Importance of (Re)membering African Womanhood in the Diaspora1 Cynthia B. Dillard (Nana Mansa II of Mpeasem, Ghana, West Africa)

You see this basket holds beads of many sorts and sizes, as delicate as drops of water. Some more complex and intricate than any spider’s design. I collect them as our daughters enter this village and deposit their waist beads at death’s gate. If you look closely you can discern within each bead the hues of blues; this woman’s birth, that one’s budding of breasts; the first blood, the sacrament of sex, childbearing, old age, death. Feel their surfaces, the ridges of happiness and hollows of heartbreaks. Hear in them as they meet each other, the sound of living waters. —Jackson-Opoku (1997, p. 11)

In her award-winning book, The River where Blood Is Born, Sandra Jackson-Opoku uses beadwork to describe the act of stringing together the rich history and memory of African people: of time and location, of important moments and rites of passage, of birth, death and the spiritual nature of experience and culture. The Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 103–114. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Figure 5.1. Handmade beads

notion of beadwork—both literally and as a metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)—is useful in describing the power and central place of ritual and traditions for African people. I have come to see handmade beads (like the strand seen in Figure 5.1) as containers and symbols of cultural memory, helpful in examining questions of identity, spirituality, knowledge, subjectivities, and complexity of African cultural production. As such, there are several characteristics of beads that are important to marshalling beads as a metaphor for cultural memory.2 First, like cultural memory, beads are also cultural, imbued with deep and sacred meanings to the wearer and of the beads themselves as adornments. They are also relatively small, which aids in their movement and influence from culture to culture. However, each bead tells a deeper story of the culture and the history of the people who created it, the relationships between peoples, and how it traveled from place to place. As containers of memory, they are a beautiful (re)3 minder of the cultural nature of life all over the world. Second, beads, like cultural memories are multisensory: They are containers of memory that are embodied, that engage, body, mind, and spirit. In other words, like memory, you can hear, touch, see, smell, taste, and feel them in and with the body.

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For African-ascendant women, they represent what Oyewumi (2004) describes as our world sense. The distinction here is that the European notion of worldview is too narrow, not taking into account the multiplicity of ways of knowing beyond what can be seen (i.e., world “view”). Within African ways of knowing, Oyewumi argues one knows not only through what one can see, but also through what one hears, touches, feels, and intuits, taking into account the spiritual nature of our senses, the evidence of things unseen. Third, beads as containers of memory can unite and identify a group but can also distinguish the role of the wearer (e.g., chiefs, queens, etc.). Fourth, as bearers of cultural memories, beads can be useful, for example, in measuring and counting time, space, weight, like an abacus or an Ashanti brass piece. Fifth, beads as containers of memory are spiritual, often used for prayers and protection (in Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Catholic spiritual traditions, for example). Finally, beads are art and are also used to create art: Like memories, they are both individual and collective. And like African feminist notions of beauty (see Dillard, 2012), beads contain their own history and mystery: They are beauty and art on their own terms. Together, they create the art of the bead, something that we can treasure, love, and pass on to others. As Madam Felicia Ayertey says: “The bead is constant always. It is an inheritance from our fathers and the children should learn that” (quoted in Wilson, 2003, p. 89). Beads as containers of cultural memory can also describe the spiritual location of memory and the multiple locations of (re)membering ritual and tradition for African people in diaspora. Many scholars have described the complexities of fragmentation, dislocation, and the challenges of living African heritage within and against our connected and collective diasporic locations (Busia, 1989; Dillard, 2006; DuBois, 1986; Hall, 1999; King, 2005; Marshall, 1984). Equally important, however, is to examine those memories and traditions that hold culture together. When creating a strand of beads, a person must have something on which to place and string the beads, often silken thread, cord, sinew, elastic, or chain.

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But regardless of the “thread,” without it, the beads remain simply unconnected raw material. Separate. Individual. Fragmented. Often able to simply roll away. So, it stands to reason that if we envision beads as seemingly individual containers of memory, the more beads we (re)member (i.e., gather and put together, in relation to/with one another), the more beautiful, full, and expansive might be our collective strand, our collective memory. One might think of the material that holds these beads of memory together as ritual, a central thread or activity woven across locations and histories and through time, ripe with the wisdom to (re)member ourselves and our work on this human journey. Ritual, as a thread for (re)membering within African community [is] culturally both religious and social in origins and purpose. It keeps the whole community of the living and the dead united and keeps all the forces of life in harmony for another season. The ancestors are re-membered for their continuing protection, and failing to keep their memory alive leads to the destruction of the community. … [They] are the physical representation of those metaphysical silken threads … [making] the link across waters and boundaries of generation and time. (Busia, 1989, 208–210) Further, ritual is “the yardstick by which people measure their state of connection with the hidden ancestral realm” (Jackson-Opoku, 1997, p. 12). Here, ritual does not simply refer to a particular or singular act like saying a prayer, participating in a sacrifice, or mysteriously speaking in tongues: That is too often the common understanding in contemporary popular culture. Rather, from an African spiritual perspective, it describes the necessity of a deeper recognition of everyday acts as life affi rming, lived in honor of the inheritance of the ancestors and the legacy of which we are a part as African-ascendant people. So, while ritual may certainly include offering prayer, engaging in meditation, eating together, or other redemptive acts, I use it here to describe a way of living that is fundamentally about making space for consistent recognition of our cultural inheritance as African people. Not superfluously, but consciously. Paule Marshall provides a poignant example in her description of the protagonist Avey’s painful (re)cognition of what she and her

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husband Jay lost in succumbing to the seduction to forget the rituals and celebrations that had provided them with a sense of African American culture, of their own power in a hostile and racist world, and of the essence of their cultural inheritance, their “beads”: Something in those small rites, an ethos they held in common, had reached back beyond her life and beyond Jay’s to join them to the vast unknown lineage that had made their being possible. And this link, these connections, heard in the music and in the praisesongs of a Sunday: “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were/young, …” had both protected them and put them in possession of a kind of power. All this had passed from their lives without their hardly noticing. … Too much! They had behaved, she and Jay, as if there had been nothing about them worth honoring. (Marshall, 1984, 137, 139; emphases in the original). Seen from an endarkened feminist space, a ritual approach to our teaching and research practice would also honor the wisdom, spirituality, and critical interventions of transnational Black women’s ways of knowing and being in cultural and collective memory, stringing the spiritual and the material beads of African women together, from African continent to diaspora and back again. Rituals would include those that affirm a consciousness of the realm of the spirit in our everyday lives, those that recognize such consciousness as a transformative force in research and teaching work, and those that lift up the work as sacred, as worthy of being held with reverence as it is done (Dillard & Okpalaoka, 2011). And, fundamentally, teaching and (re)search that affirms the place of ritual for African-ascendant people would centrally be about finding “the answers to the questions of origins before [we] can return home [to ourselves]” (Busia, 1989, p. 205). The challenge of living and reading the African Diaspora is not an easy one: Our beads and our rituals have been lost, stolen, (re)named, (re)appropriated, buried, and crushed without regard under the boots of many. They have been left out, torn asunder. They are sometimes difficult to (re)cognize, even for African people ourselves. What would it take to read the Diaspora, to (re)search through our memories of rituals, questions of identity, place, and sacred knowledge of African traditions?

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I turn again to Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1984) as an example of and tribute to the ritualized (re)membering of an African American woman. This text is a potential and powerful road map we might follow in the process of (re)membering ourselves, as African ascendants. In the book, as Avey (re)members, through uncovering and arduously bringing to meaning and consciousness what she’s forgotten, she symbolically (re)verses the journey of the transatlantic slave trade and its consequent diaspora to one that ends in Africa (vs. in the Americas). This (re)turn to consciousness—through her encounters with various rituals, songs, dances, sights, and experiences spanning locations in the United States and the Caribbean (re)invests Africa with worth and meaning to Avey: The process (re)turns to her some of the African cultural beads that she has tried desperately throughout her life to take off, to throw aside, to be seduced not to wear. I discuss this work of fiction to make an important point: To see one’s self as African can (re)turn to our consciousness both memories and rituals of personal and collective community for which we might more productively envision, read, and (re)produce cultural identities and inheritances as African-ascendant women in new ways. These stories are production of African culture, the stringing together of old and new beads to create something new yet again. Drawing on fragments of tradition in this process, we might be able to interpret and to tell new and meaningful stories of Africa, the African, of the “fact of Blackness” (Fanon, 1967, p. 109), of the answer to the question “What is Africa is to me?” (Soyinka, 1999, p. 145). Busia (1989) says this: Storytelling, including the telling of [our] own story… in progress … must be undertaken within a cultural [and spiritual] context, a context that includes, as indexes in the composition of [the] story, aspects such as dress, food, dance and formal and informal ritual, in addition to the words themselves. It is not only the story itself which has meaning, but the circumstances of its telling. (p. 200) For the teacher or researcher engaged in ritualizing the methods and practices that we use, Busia’s words above characterize an endarkened feminist framework involving several engagements

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for both ourselves and our students (Dillard, 2008). First, we must be drawn into and conscious of the place of spirit, the inner place in our lives where spirit resides. Second, we must be engaged with/in relevant cultural rituals, people, spaces, and places (in this case, of Africa and its diaspora) in intimate and authentic ways. Finally, we must be open to being transformed by all that is encountered and (re)cognize such encounters as spiritually guided and purposeful, with the potential to expand our vision and being. Such engagements will certainly expose us to stories not our own, that may sometimes even seem incredible to our minds and hearts. However, such engagement requires us to bear witness to both beads and threads, memories and rituals, strange and familiar, new and old, maybe all at once. But these beads are wise, they come to teach us lessons. For “when a daughter makes a conscious effort to connect with our wisdom, that is when an ancestor mother must reach out a helping hand” (Jackson-Opoku, 1997, p. 227; emphasis in the original).

(Re)Membering Our Beads, Affirming Our Memories: Sankofa Is Our Redemption Song The beaded strand seen in Figure 5.1 is named Sankofa, Our Redemption Song and it is my prayer to the ancestors: Those who endured the cruel experiences of capture and enslavement in Africa, who survived the horrors of the Middle Passage, withstood the brutalities of slavery, endured the state-sponsored terrorism of lynching and massacre on diasporic shores, and have lived and continue to live through the indignities that have been the experiences of being Black in America. And as an ascendant of African people, these experiences run through my blood and the blood of every person of African ascent in the Diaspora as well as on the continent of Africa today. Th is is our legacy, the gift that the ancestors gave to us. In the words of the Akan people of Ghana, it is our duty to sankofa: To return and fetch what we need of the strength, courage, and wisdom of these ancestors and bring it forward to address the challenges of our lives in these times. As Bob Marley so often reminded us: Sankofa is our redemption song.

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Turquoise and red beads, designed by my sister friend Edna in the Krobos tradition of bead-making in Ghana, anchor this strand. There are a total of eight groups of five anchor beads, or forty beads. This is a very spiritually significant number, especially in the Christian tradition. It is also said to be the number of days that it takes, once a commitment or goal is made, for that commitment to truly become a part of you, to embrace the strength and courage to work through new experiences and to change old ones that no longer serve your highest purpose. Powerful transformations can and do happen in forty days. I often use this number in prayer beads, as it is an important reminder of the sort of commitment that it takes to embrace the difficult changes that come suddenly to our lives. Such was the case of our ancestors who were torn from their lands and families in Africa and whose blood was shed in that brutality. In the miles and miles that our ancestors walked through the bush in shackles. Of those who died in the slave dungeons along the west coast of Africa. Of their blood shed in the Middle Passage from disease, insurrections, and attack. Of that also shed in the New World on plantations, from the ends of lynching ropes, in civil rights movements, in governmental experiments. Such horror is hard to fathom. On this shawl, it is (re)presented by four pairs of new and old “blood” beads. The old dark glass beads from Ghana are the blood of the families and loved ones who have witnessed and experienced our trials as Black people. Here, it is important to (re)cognize that the continent of Africa suffered the loss of its children and is still suffering those losses today. New red glass beads (from India) (re)present the new blood of African people that is always influenced by the old: There is no African American without the African. And, in addition to creating what we know as an African Diaspora, this migration and mixing (often forced through rape, and after slavery, in our partnering with peoples of different ethnicities and cultural heritages), created a new Black people in the Western world (i.e., the African Canadian, the African American, the African Brazilian, etc.). These New World Africans are represented by the twelve black/white/and red layered beads, symbolizing our complexities and layeredness, often imperfect but always attached to Africa by both blood and Blackness. And I choose a dozen in reference also

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to the dozens, one of the many manifestations of African understandings transformed and brought forward in the New World. We can point to other transformations, echoes of the voices of the ancestors: jazz, gumbo, African American vernacular English, braiding and other hairstyles. Sankofa is always in us. Whether we are conscious of ourselves as connected to Africa or not, we engage in “going back to fetch” African understandings and ways of being as often as we take a breath. African people have always had an important relationship with the natural world, that is, with the earth, sea, sky, sun, mountains, and animals of the earth. And understanding the wisdom of those relationships, from an African standpoint, is part of our sankofa. Four bright turquoise glass beads from India represent the sea and our understanding of the living spirit of the sea: It gives and supports life, and, in the case of many of our ancestors who perished in the Middle Passage, it supports and cradles their bones, a watery grave as their final resting place. And bones and shells are a strong part of Sankofa, Our Redemption Song. There are three fish bones. There is a cowry shell (or cedie in Twi) that I picked up on the seashore in Ghana. The modern-day currency in Ghana is named the cedi, as the same cowry shell was used as the currency in ancient times. These shells are also used as offerings to spirits when one desires the energy of the sea. Another seashell from the Ghana shores, one that resembles a bone, is also a part of the strand. I love this shell, as it is through its difficult tumblings, being pulled and tugged along the ocean bottom that it became beautiful. This is the story of Black people everywhere! Finally, there are two batiked bone beads made in Kenya. The large round one (re)presents the continent of Africa. The smaller one (re)presents the idea of Pan-Africanism and the attempts by at least some of our people and leaders to (re)cognize the importance of sankofa. When you look carefully at this bead, you’ll see the Ghanaian adinkra symbol, Gye Nyame, meaning “One God.” The full-circle nature of Pan-Africanism is clear through this particular bead: Made in Kenya, bearing witness to a language system and culture in Ghana, West Africa, purchased in a store

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in Columbus, Ohio, and now to travel to wherever the wearer of this shawl is going. There are eight turquoise glass beads from Ghana that (re)present the sky. I believe (and stories have told us) that it was through our ancestors’ connections to God’s creations (the sea, stars, sun, sky, etc.) that they were able to keep their faith: in the Creator, in spirit, in each other, in humanity, in connections to home that had been broken. One bright gold bead represents the sun. It is placed at the neck of the strand. And while it may often be covered by a collar or by someone’s hair, it is still always present. These are the lessons that carried the ancestors through their trials and tribulations and from which we can draw inspiration and hope today. Finally, there are healing stones on this piece. I believe that engaging in our own versions of sankofa can be healing practices for Africans in the Diaspora. Silver is a feminine metal, very useful for introspection, reflection, and (re)membering. And “we are the daughters of those women who chose to survive,” as Julie Dash says in her landmark film Daughters of the Dust (1991). There is a sterling silver ankh (re)presenting life and womanhood. It is in honor of the mothers and sisters of who have perished in the New World, in Africa, and in various versions of continued oppressions of Black women all over the globe. There is also one lone African trade bead on this strand. While not listed in any book on gemstones and metals, these trade beads are healing, as they find their way to prayer work. Having been used as trading pieces for goods and later traded for African people in the transatlantic slave trade, I feel particularly healed to (re)cover these beads that carry the cries and voices of the ancestors, and to (re)member them in the work of collecting our beads. There is a lava stone bead and an ortho cerus fossil, reminders of the ancient nature of wisdom. There are two faceted quartz beads used to heal and align the spiritual and emotional body. These beads also (re)mind us of the sparkle of the sea, something that always heals, when time is allowed for deeply being in its gaze. There are three clear Ghana glass beads (re)minding us of the way that our ancestors (re)cognized the energy of spirit in everything, including what we see today as inanimate objects. There is one large agate crystal rock bead, the “God” bead of

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the strand. Th is bead is also placed near the heart: That is where the ancestors must have carried their faith in Spirit, given the traumas they’d endured. It is also where African people must place our faith today. Agates are often used for clearing and grounding. The threehole red agate at the bottom of Sankofa, Our Redemption Song is used to calm and stabilize emotions. We must (re)member our purposes and be about the work of fulfilling them! The spotted agate disc on the other side of the strand is used to cleanse and clear our auras. It can act as a magnet for negative energy, cleansing and transforming that negative energy into something positive. It reminds us that the ancestors’ voices whisper to us often: “Sankofa is your redemption song.” And they will know that we’ve heard them by our (re)membering who we are and whose we are. Let it be so.

Notes 1. Th is chapter is a slightly revised version of Dillard (2012).

2. The following summary of the characteristics of beads is adapted with permission from a lecture by Joyce Griffiths, former owner of Byzantium Beads in Columbus, Ohio. While I’ve added some embellishments, her initial framework helped me think about the importance of beads and bead-making in the world.

3. Often in academic discourse, we use the prefi x “re” in a casual, near indifferent acknowledgment of its true meaning. When preceding a word, “re” literally means to do or perform again. Against the continued subjugation of African culture and knowledge and in honor of the ancient and historical wisdom of African people, I have chosen to place the (re) in parentheses, as its use is epistemic: It has the ability to powerfully change the way that that we think and enact the relationship between thought, word, and action in the formation of identity generally and Black identity more particularly.

References Busia, A. (1989). What is your nation? Reconnecting Africa and her diaspora through Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the widow. In C. Wall (Ed.), Changing our own words: Essays on criticism, theory, and writing by Black women (pp. 196–212). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Dash, J. (Producer/Director). (1991). Daughters of the dust [motion picture]. Savannah, GA: Geechee Girls Productions.

Dillard, C. B. (2006). On spiritual strivings: Transforming an African American woman’s academic life. Albany: SUNY Press. Dillard, C. B. (2008). When the ground is Black, the ground is fertile: Exploring endarkened feminist epistemology and healing methodologies of the spirit. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 277–292). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dillard, C. B. (2012). Learning to (re)member the things we’ve learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms, spirituality and the sacred nature of research and teaching. Black Studies and Critical Thinking, 18, 41–56.

Dillard, C. B. & Okpalaoka, C. L. (2011). The sacred and spiritual nature of endarkened transnational feminist praxis in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 147–162). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

DuBois, W. E. B. (1986). Writings. New York: Viking.

Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto Books.

Hall, S. (1999). Th inking the diaspora: Home-thoughts from abroad. Small Axe, 6, 1–18.

Jackson-Opoku, S. (1997). The river where blood is born. New York: One World.

King, J. (Ed.) (2005). Black education: A transformative research and action agenda for the new century. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association and Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marshall, P. (1984). Praisesong for the widow. New York: Dutton.

Oyewumi, O. (2004). Conceptualizing gender: Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts and the challenge of African epistemologies. In CODESRIA (Ed.), African gender scholarship: Concept, methodologies and paradigms (pp. 1–8). Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA. Soyinka, W. (1999). The burden of memory, the muse of forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, A. (Ed.) (2003). The bead is constant. Accra: Ghana Universities Press.

Chapter 6

Border Crossing Bridging Empirical Practices with De/colonizing Epistemologies Kakali Bhattacharya

Henry Giroux challenges the neoliberal capitalism facing higher education and the pernicious effects of “negative globalization” (Giroux, 2007a, p. 3), mapping the pervasiveness of various types of violence that exists locally, nationally, and transnationally. He calls for emancipatory politics to become a point of departure in specific and concrete situations opening up sites of struggle to imagine a concept of “democracy that is never complete and is constantly open to different understanding of its workings” (Giroux, 2007b, p. 30). Therefore, higher education can become a site where democracy is practiced in unique ways, in ways that do not just focus on the will of the majority or force the minority to accept the will of the majority as their own but reengage critical discourses through pedagogical and empirical practices, through opening up spaces for border crossings, physical, intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and any other kind that might be appropriate. In support of this notion of border crossing, Giroux (2007b) states:

Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 115–134. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Public intellectuals need to approach social issues mindful of the multiple connections and issues that tie humanity together; but they need to do so as border intellectuals move within and across diverse sites of learning as part of an engaged and practical politics that recognizes the importance of asking questions, making distinctions, restoring to memory all those things that tend to be overlooked or walked past in the rush to collective judgment and action. (p. 37)

In conceptualizing democratic practices as open-ended possibilities, it is critical that as intellectuals we identify the borders we draw around ourselves and students, and create possibilities for multiple types of border crossings within the neoliberal culture of higher education. To that end, Anzaldúa (1999 [1987]) describes border crossings to be “the psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and the spiritual borderlands” (p. 17). What I take from both Giroux’s (2007a, 2007b) and Anzaldúa’s (1999 [1987]) notions of border crossings is that higher education is a primary site of such crossings to occur, not to just promote a different kind of pedagogy or to hold a space for multiple types of border crossings, but to thoughtfully reflect on what these crossings point to, what colonizing discourses are highlighted within these crossings, how such discourses are taken up when crossings happen, and what de/colonizing possibilities are created, re-worked, or re-imagined through these crossings. In this chapter, I discuss two critical incidents that demonstrate various types of border crossings in higher education. Then, I present an analysis of the critical incidents informed by transnational feminism and de/colonizing epistemologies. In so doing, I explore what the border crossings point to, the role of colonizing discourses within such crossings, and the de/colonizing possibilities that are identified. Finally, I discuss the implications for border intellectuals working with several types of oppressive discourses within higher education.

Border Crossings and Building Bridges Here, I present two incidents that reflect different types of border crossings, grounded in various critical discourses that explore the ways in which oppression, liberation, and resistance take shape in

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the context of colonizing discursive structures. These incidents are also part of my border crossings, re/imaginging, re/working, and re/inventing de/colonizing epistemic and ontological spaces. Border Crossing: Not Another “Black Folk” Movie

September 2006. I have come back from the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, brimming with new ideas. I have seen a documentary titled Home and have planned to show it to my class, which is comprised primarily of students of African American heritage. The documentary was brilliant to me because it demonstrated how Shree, a woman of African American heritage, identified the housing projects as her home. She was offered housing assistance through a government program that would help her move out of her current location to one that is safer, in a neighborhood where there is less crime and poverty, and to a house that is bigger, with more amenities, than the current one in which she lives. A social worker was assigned to help her with the logistical details of getting her finances in order so she could qualify for the housing assistance and be able to move into the new house. Shree wrestled with the decision of moving out of her home to this new place and eventually declined the offer. She chose her current home, where she felt “at home” and not to where she thought she was expected to move to have a different option from the other “Black folks in the projects,” as she stated in the documentary. Approaching this documentary from a de/colonizing perspective, I felt that this was a celebratory movie where the protagonist did not conform to the normative structures of belonging to a desirable economic class or living in the right neighborhood, and re-conceptualized what home meant to her from her own context. That she exercised her agency so powerfully made my little de/colonizing heart sing. I showed the video in my introductory qualitative methods class. We discussed subjectivities and the role they play in how we understand our studies and interact with the participants. The students were to reflect on their subjectivities and create a performance text reflecting their relationships to their research agenda in the following class. A week went by and I was excited to see what the students would produce. This activity in itself has been one that I created

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for this class utilizing de/colonizing epistemologies. I have noticed that in this mid-southern urban university I have critical thinkers as students. However, their prior educational background did not expose them to academic writing and developing a scholarly voice. I have decided that at least one of the assignments should be one in which they could express their thoughts in ways that are authentic and natural while connecting their research interest and the assigned readings. I did not want their experience of learning a new paradigm of inquiry to be so demoralizing that they would author themselves as intellectually incompetent. I created other assignments to be cumulative, where they design a qualitative research proposal and rework the proposal through the entire semester based on my feedback. Students are expected to submit a clean, polished version of their proposal at the end of the semester to earn back any points lost, thereby being immersed in the learning and not being focused on grades. Carol, a woman of African American heritage, in her forties, steps out in front of the class to perform her subjectivity. She has written a poem, printed on a white sheet of paper, in big black 32-point Times New Roman font, easily visible when she nervously drops the paper on the floor. She picks up the paper, with trembling hands. She clears her throat and looks at me. Carol and I share a friendly relationship, and she comes to class prepared with her work done. She engages in thoughtful discussions and attempts to understand positions different from her own. I nod to Carol, so that she can start her performance. She starts by addressing the class: “I am not a poet. This is actually not a good poem. But I had to write it. I just didn’t know what else to do but to write it like this. It reads childish. But it is important to me.” She raises her voice and reads the title of the poem, “Not Another Black Folk Video.” Then, in a quivering voice, she reads the following poem. So far, so good the class is interesting We’re learning all kinds of things. Today we’re going to watch a movie Netfl icks of all things. I think to myself, oh Lord, oh no. …

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I bet it is a “Black folk” video. Yes, I was right … here we go … don’t let it be about the hood. I’m so tired of seeing less than average black folk, sorely misunderstood. I’m so tired of White researchers, Seeking bad examples of me. Oh Lord, why this video? To show subjectivity? Couldn’t we find another piece? Without oppressing me? I’m so tired of these researchers, going to the hood. Shining light on the “truth” which is really not understood. Do I weep for the folk in the video? No, I just stop and think. … Why can’t the researchers, look at other cultures? Why does it always have to be folks like me? You can’t tell me that poverty and bad decisions, Don’t exist in various cultures of the world. Like in the Appalachian Mountains, Boston, the Ozarks and New York … just to name a few. You can’t tell me that there aren’t other races … in the good ole’ U. S. of A. Truly there are poor folk everywhere, For the Bible says they’ll be with us always. Shree and her kids. … She’s struggling to feed them and pay bills, This is nothing new. I know people like this for real. I grew up with folks like this. They’re not made to be examined, Nor put under life’s microscope. They are real people … just like you and me. Oh why did I have to watch this video? It just made me feel upset. I’m so tired of these researchers going to the ghetto … and the hood for press. Why can’t they seek other races in the good ole U. S. of A.?

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I’m so sick of these types of fi lms, They push forward the stereotypical ways. Why can’t they go to their hometowns? They must know someone that lives this way. Ok … we learned about subjectivity. Personal investment in research. Discuss your experiences. Be true with your path. Submerge yourself in your work. Don’t trash the work. Don’t find the faults. Look for meanings to make it clear. Ok. … I get that. I agree. What about Shree? Shree and her kids didn’t have a bad life, They are fulfi lling Maslow’s needs. They were happy, Had shelter, Had food, Were loved, they just didn’t have what the researcher deems that they need. Yes, it evoked emotions. I spoke with my peers after class, I told them how I felt. They told me “You can’t write that!” “Please don’t say that” as I spoke to them about Black folk. Why can’t I say it! Why can’t I speak to it! Why can’t I say “Black folk”? When we just finished watching a piece, Meant clearly to provoke. As I drove home I thought about my peers.

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I was miffed that they didn’t want me to speak my truth. Yet, as I recall … as the story opened up. … The first thing I saw was two Black youths. I thought oh no … here we go … more poor Black folk in the hood. Then within myself I cried … sit through it … and just endure it. From high school through college … up until today. I’ve always expressed myself, Thus, I must say: Just another “Black folk” video, We could have shot it downtown anywhere. Haven’t we seen enough of this? Same ole plot, Same ole story, By now most folk think it’s a fad.

Carol reads the poem like spoken word. Her body shakes as she reads it, her voice undulating with anger and sadness during her reading, she almost memorized the poem, so she barely looks at the paper, and holds eye contact with the class, but not with me. Her passion and energy invested in the poem are palpable. When she is done, a small stream of tears runs down her cheeks and the students remain silent, looking at me, as if to see how I would react to a poem that is in direct criticism of what I did a week ago. Carol turns to look at me. I do not feel anger or judgment from her but a relief from being able to release years of pent-up frustration. I am overwhelmed with humility. I have been seduced heavily by postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial theories for years. I realize how heavily I depend on the theories being able to help me with critical and reflective thinking, deconstruct assumptions, and yet how poorly I bridge those theories and theoretical tools with the materiality of lived experiences. I have an option to explain my de/colonizing perspective or build a bridge between us. I remember how people would expect me to love Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake, both the movie and the novel, because it is about Indian immigrants living in the United States, and they would comment how it paralleled real lives of these people and expected me to be proud for being represented.

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Except I was not. I found Jhumpa’s characters one dimensional, who easily settled their transnational tensions, and if it did anything, it exoticized the Third World yet again, as the spicy curry palatable to the Western palette. I take a deep breath and start to speak. Carol, first I am honored that you felt safe to read this poem in this class. Thank you for doing that. Second, the points you make in your poem are extremely legitimate points, and I want to thank you for making me aware of them. I understand them all too well because I cringe too when Indian people are represented in some stereotypical way, even when the intention of the presenter is noble. I think we should discuss the issue of engaging well-intentioned outsider researchers in ways that are not oppressive to the people s/he is representing. Carol relaxes, smiles, takes a seat. The class engages in a discussion about who should do research on whom and what, if any, role outsider researchers should play when studying people that live remarkably different lives than their own with a varied set of privileges or lack thereof. During the break, I notice that the students do not split into their Black and White student groups as they usually do. They gather around in mixed groups and talk about things that they share in common. Borders crossed. Border Crossing: Tradition and Family

October 2010. Sally, a middle-school principal, in her forties, of Mexican heritage, walks into my office. She is conducting a qualitative study for her dissertation. I am her dissertation committee chair and methodologist. She slumps into the chair at the other side of my desk. I open the conversation. “How are you doing?” “Not good. Really tired. Exhausted in all ways.” Sally sighs. “Talk to me. What’s going on?” I ask with earnest curiosity. Sally says: Well, I don’t know what to do really. I have to work evenings for school functions. We have games and other things where I am expected to be there. Then I come home and help around the house, the kids, lunch for the next day, and stuff, and then I am

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trying to write from 11:00 pm to 2:00 am. My mother, motherin-law, they keep saying that I am being selfish. I have enough education now. I need to be there for my family. That I am not being a good mother and a wife. I love them both, don’t get me wrong. They’re just from another time.

Sally’s voice trail off and eyes tear up. “Have you talked to your husband?” I ask. She answers: Yes, and oh my God, he is the most supportive man ever. He totally supports me. Even bought me a new laptop so I can write anywhere. I don’t know what I would do without him. He says to not worry about our mothers. But it hurts that they don’t understand. I can make different choices than them. If I respect their choices, I just wish, you know, they respected mine. Sally wipes her tears as she finishes speaking. I think about how as a feminist I would always champion empowering women to pursue their goals and dreams. I think about the various feminist critiques that I could launch at the oppressive structures that discursively inform Sally’s roles as ideal mother and wife, creating restrictive borders around her existence. I do not envy her position, but engaging her in a discussion makes me realize something that years of reading texts and journal articles did not. Sally is not trying to just resist the borders drawn around her. She is trying to elegantly construct a bridge between traditional expectations and how she authors herself as a wife and mother, without dismissing either position. Family is important to Sally, and her choices should not be in spite of family support, but with the support of family, even if they differ in their traditional outlooks. For Sally, being a good wife and mother matters, and the good opinion of her family members matter, and while she can dismiss and ignore a dated perspective, she is choosing to do neither. I realize that while I can easily engage Sally in a discussion of agency, her choices, her support from her husband, those are not the issues she is focused on. “If you could wave a magic wand, what would you like to see happen?” I am full of questions today. Sally says quietly:

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Well I don’t want to alienate my family because I want to pursue a doctoral degree. I want them to be proud of me for being a first-generation Mexican for going all the way in school. Not be ashamed of that or judge me badly. I just tell them that I love them. No matter what they say to me. And I do. I accept where they are coming from. And the day I graduate, I want them to be there. I am hoping they will be proud of me then and understand that I am being a good role model to my kids by showing them that you can pursue whatever dreams you have, and go all the way, no matter how difficult or different it might seem.

December 2011. Sally and I walk over to meet her family after she proudly strides across the stage and graduates with her doctoral degree in Educational Leadership. Her family paid extra money to reserve a private viewing booth in the convocation arena so that they can all be together and make the day special. As we get closer to the booth, Sally squeezes my hand, looks at me and whispers, “Thank you.” Perhaps sensing Sally’s arrival, her entire family runs out of the booth, her mother in a wheelchair being assisted by Sally’s husband, and her mother-in-law standing at the doorway, supported by her cane. I lose Sally in the sea of arms and bodies wrapped around her, hugging her, while she cries and smiles simultaneously. Her mother wants to see me. She holds her hand out and reaches for mine. I reach down and extend my hand to Sally’s mother. In broken English she says, “Thank you. My daughter is doctor. She dreams big. We don’t dare.” She squeezes my hand. I look over to Sally’s mother-in-law who is embracing Sally. Both women cry. Borders crossed.

Bridging with De/colonizing Epistemologies Keeping in mind Giroux’s (2007a, 2007b) call for higher education being a site to practice democracy, to make space for border intellectuals, and using Anzaldúa’s (1999 [1987]) concept of border crossings, in this section, I explore the types of border crossings that occurred in the critical incidents described above. As a woman of color educated and raised in India, Canada, and the United States, I carry with me the intersection of various oppressive and resistant discourses. Since I cannot divorce myself from

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the discursive influences in my life, I resonate with Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness as she imagines a day of affirmation for her people when she states: On that day I say, “Yes all you people wound us when you reject us. Rejection strips us of self-worth; our vulnerability exposes us to shame. It is our innate identity you find wanting. We are ashamed that we need your good opinion, that we need your acceptance. We can no longer camouflage our needs, can no longer let defenses and fences sprout around us. We can no longer withdraw. To rage and look upon you with contempt is to rage and be contemptuous of ourselves. We can no longer blame you, nor disown the white parts, the male parts, the pathological parts, the queer parts, these vulnerable parts. Here we are weaponless with open arms, with only our magic. Let’s try it our way, the mestiza way, the Chicana way, the woman way.” (Anzaldua, 1999 [1987], p. 110) Using this affirmation in the context of the narratives presented, I am inspired to go beyond the binary narratives of the victim and the oppressed so as to not create some sort of moral superiority of one over the other. Instead, I am compelled to reflect on how I could build a bridge from the bordered perspectives grounded in the materiality of existence. Given that I am informed by de/colonizing transnational feminist epistemologies, in the following section I will discuss how those epistemologies intersect with the narratives presented. De/colonizing epistemologies represent collective and varied ways of knowing the hegemonic effects of colonizing discourses and their foundational assumptions. Colonizing discourses are those that emerged from the post-Enlightenment European discourses (Smith, 1999) and currently represent imperialistic discourses forcing polarized relations between people, their locations, their categories of identification, and their ways of knowing and understanding the world. These imperialistic discourses continue to create grand narratives that exoticize non-White narratives or push them to the periphery. Within the context of the narratives presented in this chapter, both the students and I were operating within both oppressive and liberatory discourses, while searching

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for possibilities of empowerment, connection, and healing. Such work requires reimagining academia as a space for de/colonizing knowledge construction, instead of being a space for parroting colonizing discourses, creating more of the same, widget academic intellectuals, with differences reduced into sameness. Resisting such politics of academic knowledge production, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) describes how certain ways of knowledge production are privileged over others. She argues: Academic knowledges are organized around the idea of disciplines and fields of knowledge. These are deeply implicated in each other and share genealogical foundations in various classical and Enlightenment philosophies. Most of the “traditional” disciplines are grounded in cultural worldviews which are either antagonistic to other belief systems or have no methodology for dealing with other knowledge systems. Underpinning all of what is taught in universities is the belief in the concept of science as the all-embracing method for gaining an understanding of the world. (p. 65) In other words, Smith’s argument challenges current academic system of knowledges for being unresponsive to belief systems that are traditionally marginalized and silenced. Consequently, when knowledge is produced from those previously ignored cultural spaces, they are considered, “less ‘adequate,’ less ‘universal’ and less ‘scientific’—in other words, inferior” (Harrison, 1997, p. 6). Examining trends in anthropology, Harrison elaborates on the silencing of racialized perspectives, despite anthropology’s inclination toward studying cultural diversity and perspectives. Harrison argues: Paradoxically, despite the pervasiveness of racialized structures of inequality, neither mainstream nor radical/critical anthropology has contributed a wealth of insight and knowledges to our understanding of racism and the socio-cultural construction of racial differences. … Anthropology’s preoccupation with redressing ethnocentrism does not exonerate it from neglecting to confront, both in intellectual and sociopolitical terms, racism/White supremacy as a major ideological and institutionalized force in today’s world. The connotations of a racialized

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Other—it’s most extreme and invidious form being the Black Other—have been and, unfortunately, still remain underpinnings of many anthropological assumptions and practices. (1997, p. 3; emphasis in the original)

Informed by these de/colonizing arguments, I see the fi rst border-crossing narrative creating the discursive space where I had to stretch my boundaries of understanding and integrating postcolonial and poststructural theories and critiques with the materiality of lived experiences in ways I did not before. For example, while I was acutely aware of the structural forces of oppression in higher education, and consciously identified a documentary being agentic, aligned with various de/colonizing epistemologies, I ignored an obvious fact: Even with the intent to honor an agentic discussion, I was still putting the Other under an objectifying gaze, a spectacle to be observed, analyzed, and celebrated as victorious, but nevertheless a spectacle. Therefore, Carol’s resistance created a space for producing knowledge from such academic sites that are traditionally marginalized and silenced not just by dominant oppressive discourses, but even by self-censoring initiatives practiced by Carol’s peers who belonged to the same ethnic group. Viewing Carol’s resistance through my own resistance to dominant discourses, I identified how transnational feminists continue to challenge reducing women into categories of spectacle, such as oppressed, colonized, non-Western, ethnic, exotic, or backwards. At a rudimentary level, transnationalism refers to practices of migrants who identify with multiple nation-states, if not at least two nation-states. This term has been taken up differently in various fields by extending the understanding to include a political opposition to hegemonic social structures by focusing on shifts “that challenge the older, conventional boundaries of national economies, identities, and cultures” (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994, p. 9). Grewal and Kaplan (1994) urge feminist political practices to acknowledge transnational cultural flows in order to “understand the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations. If feminist movements cannot understand the dynamics of these material conditions, then they will be unable to

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construct an effective opposition to current economic and cultural hegemonies that are taking new global forms” (p. 17). Transnational cultural flows are always already, informed by the politics of location, which can offer insights to identity, agency, resistance, and power relations. Sangari and Vaid (1993) emphasize that understanding women as agents requires understanding that the “notions of femaleness, self, or identity are so tied up with questions of family, class, religion, and other forms of collectivity that they cannot be framed in terms of a single unified axis” (p. 871). By recognizing multiple categories of examination, implications for border crossings become visible. While I wanted to cross some borders of traditional forms of academic knowledge production, I brought with me a colonizing gaze that I was not aware of and further reinforced a stereotypical production of “Black folks” as evidenced in the first narrative. Somehow, even with the understanding of multiplicity as a category of analysis in and of itself, I rendered “Black folks” as once oppressed and then agentic in making their own decision for survival. I recognized that the liberatory urges within me remained ignorant of the complexity of Carol’s understanding of oppression, a subversively repeated production of “Black folks” “in the hood” who are unable to decide what is really good for them until they are offered some help from “White folks.” What, then, is my role as a border intellectual in Western academia working with other border intellectual scholars as students? I look toward Smith (1999), who examines the role of the native intellectual: Currently, the role of “native” intellectual has been reformulated not in relation to nationalist or liberatory discourses but in relation to the “post-colonial” move across the boundaries of indigenous and metropolitan, institution and community, politics and scholarship. Their place in the academy is still highly problematic. (p. 71) Smith’s argument about strategic positioning, along multiple groups of audiences, further complicate how one can remain vigilant about the contradictions of being a native intellectual. The term “native intellectual” is contradictory because membership in the native community is troubled by being an

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intellectual in a non-native community. Moreover, membership in Western academia is met with many types of gate-keeping and negotiations through which production of knowledge is mitigated. Thus, interrogating who is listening, who is speaking, and what gets said and heard become critical points of analysis to construct de/colonizing epistemologies. Spivak elaborates: For me, the question “Who should speak” is less crucial than “Who will listen?” “I will speak for myself as a Third World person” is an important position for political mobilization today. But the real demand is that, when I speak from that position, I should be listened to seriously, not with that kind of benevolent imperialism. (1990, p. 59) By accepting my alignment with colonizing discourses, I looked toward the protagonist depicted in the documentary in the first border-crossing incident with some sort of “benevolent imperialism” instead of seriously reflecting on the implications of the White researcher and the White social worker trying to save a poor Black folk in the hood. Carol spoke for herself, resisting the colonizing narrative that was being promoted in academia, and created a space for identifying different possibilities for extending de/colonizing epistemologies, informed by the materiality of her existence, instead of by any scholarly texts. Carol identified implications of crossing some boundaries and crossed others in the dialogic space that she created. She criticized the boundaries a non-native researcher crossed by putting the exotic under his gaze, implying that those boundaries are marked boundaries and cannot be crossed that easily by non-natives. Additionally, Carol transgressed the boundaries marked by discursive politics in academia about how much of her indigenous knowledge she can share and invited others to engage with a different type of knowledge production than what they were exposed to previously. Similar to Carol, Sally resisted some boundaries drawn around her and attempted to cross borders while being agentic and pursuing a goal outside of what was expected of her culturally. The cultural restrictions placed on Sally, depicted in the second border-crossing incident, could easily be seen as colonizing,

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as oppressive, and restrictive and yet Sally chose to see those boundaries through love and compassion, through a need to integrate her existence informed by both cultural tradition and her choice to pursue what she thought was important. In that way, Sally was authoring her existence by creating possibilities that were not accessed or valued initially by her family. Wanting to create a story different from her mother and mother-in-law, Sally created a model of possibility that was otherwise absent in the way cultural expectations were taken up in her family. I see Sally’s authoring of self-hood by making higher education a fertile ground for her empowerment, an establishment of her presence in a way that was unexpected, similar to how scholars of color write themselves in existence, with their complicated positioning and colonization in academia. Often, scholars of color who write themselves into existence lean on transitional feminism. Transnational feminism continues to encourage an examination of the fluidity of the subject positions that people occupy when they write themselves into existence and author their own stories. For example, Mitsuye Yamada writes: An Asian American woman thriving under the smug of illusion that I was not the stereotypic image of the Asian woman because I had a career teaching English in a community college. I did not think anything assertive was necessary to make my point … it was so much my expected role that it ultimately rendered me invisible … contrary to what I thought, I had actually been contributing to my own stereotyping. … When the Asian American woman is lulled into believing that people perceive her being different from other Asian women (the submissive, subservient, ready-to-please, east-to-get-along-with Asian woman), she is kept comfortable with the state of things. (Yamada, 2002, pp. 36–37) Yamada’s narrative highlights how she departs from Asian stereotypes and identifies herself as atypical to only perpetuate the colonial understanding of the Other. On one hand, I see Sally’s negotiations parallel to Yamada’s as she tries to cross the borders of the stereotypical Mexican and create a different kind of Mexican wife and mother informed through an empowered sense of self. On the other hand, in Sally’s negotiation of her self-hood

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she does not reject the stereotypical understanding of Mexican mother and wife. Instead, Sally wants to honor both forms of authoring self-hoods and build a bridge between multiple forms of self-hood that can exist within the subject position of Mexican wife and mother. By doing so, she is not creating an oppositional binaried discourse and eventually building conditions for her own invisibility as Yamada did. Instead, she is re/inventing, identifying possibilities from her material existence to that of her mother’s and mother-in-law’s to elegantly make room for multiple forms of femininity, motherhood, and roles women can play informed by a hybridized, mestiza consciousness. Both Carol’s and Sally’s narratives underscore the complicated position of being a border intellectual meeting, resisting, and accommodating various colonizing discourses. The complication lies in being “accepted” as we author our existence and resist certain Western discourses, causing a shuttling between being native and a Western intellectual. In this transcultural shuttling, there is a need to resist against the erasure of native sensibilities, however intersected they are with colonizing discourses and however hybridized they are in their contested loyalties. Colonizing discourses tend to limit ethnicity within certain borders, as if to say that nondominant discourses have their own homelands with distinctive boundaries and as if to suggest that such discourses can have a separate development that but parties subscribing to such discourses should know their place. Both Carol and Sally resisted such politics of location and attempted to build bridges out of their authentic sense of being to spaces traversed by oppressive discourses. These de/colonizing arguments call for rupturing binaries between the oppressor and the oppressed and situate women in their particular historical, political contexts and breaking apart the practice of using women as objects of analysis. Such departures open up spaces of differences among women of any background, which can reveal previously unthought-of possibilities of alliance and resistance to challenge imperialistic norms present in higher education in the United States.

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Implications for Border Intellectuals The border-crossing narratives and the bridging of those narratives with transnational feminist de/colonizing epistemologies raise questions about the roles border intellectuals can play in higher education in resistance to imperialistic discourses. As border intellectuals, when we face oppressive discourses that we are evoking or one that is evoked within the power relations of the space in which we are working, we have an obligation to face the imperialism with our collective solidarity, resilience, and talent. Arundhati Roy (2003) suggests: If we look at this confl ict as a straightforward eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Empire and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing. But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to Empire.2 We may not have stopped it in its tracks—yet—but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness. (p. 122)

And when the empire is stripped and exists in its iniquitous nakedness, we have an opportunity to redress the empire, to create possibilities that did not exist before. To that end, Roy (2003) suggests: Our strategy should be not only to confront empire but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. (p. 142) While Roy’s discussion of the empire is global in nature, colonizing discourses and the effect of the empire are manifest in various ways in local, regional, and national cultural discourses

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and inform the ways in which higher education functions within such structures as Henry Giroux (2007a, 2007b) points out repeatedly. Taking Roy’s strategic suggestion, Carol’s desire to tell her own story, refusing to buy into a story that she felt was brainwashed to buy, is a way to lay siege to empire. Sally’s sheer relentlessness against a cultural narrative, refusing to give up on her own dream, bringing her compassion and love for her family as her weapon intersects both Roy’s and Anzaldúa’s (1999 [1987]) suggestions to try things our way, the mestiza way, weaponless but with our magic. Therefore, as border intellectuals, or as wellintentioned intellectuals who work with people at various types of borders, we need to remain vigilant of colonizing discourses both within and without and lay siege to them, strip them bare, and engage in politics of possibilities and solidarity, daring to imagine ideas that promise to cross and create borders as needed.

Notes 1. I have Carol’s permission to use her name and her poem. Th is poem is also on my class website to discuss the materiality of oppressive structures in academia. 2. Of empire, Roy writes:

When we speak of confronting “Empire,” we need to identify what “Empire” means. Does it mean the U.S. Government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that? In many countries, Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous byproducts nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course terrorism. All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalization. Corporate Globalization—or shall we call it by its name?—Imperialism— needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice. Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all they have to make sure that it is only money, goods, patents and services that are globalized. Not the free movement of people. Not a respect for human rights. … So this—all this—is “empire.” Th is loyal confederation, this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them. (2003, p. 145)

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References Anzaldúa, G. (1999 [1987]). Borderlands la frontera: The new mestiza (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Giroux, H. (2007a). The university in chains: Confronting the military-industrialacademic complex. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Giroux, H. (2007b). Utopian thinking in dangerous times: Critical pedagogy and the project of educated hope. In M. Cote, R. J. F. Day, & G. D. Peuter (Eds.), Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiements against neoliberal globalization (pp. 25–42). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Grewal, I. & Kaplan, C. (1994). Scattered hegemonies: Postmodernity and transnational feminist practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harrison, F. V. (1997). Anthropology as an agent of transformation: Introductory comments and queries. In F. V. Harrison (Ed.), Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward an anthropology for liberation (pp. 1–16). Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association. Roy, A. (2003). War talk. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Sangari, K. & Vaid, S. (1993). Consent, agency, and rhetorics of incitement. Economic and Political Weekly, 1, 867–882.

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous people. New York: Zed Books. Spivak, G. (1990). Questions of multiculturalism. In S. Harasayam (Ed.), The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues (pp. 59–66). New York: Routledge. Yamada, M. (2002). Invisibility is an unnatural disaster: Reflections of an Asian American woman. This bridge called my back: Writings by radical woman of color. Berkeley, CA: Th ird Woman Press.

Part III

Method

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Chapter 7

Dewey, A/r/tography, and Ab-Use of Global Dialogue Richard Siegesmund

In his opening keynote address to the Eighth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Paul Atkinson (2012) spoke to the cultural richness of modernism and our current tendency to undervalue this tradition. It is all too easy to be critical of our recent intellectual roots as the conventions of academia demand that scholars produce new, innovative theories. Many young scholars simply overthrow precedent in order to create room for themselves on the academic stage (Behar, 2008). The newcomers fight for the limelight that will assure the lively debates that bring promotion, tenure, and the rewards of academia. However, these spectacles can obscure as much as they reveal. Therefore, one can profit by pausing and reconsidering intellectual histories and how we come to frame scholarly lineages and understandings. The past is important and continuously reconfigures as it shapes the future. Arts-based educational research (ABER) is a case in point. A/r/tography, an ABER methodology that emerged in the first decade of the 21st century, provides an example. Consider Being with A/r/tography, published in 2008 with twenty-nine pages of Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 137–155. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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references (Springgay et al., 2008). Only sixteen of the works cited date from before 1970. Here, the impetus to break new methodological ground seems to require, as Ruth Behar cautioned, a rejection of a previously foundational intellectual paradigm. With this predictable need to throw out the old, it is perhaps not surprising that Dewey’s Art as Experience is not cited in the nearly 500 references that support Being with A/r/tography. However, as Atkinson suggests, we may perhaps be underestimating the richness of Dewey’s contribution to a postmodern qualitative research methodology. This chapter seeks to re-present the radical ideas of Dewey’s aesthetics and their relevancy to contemporary ABER. By linking a/r/tography back to Dewey, an intellectual chain begins to form that connects a/r/tography back to 18th-century aesthetic theory. We can see how Dewey and modernist traditions prefigure a conceptual framework for a/r/tography. Similarly, postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2012) builds her 21st-century postmodern theory of aesthetics, as authentic personal resistance to globalization, on Enlightenment traditions. She calls acts of aesthetic resistance “ab-use” and traces the foundations of her view on the work of 18th-century philosophers Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller. Both Dewey and Spivak speak to aesthetic inquiry as opening new transcultural conversations. Incorporating these conceptual frameworks into an ABER methodology such as a/r/tography increases the possibilities of aesthetic inquiry that address the problem of voice in an era of silencing through capitalism and statistical quantification. Dewey and Spivak both provide insight into what a/r/tography might achieve as a form of qualitative inquiry.

Arts-Based Research and A/r/tography Arts-based research methodologies are rigorous approaches to the study of intentional acts and artifacts of significance that, in turn, take on additional layers of significance through interpretation. Generally, but not exclusively, these investitures of significance, both in the initial making and in the interpretation, begin in the sense of or relationships of somatic qualities and therefore before

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the intercession of language: The maker’s sensory, qualitative awareness shapes these actions and objects. These works demonstrate what Dewey (1989 [1934]) calls thinking in “relations of qualities” (p. 52). Relations of qualities include (but are not limited to) how the intensities of color and the outlines of shape evoke contrasts and rhythmic patterns. Such relationships extend to sound, smell, and taste. They also include our somatic sense of touch—what we volitionally and nonvolitionally touch and are touched by. These relationships unfurl in space and time. In turn, the interpretation of relations of qualities by a viewer requires sensory, qualitative awareness that prolongs into an experience. Such works are products of felt, somatic expression, and are initially re-experienced by a viewer as such. Indeed, repeated iterations of a hermeneutic cycle, initiated by a maker and continued by one or more observers, may occur before the presence of any form of language. The disciplined interpretation and assessment of intentional or unintentional significance of these non-linguistic acts is at the heart of ABER methodologies. There may be an urgent expressive intent from maker to viewer, the intent may be entirely the work of interpretation by the viewer, or there may be gradients of shaped experience that fall on a continuum between these two points. These analyses may be manifest in the form of yet another pre-linguistic artifact, thus creating iterations of interpretations outside of language. An important strand of arts-based research explores its therapeutic values (McNiff, 1998). This approach is particularly significant within the health sciences. The artistic application (intentional or unintentional) of photography has an intimate relationship to the fields of sociology and anthropology (Banks, 2001; Pink, 2007). However, this chapter is concerned with the arts-based research as it relates to the field of education. The first fully articulated methodology of arts-based educational research (ABER) is Elliot Eisner’s educational connoisseurship (1991). Just as a good critic re-educates perception (Dewey, 1989 [1934]), the educational connoisseur helps us to see fine-grained elements of excellent practice that would have gone unnoticed by the novice or inattentive viewer. In this conceptual framework, the

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classroom is a place of non-linguistic shapings, achieved through inscribed explicit and implicit acts, or by the absence of action (Eisner, 2002). From this beginning, multiple forms of discipline specific ABER methodologies emerged. These include, but are not limited to, portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), narrative storytelling (Barone, 2001), ethnodrama (Saldaña, 2005), and playbuilding (Norris, 2009). A/r/tography is a later ABER methodological iteration. It was developed at and continues to be explored primarily by the faculty and students at the University of British Columbia. The name suggests that knowledge of education comes from inscriptions and denotings (graphy) conducted by the artist, researcher, and teacher. All three roles must be in the research design for the work to be a/r/tography. Of note here is the emphasis on the dual role of the artist in research. A/r/tography formally acknowledges the researcher as maker. Making is necessary to translate sensory experience into visual data. Because a/r/tography works with sensory relationships that occur before language, the methodology claims to be particularly effective in fostering global dialogue. An example is the City of Richgate Project (Beer et al., 2010; Bickel et al., 2010). This socially engaged ABER project investigates modes of cultural representation within the city of Richmond, British Columbia, a city that has had its social landscape altered through generations of immigration, principally Chinese. As an example of the slippage of language, the residents of Richmond commonly refer to their community as Richgate, thus reflecting a transformation of an Anglo-Canadian tradition of naming a place to remember where one has come from to a Chinese tradition of naming a place to reflect one’s aspiration for the future. The research project—in words and images—attempts to bridge cultural divides.

The Renderings of A/r/tography A/r/tographic methodological theory eschews the term conceptual framework, for the ideas that shape a/r/tographic research are better understood as renderings rather than concepts (Springgay et al., 2008). Concepts appear fi xed with distinct borders that allow for ready categorization and sorting. Renderings function

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in different ways. Most significantly, following the visual arts meaning of the word as a sketch to capture an essence, a rendering leaves open the important work of erasure. Rendering is shape-shifting rather than shape-fi xing. Learning to erase, revise, repurpose, and re-form are important skills in the training of a visual artist. A methodology of art-making needs to embrace these acts as essential to coming to know. There are six renderings to a/r/tography: contiguity, living inquiry, metaphor and metonymy, openings, reverberations, and excess. They represent criteria for judging the merit of a work of ABER. Contiguity is similar to the 20th-century art forms of collage (the ripping and juxtaposition of two-dimensional images), montage (the repetition of images), and bricolage (the recombination of three-dimensional everyday objects). Contiguity may create an appearance of continuity, but it makes no pretense of a seamless linearity. Living inquiry embraces erasure. We change in our research. Inquiry erases and remakes the researcher; the methodology stipulates it. How are we smart about the changes that we undergo, as we embrace an effort to understand? Metaphor and metonymy are means for reaching beyond what we have literal words to say. They are profoundly rooted in the experience of the body and are the first attempts to translate somatic experience into language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Poetry is a necessity to achieve new understanding. Openings occur in a process of rupture. Ruptures dislocate; they do not result in easy narratives and simple explanations. In a rupture, there is a promise of reconfiguration. This is not a guarantee; it is only a promise. Nevertheless, this is a moment of the possibility of something new to emerge, that which is not yet (Greene, 2001). Reverberations are echoes that force us to turn our attention. They are also slippages of meanings for a reverberation is a shadow of the original. In hearing a reverberation we pause, refocus, and respond. If there is slippage, it requires that we fashion, to the best of our ability, a remaking. A reverberation does not allow us to record and claim a finding. Richard Rorty (1989) contends that

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20th-century philosophy’s greatest achievement was in its shift of thinking from conceptualizing philosophy as a process of finding to a process of making as represented in the work of Heidegger and late Wittgenstein. Dewey also belongs to this list. Excess is a refusal to accept a line of regression within a data set. It aggressively pushes for the inclusion of outlier data that may skew quantitative synthesis. Excess holds that there is a story in the outlier for it holds the challenge to our imagination. The outlier is not a rogue data point; it is an alarm of a failing paradigm. These six renderings form a critical background for the methodology of a/r/tography. The renderings question a linear process of logic and the value of deductive reason. Somatic forms of experiential knowing are regarded as essential and not as a distraction from the conduct of research. The literature that supports these ideas is overwhelmingly post-modern, heavily influence by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), Jacques Derrida (1998 [1967]), and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975). This literature readily supports Rorty’s assessment that the 20th century represents a shift in philosophy to a process of deconstruction and remaking. Not only is John Dewey one of the 20th-century philosophers who also made Rorty’s philosophical turn, but postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak contends that this same turn was made as early as the 18th century through German aesthetics. Through both Dewey and Spivak, we can see how the postmodern methodology of a/r/tography begins to emerge in the Enlightenment. This is an example of the intellectual historic connectedness that Atkinson implores us to reconsider.

Dewey’s Aesthetics of Experience The questions that drove the American educational philosopher John Dewey’s entire career might be paraphrased as: (1) What is thinking? (2) How would you teach someone to think? Beginning in 1929, as he turned seventy, Dewey produced a series of works that summarized his journey to attempt to answer these questions. This conceptual stream begins with the second edition of Experience and Nature (1958 [1929]), which proposed our ability to construct meaning from pre-linguistic sensory experience.

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In the same year, The Quest for Certainty (1988 [1929]) argued that the hope of finding immutable knowledge was quixotic. Dewey expanded on pre-linguistic thinking in an essay entitled Qualitative Thought (1931) and then extensively rewrote How We Think (1986 [1933]), in which his earlier conception of thought as a noun changed to thinking as a verb. This journey culminated in Art as Experience (1989 [1934]), his most fully articulated argument on how human beings can come to an authentic knowing through somatic, pre-linguistic, sensory experience. In this journey, Dewey made the complete Rortian turn from philosophy found to philosophy made. These ideas are all harbingers of the renderings of a/r/tography. Art as Experience is a work that we still struggle to interpret. In his introduction to the 1989 Boydston edition, aesthetics philosopher Abraham Kaplan (1989) remarked that Art as Experience is a book that is better sensed than understood. To our contemporary mind, Dewey’s argument for communicative qualitative understanding constructed outside of symbolic discourse defies the common conception of thought, which we tend to base on the close analytic application of linguistic, mathematical, or visual symbols. However, the arts-based methodology of a/r/tography has opened research to what is felt before it is said. It points to the limits of language and contends that the space around language is fecund with meaning. This place of the in-between—the space not occupied by words—is sense felt. Felt sense provides us the material to make sense: our ordering of the qualitative relationships of sense that allows us to hypothesize an understanding of the world. Through this process, multiple appeals to making sense go beyond mere seeing to achieving insight. Consider the contributions of just the sense of touch: Understanding through touch reconfigures the ways in which we perceive objects, providing access to depth and surface, inside and outside (Grosz, 1994; Merleau-Ponty, 1968). Touch expresses active involvement with the subject matter. Touch becomes a mode of knowing through proximity and relationality and poses different ways of making sense of the world, challenging the mechanisms of visual perception. Similarly, it draws attention to

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sensory experiences and knowledge that is interconnected with our bodies and with others. (Springgay et al., 2008, p. xxi)

In a/r/tography, the expressive power of art—its necessity in research— is its ability to inscribe sensory somatic knowledge into form. Through a/r/tography, we can better appreciate Dewey’s purpose in writing a book that is sensed and not traditionally understood, for Dewey was pushing for a similar reconfiguration of what counts in research and how we might characterize coming to know. To rephrase a claim from Art as Experience, Dewey might say that the arts-based methods of a/r/tography thrust into the future, and in so doing, now extend into the past to help us understand a history previously misunderstood. Kaplan is right. Art as Experience is a book to be sensed; but Dewey is arguing that through sense, we can reach a conception of what it means to understand.

Experience versus Beauty Dewey’s aesthetics is composed of structured, rational thought that precedes language. To this end, he felt our commonly understood definitions of aesthetics (a philosophy of beauty, specialness, and distinction) were pernicious. Dewey claimed that these common meanings obfuscated the critical role of aesthetics as a place to structure pre-linguistic experience in rational forms. In this regard, he saw institutions like art museums that removed objects from their every-day context as profoundly anesthetic. Such presentations put the mind to sleep and evoke an insipid sense of pleasure. Dewey wanted a raw aesthetics of living and railed against “a separation of art from the objects and scenes of ordinary experience” (1989 [1934], p. 12). Aesthetics, as encountered in art museums or through curriculum innovations like cultural literacy (Hirsch et al., 1987), is a deadening discourse that excludes felt experience. The scope and sequence in the design of gallery installation, or a textbook, or a list of essential objects of cultural significance all shrivel our ability to respond authentically with our senses, for someone else has already framed what that experience should be. In this regard, the contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière notes, “When

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people go to the museum now, they are in front of modes of exhibition and explanatory labels that tell them what they must see” (Rancière [2009], as quoted in Arnall et al., 2012, p. 293). What the words say occludes making sense. As Dewey first explored in Experience and Nature, perception is primal. Refined perception in all sensory modalities was essential to human survival and key to evolution. In his quest to answer his questions of how do we think and how do we teach it, Dewey had to ask where this basic human skill of making one’s own sense—or, as Rancière would phrase it, to write one’s own poem—was preserved and honed. Aesthetics could not be about decadent forms of appreciation; it had to deal with the translation of felt experience into forms of purposeful action. For art provided a record of somatic inquiry that was critical to our survival. “As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure” (Dewey, 1989 [1934], p. 346). For both Dewey and a/r/tography, there is a necessity of attuning sense. This is not about connoisseurship or excellence, but about an engagement of living in the everyday. A fully sensate individual actively uses the mind to process into intuitive and coherent meaning the dizzying arrays of sensory data that bombard us. Dewey’s live creature (the subject of Chapter 1 of Art as Experience) is in active relationship to its environment: the animate beings and inanimate objects around it. For a/r/tography, these moments of sense generate ruptures that incite. The intimacy of sense provokes. Sensory perception is not an impartial recording; it is an act of editing excess. Our editing is often unconscious, so only with reflective and reflexive practice can we open our consciousness to the spectrum of sense perception: to that which intimately impels as well as repulses. The a/r/tographer seeks paths that do not adsorb or gloss, but offers forms of practice that absorb and saturate us into dynamic living. Here, Dewey feels that if we concede aesthetics as personal preference, entertainment, and gratification, we have not simply ignored the work of aesthetics but have failed as educators to teach a critical skill for the development of mind—the ability to perceive. Perception is the act of embracing, managing, and deftly editing sensory excess through

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compression of all significance rather than selection and exclusion (Dewey, 1989 [1934], p. 211). Perception requires an intentional demolition, a deconstruction, of our existing schematic lenses in order to rebuild a broader, and hopefully fresh, understanding. Dewey warned that if we become slack and inattentive, we stop to feel. This occurs when we settle for recognition, rather than striving for perception. Dewey said, “Recognition is perception arrested before it has a chance to develop freely” (1989 [1934], p. 58). Recognition is analytic labeling; perception is full somatic felt experience. There is a danger that should we once achieve perception, we reify it into recognition. The quest for perception never ends as each new cycle opens new possibilities. Moments of perception are profoundly human. The inscription of these moments in works of art and works of expression have the authentic ability to be a transcultural opening to new forms of dialogue: Expression strikes below the barriers that separate human beings from one another. Since art is the most universal form of language, since it is constituted, even apart from literature, by the common qualities of the public world, it is the most universal and freest form of communication. (Dewey, 1989 [1934], p. 275) For Dewey, art’s free communication is a form of global dialogue. The purpose of dialogue is to facilitate inquiry. Dewey’s concept of qualitative thought—thinking in direct relationships of sensory experience in a space that occurs before symbolic manipulation—is a place of deconstruction. From disassemblage, Dewey argued for aesthetics as a path to deeply global dialogue that occurs through a raw perceptual sensuality outside of familiar semiotic contexts.

Precedents for Dewey’s Aesthetics Dewey did not come to these ideas as some personal epiphany that announces a dramatic break with intellectual tradition. Aesthetics as inquiry into deeply human subjective somatic experience is an idea that comes out of German idealism and the 18th-century Enlightenment beginning with the philosopher Immanuel Kant (Bowie, 2003). As a student, Dewey trained in German

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philosophy that promoted aesthetics as a critical voice to error in logical/linguistic representations. Nor is Dewey alone in recognizing this Enlightenment tradition and coming to similar conclusions. Consider postcolonial theorist and Derrida translator Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2012). She, too, points to German idealism as first articulating what we now would call somatic deconstructive discourse that seeks to rupture a fascist and self-mythologizing project of reason (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1994 [1944]). Like Dewey, Spivak contends that aesthetics holds the promise of resistance to the relentless homogenizing of globalization that only serves the interests of capital and data (2012, p. 1). For her, a hope for global dialogue lies in the ability of aesthetics to disrupt and deconstruct. Spivak contends that aesthetics, as it was proposed in the 18th century, achieves epistemological change through the rearrangement of desires (p. 2). To restate Spivak’s position in the language of Dewey and a/r/tography, the rearrangement of sense to make new forms of sense is the project of aesthetics as first proposed during the Enlightenment. Like Dewey, Spivak contends that this tradition of aesthetics is disruption of recognition through perception. This, she posits, is what Kant meant when he claimed aesthetics was a “new sensibility that is real science” (Kant, 1929 [1781], p. 66). She traces her articulation of aesthetics as rupture through Kant and the subsequent reinterpretations of his aesthetics by philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, and into the present through the work of Jacques Derrida. Spivak argues that a close study of key words and concepts in Kant (in his original German and not in any of the current English translations) provides intellectual precedence and lineage to her interpretation of aesthetics. Here, she states, one can see Kant wrestling with Rorty’s two conceptions of philosophy: a philosophy made and a philosophy found. She is rereading Kant just as Schiller, Nietzsche, and Derrida all reread Kant. Is her rereading right? Her response would please Rorty: “But who is exactly right? Schiller’s problem was not that he was wrong, but that he did not run with his version of his wrong, as did Kant, as did Nietzsche, as did Derrida, in different ways” (Spivak, 2012, p. 28).

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In short, Spivak claims that the Rortian turn from a philosophy found to a philosophy made is not a 20th-century postmodern discovery; it is an 18th-century discovery of modernism grounded in the German enlightenment. This insight again reminds us of Paul Atkinson’s admonition to duly consider our intellectual heritages.

Spivak’s Aesthetics of Ab-Use For Spivak, aesthetics is a deeply human, transcultural, pre-linguistic somatic experience that troubles language, and possibly always lies outside of language. She writes of aesthetics as a discipline of ab-use (p. 11). In this case, the Latin prefi x ab suggests a working away from and a working under. In her view, the use of aesthetics is in its unsettling of rationale discourse. The discipline of aesthetics works below epistemology’s surface and off the radar to achieve a disruption of knowing. It is a conscious “work of displacing belief onto the terrain of the imagination” (2012, p. 10). To Spivak, educating for an aesthetic of ab-use is critical in our era of globalization, because globalization, to her, is an insidiously transnational homogenization driven by capital and data (2012, p. 1). Globalization strips away the autonomy of the individual by assimilating desire and substituting it with entertainment for the purposes of both transnational capital consolidation and acquisition of deep data to be mined for policy and political control. Dazzling with spectacle and brute power are tools to achieve both ends. Spivak suggests that an aesthetic of ab-use is the only viable course of resistance. Here, Spivak freely acknowledges a double bind (2012, p. 4) (i.e., a moment that requires resolution through contradictory action). Purity of theory is not an option. For example, an individual who aspires to autonomy nevertheless must interact in the world of globalization (and, perhaps on occasion, even enjoy participating in the spectacle). One lives in the double bind. Aesthetic education aspires to help individuals understand the conditions for practicing ab-use and fashioning acts of resistance. “We act by imagining imperatives,” Spivak states. “We must scrupulously imagine a situation in order to act” (2012, p. 140). Imagining requires a deconstruction of use: a deconstruction of givens. Imagining is not the packaged and fantasy dreams

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of the global culture industry (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1994 [1944]). Furthermore, imagining is not a passive, escapist activity. It is a rigorous existence in articulating that which is not yet as a conscious course of resistance to that which is (Greene, 1995). Aesthetics itself can create double binds. Acts of ab-use that allow for resistance to globalization and the reaffirmation of individual presence are possible. So are acts of abuse—what Dewey would call acts of anesthesia—that simply lead us into conformity with homogenized experience. Spivak is particularly concerned that multicultural political correctness teaches a vapid tolerance. This merely provides a smug anesthetic satisfaction to members of the dominant culture. In contrast, ab-use is critical and provocative. While ab-use is our only resource to any hope of an authentic voice, our voices are not the same. To speak to each other does not imply commonality; it allows the recognition of difference that does not degrade into abusive stereotype.

A Deweyian Aesthetic of Ab-Use and A/r/tography The tradition of subjectivity in aesthetics, from which Dewey, Spivak, and the ABER methodology of a/r/tography draw, privileges the personal as a means to global dialogue. Global dialogue is not a claim of essential universal truths. Aesthetics simply reveals points for border-jumping conspiratorial conversations (Barone, 2000). Through aesthetics, new ways of being able to talk to others emerge. As Dewey told us, the hope for these conversations is not in reductive exclusion, but in attention to the fullness of qualitative relationship. This attention is possible through openings that invite excess. For Dewey, this repleteness is not edited through extraction, but distilled and compressed over time so that we can glimpse, in dynamic and ephemeral moments, visions of possibility that allow for reflection ((1989 [1934]), p. 70). These are not passive beholdings. They are encounters in which we fall out of step, followed by attempts to recover unison. The recovery of unison is first a somatic experience that becomes knowledge through mental reflection. An aesthetic of the everyday is finding balance

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out of disruption. To negotiate the disruption of an authentic aesthetic encounter is to learn how to live. It impels us into new action. Dewey claims that the “senses are sentinels of immediate thought and outposts of action” (1989 [1934]), p. 25). One thinks in relations of qualities by bringing in, not by throwing out. There are at least three considerations for a work of a/r/tography if it seeks to achieve a Deweyian reflective sensory saturation hat promotes moments of ab-usive global dialogue. First, delving deeply into personal ab-usive somatic experience in the hope of finding a conversation that will reach out to others is a double bind for a/r/tography. It is daunting to attempt to create artifacts that inscribe one’s own personal experience of sensory, qualitative relationships that will later serve as the basis for either further art-making or linguistic interpretation. Aspirations can fall short. The most common ABER failure is solipsistic work that may have deep personal resonance for the maker but fails to make Barone’s leap in generating outside conversations. Spivak warns that an uncritical liberal audience can mask this aesthetic failure. A work of a/r/tography that contributes to global dialogue must demonstrate an aesthetic of ab-use; it cannot be an abusive work: It must be one that is agreeable and generates polite acceptance within the community of a/r/tographers. Second, Dewey offers a criterion for judging aesthetic achievement: A work of art must reorganize space and time (1989 [1934], p. 29). Similarly, a/r/tographic research needs to reorder perception—the opening that our vision beholds (Heidegger, 1971 [1936]). It needs to reconfigure how we see and feel the ebb and flow of events. Personal testimony is insufficient; it needs to be critical (Denzin, 2005). Spaces of pre-linguistic action are sites of inquiry. Actions reorder relationships; inquiry applies inferential reasoning to express understandings from these relationships. While aesthetic objects do not have a single fi xed discoverable, inscribed meaning, actions have consequences. Aesthetics is a discipline for learning to hone interpretation, to get better at the ability to conduct inquiry as the basis for imagining repeated iterations of new possibilities. As we are driven to see qualities anew, to construct new possibilities of inscription, we have

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hope of moving closer—perhaps to better appreciate, if never to fully align—with those who are culturally other. The work must move us into conversation with others. Such a goal promotes a Deweyian conception of education as fostering growth. In contrast, Spivak offers a darker view of globalization that challenges belief in a Deweyian purpose of education. If, as educators, we continue to believe in the concept of a curriculum, a positive structure designed with forethought by a classroom teacher that students experience, how could such a regime be anything but a servant of globalization, forcing conformity of students to capital and data? To Spivak, Dewey’s reordering of space and time could result in a continuation of globalization as an aesthetics of abuse. For her, an ab-use curriculum of aesthetics is a guerrilla curriculum that challenges an imposed hegemony. Yet, Spivak holds that aesthetic education can be more than isolated series of anarchistic acts. There is a possibility in acts of ab-use, centered in qualitative, somatic experience, of forging authentic shared common purpose. This is Spivak’s double bind: Educational promotion of acts of resistance can never be captured with a planned scope and sequence of curriculum, yet our attempts to create pockets of resistance themselves become a kind of scope and sequence. This double bind challenges my own conceptions of ABER. In previous writings, I have insisted that a responsibility of ABER is to produce a product that gives us insight into problems of education (Riddett-Moore & Siegesmund, 2012; Siegesmund & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2008). In my own research, I have argued for framing aesthetics, within the context of education, as a philosophy of care and responsible choice (Phillips & Siegesmund, In press; Siegesmund, 2010). I have made a case for the usefulness of aesthetics, which appears to run counter to Spivak’s aesthetics of ab-use. It also runs counter to Jacques Rancière’s call for the removal of all utilitarian expectations from art (2009). Here is the double bind. We cannot dictate care as a course objective and claim that we teach students to care. We cannot teach students to be responsible anymore than we can teach students to have an experience. However, we can risk teaching in ways that students might care, might grow into responsibility, and might have insights into

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authentic moments of ab-use through somatic experience. Dewey claimed we learn as we are lured. Teachers set lures and snares. We have hopes, but hopes are not the same as the measurable learning outcomes that educational authorities increasingly demand. Thus, we become guerilla educators of ab-use. This leads to the third consideration. A/r/tography faces the same double bind as a research methodology of ab-use. A research proposal in a/r/tography cannot declare its usefulness, for to do so would be an abuse of aesthetics. Yet, the a/r/tographer must find a way where the work opens into authentic dialogue with others that reaches past ABER’s core group of initiates. The work must reorder space and time. In short, it must find its way to being useful. Thus, a research prospectus in a/r/tography cannot say what it will do. It cannot even say what it will risk, for to say what is at risk is to limit risk, thereby eviscerating it. In the a/r/tographic novel Seeing Red (Sameshima, 2007), the doctoral candidate does not complete her a/r/tographic dissertation; she disappears, presumably committing suicide. Real risk invites chaos and failure. This becomes a double bind, as a research prospectus is a contract to prevent failure.

Moving Forward with A/r/tography Dewey dismissed aesthetics as a philosophy of beauty and preference as these also contribute to anesthesia. Instead, art was the recognition of felt relationships. In these relationships, a whole is not a conclusion; it is a proposition of a new possibility. The recognition of felt relationships propels us into further action. Recognition and reflection on felt relationships may lead to acts of care (Siegesmund, 2010). Aesthetics is not sitting back and appreciating. Aesthetics teaches perceiving the intimate and global relationships that bond us as well as bind us and accepting the responsibility for those relationships. A/r/tography is a distinctive form of arts-based research in that it acknowledges essential data in the research study has to be made by the researcher. This is more than reshaping data in poetic forms. It is the recognition that the researcher must make the invisible visible. For Dewey, this would be going beyond the limits of recognition to achieve perception. For Spivak, this is

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seeing and manifesting places of disruption in seemingly ordered patterns. For Dewey, aesthetic perception passes through recognition to achieve higher insight. For Spivak, aesthetic perception is an act of deconstruction that opens doors to new possibilities. In both cases, there is an appeal that our research must deal with authentic human sensory response. Thus, through Dewey and Spivak, we can further understand a/r/tography as a research methodology uniquely suited to developing aesthetic inquiry that risks caring, as caring is action stemming from being-in-relation to one’s self, other sentient creatures, and objects unfolding in space and time. These nonlinguistic and linguistic acts of ab-usive responsibility that are open to failure, in the hope of global dialogue, are the measure of our work. A/r/tography, and other ABER methodologies, make this distinctive contribution to qualitative research in a time of anaesthetizing globalization.

References A rnall, G., Gandolfi, L., & Zaramella, E. (2012). Aesthetics and politics revisited: An interview with Jacques Rancière. Critical Inquiry, 38, 289–297. Atk inson, P. (2012). Modernism, postmodernism and a potential failure of nerve. Paper presented at the Eighth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 17. Banks, M. (2001). Visual methods in social research. London: Sage.

Barone, T. (2000). Aesthetics, politics, and educational inquiry. New York: Peter Lang. Barone, T. (2001). Touching eternity. New York: Teachers College Press.

Beer, R., Irwin, R. L., Grauer, K., & Xiong, G. (2010). Research and creation: Socially-engaged art in the city of Richgate project. International Journal of Education Through Art, 6, 213–227.

Behar, R. (2008). Between poetry and anthropology: Searching for home. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (pp. 55–71). New York Routledge. Bickel, B., Springgay, S., Beer, R., Irwin, R. L., Grauer, K., & Xiong, G. (2010). A/r/tographic collaboration as radical relatedness. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 10, 86–102.

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Bow ie, A. (2003). Aesthetics and subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Denzin, N. K. (2005). Emancipatory discourses and the ethics and politics of interpretation. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 933–958). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Derrida, J. (1998 [1967]). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dewey, J. (1931). Qualitative thought. In Philosophy and civilization (pp. 93–116). New York: Minton, Balch & Company. Dewey, J. (1958 [1929]). Experience and nature (2nd ed.). New York: Dover.

Dewey, J. (1986 [1933]). How we think. In J. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 8: 1933, pp. 105–352). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, J. (1988 [1929]). The quest for certainty. In J. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 4: 1929, pp. 1–250). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1989 [1934]). Art as experience. In J. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 10: 1934, pp. 1–400). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Eisner, E. W. (1991). The enlightened eye: Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. New York: Macmillan. Eisner, E. W. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gadamer, H. G. (1975). Truth and method. London: Sheed & Ward.

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York: Teachers College Press. Grosz, E. A. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1971 [1936]). The origin of the work of art. In A. Hofstadter (Trans.), Poetry, language, thought (pp. 17–87). New York: Harper & Row.

Hirsch, E. D., Kett, J. F., & Trefi l, J. S. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. Boston: Houghton Miffl in.

Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. W. (1994 [1944]). Dialectic of enlightenment. New York: Continuum.

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Kant, I. (1929 [1781]). Critique of pure reason (N. K. Smith, Trans.). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kaplan, A. (1989). Introduction. In John Dewey, the later works, 1925–1953: Art as experience (Vol. 10: 1934, pp. vii–xxxiii). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books. Law rence-Lightfoot, S. & Davis, J. H. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. McNiff, S. (1998). Art-based research. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Norris, J. (2009). Playbuilding as qualitative research: The collective creation of dramatice representation. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc. Phillips, L. & Siegesmund, R. (In press). Teaching what we value: Care as an outcome of aesthetic education. In T. Costantino & B. White (Eds.), Aesthetics, empathy, and education. New York: Peter Lang. Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography: Images, media, and representation in research (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Rancière, J. (2009). Aesthetics and its discontents (S. Corcoran, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

R iddett-Moore, K. & Siegesmund, R. (2012). Arts-based research: Data are constructed, not found. In S. Klein (Ed.), Action research: Plain and simple, (pp. 105–132). New York: Palgrave. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Saldaña, J. (2005). Ethnodrama: An anthology of reality theatre. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Sameshima, P. (2007). Seeing red: A pedagogy of parallax. Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press.

Siegesmund, R. (2010). Aesthetics as a curriculum of care and responsible choice. In T. Costantino & B. White (Eds.), Essays on aesthetic education for the 21st century (pp. 81–92). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.

Siegesmund, R. & Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2008). The tensions of arts-based research reconsidered: The promise for practice. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (pp. 231–246). New York: Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (2012). An aesthetic education in the era of globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Springgay, S., Irwin, R. L., Leggo, C., & Gouzouasis, P. (Eds.). (2008). Being with a/r/tography. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.

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Chapter 8

Beyond the Autoethnography versus Ironist Debates Using Charles Sanders Peirce and Cornel West to Envision an Alternative Inquiry Practice Jerry Lee Rosiek

What I am going to argue is that the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William James—but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact. —Latour (2004)

Ontology is a conjuration. —Derrida (1994)

The more reflexive branches of qualitative research scholarship seem to have arrived at a sort of impasse in recent years. By reflexive, I mean those traditions of research that direct some part of their analysis at the social and cultural location of the author as a means of qualifying their claims and inferences. By impasse, I mean conversations have settled into predictable scripts of objection and response that provide diminishing illumination. Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 157–180. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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By impasse, I also mean a condition of possibility, because the growing sense that well-worn habits of thought and analysis have exhausted themselves is inspiring a new wave of methodological creativity and risk taking. There have been two primary ways in which the idea of reflexivity has been theorized and methodologically enacted over the last two decades. The first approach rejects the totalizing authority of positivism and postpositivism in favor of appeals to the more limited authority of lived experience as a ground for knowledge. We can include in this broad category developments such as standpoint theory, action research, testimonio, and autoethnography. Although there are significant differences between these theoretical and methodological movements, they all share a commitment to resisting the way narrow hegemonic conceptions of knowledge pursue epistemic consensus at the cost of ignoring or silencing significant swaths of human concern. Each seeks to avoid these mistakes by situating knowledge claims within the personal, social, and/or cultural contexts that give the experience of knowing its meaning. I will refer to these approaches, not uncharitably, as experience-hugger theories. The other major approach similarly rejects the totalizing authority of positivism and postpositivism by calling into question the very process of representation itself. Drawing on poststructuralist semiotic theory, it calls attention to the way all knowledge claims are irreducibly mediated by signs, language, and discourses. Acknowledgment of such mediation implies that direct reference to the objects of experience is impossible. As an alternative, this approach recommends cultivating an ironic regard for all representations of our experience. We can include in this broad category methodological developments such as deconstructive textual analysis, genealogical social analysis, parodic representations, and polyvocal texts. Although there are significant differences between these analytic and representational practices, they all share a commitment to problematizing the metaphysical overreach of positivist, interpretivist, and critical conceptions of knowledge. Each seeks to avoid this overreach through inquiry practices that produce aporia instead of certainty. I will refer to these approaches, not uncharitably, as irony-hugger theories.

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Mutual Critiques Although both experience-hugger and irony-hugger approaches to reflexivity share a commitment to critiquing naive approaches to empiricism, they leverage those critiques in very different—almost incommensurable—ways. The former invoke the importance of more disciplined attention to the qualities of experience as it is actually lived as a way of destabilizing and displacing ideologically procrustean social analysis. The latter call into question the very possibility of representing experience in authoritative ways as a means of destabilizing hegemonic forms of knowing and creating conditions for less agonistic inquiry practices. This foundational difference has given rise to a parallel literature of mutual commentary and critique between these two communities of thought. On the one hand, irony-huggers have warned against the limitations of appeals to experience as a way to contribute to social transformation. The project of liberating the voice of oppressed communities through testimonio, acts of coming “out,” or the claiming of standpoints, presumes that a suppressed voice/identity/subject exists whose visibility or audibility will constitute a form of transformation. Such appeals fail to acknowledge that the experiences that would be voiced are not “natural.” They are themselves the products of social and historical processes that need to be questioned. Consequently, they risk reproducing the inherited social forms and practices that they purport to transform (e.g., Butler, 1993, 2004; Mazzei & Jackson, 2009; Scott, 1991; Sedgewick, 1990). As Scott (1991) contends: What could be truer after all than a subject’s own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation—as a foundation on which analysis is based—that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference. By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodox history, these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded the consideration of difference in the first place. They take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference. (p. 777)

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Autoethnography, although less consistently focused on projects of liberation than the aforementioned methodologies, is subject to similar critiques. This method often implies that the autobiographical voice is somehow more transparent than other modes of representation. It assumes that recounting the researcher’s first-person perspective of events avoids the distorting mistake of universalizing the scientistic “view from nowhere” (Haraway, 1988; Nagel, 1989). The rhetorical construction of a self in an autoethnographic text, however, is no less the product of culturally and socially contingent discourses than is the imperious rhetoric of naive empiricism. Therefore, the implication of transparency in the first-person voice involves its own form of naturalized distortion (Houle, 2009; Lather, 1991, 2006; Mazzei & Jackson, 2009). The most important priority of reflexive analysis, irony-huggers allege, is not to replace the authority of narrow positivist conceptions of the evidence with more holistic, localized, or political conceptions of epistemic authority. Instead, the priority should be historicizing the authority of all forms of the knowing subject. On the other hand, experience-huggers have questioned the efficacy of an analytic focused centrally on ironism. Even when willing to grant that processes of representation are irreducibly mediated, these scholars question the overriding significance of this observation. Irony-centered scholarship lives on the promise of some new possibility of analysis and action yet to come. But eventually, that promise needs to be realized in the form of specific methodological practices. This enactment will require some ontological point of leverage—however contingent, qualified, or heuristic. Lived experience, it is argued, provides just such a point of analytic leverage. Citing the reality of this experience need not be tantamount to denying its historical contingency: Somatic experience can contend with discursively organized perceptions even when it is constituted in relation to the latter. We need not rigidly enumerate or prioritize these layers of experience to recognize that it is the thickness, the multiplicity, and in particular, the tensions within experience that make experience a resource for seeing differently. Narratives that reckon with these tensions do not report spontaneous consciousness, but create images and narrative forms for rearticulating experience in such

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a way that narrated images enable the writer to confront those tensions more constructively. (Stone Mediatore, 2003, p. 130)

The importance of personal experience as a source of insight becomes especially salient when considering the suffering caused by various forms of social stratification. It is often the primary (and sometimes only) rhetorical leverage available to people caught on the underside of hegemonic social systems. Living within oppressive exclusions—racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, class stratification—often gives rise to vernacular theory claims about collective identities. These identity politics have been among the most effective ways of organizing political responses that transform institutions. Making the abandonment of such claims the prerequisite for valid social analysis without having an alternative collective political praxis can seem at best premature, at worst irresponsible (Hames-Garcia, 2011; Moya, 2000; West, 1993). I find much that is persuasive in these two streams of scholarship on reflexivity. I am also persuaded that their mutual critiques of one another have merit. The apparent contradictions between them seem less necessary or inevitable than the product of the conditions inherent in ideal of reflexivity itself. The stance that all forms of knowing need to be historically and culturally situated would apply even to scholarship on reflexivity. In other words, the apparent immediacy of experience, the urgency of political engagement, and ironic suspensions of poststructuralism are all practices of knowing that make sense in particular context relevant to certain ends and purposes. Each practice of knowing is contextual and relational, serving different purposes in different settings. Acknowledgment of this would seem to point to a diagnosis of the current impasse. The effort to work out a resolution between these reflexive traditions at a generalized level contradicts the very principle of reflexivity. Moreover, it seems to be a consequence of a nostalgia for a privileged generalizable subject position—be it ironic or constituted in political solidarity—from which all practices of knowing might be evaluated. It also suggests the need for a more explicitly context specific and purpose driven (teleological) methodological practice.

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Promising New Developments The tensions just described have been widely discussed in a variety of literatures. As early as 1989, Cornel West was working out a “neo-Gramscian pragmatism” as an alternative to totalizing Marxism and relativist postmodernism. In an interview that ranged from his reflections on Deleuze and Dewey to hip hop and the liturgy of Black Protestantism, West remarked that:

Without “totality,” our politics become emaciated, our politics become dispersed, our politics become nothing but existential rebellion. Some heuristic (rather than ontological) notion of totality is in fact necessary if we are to talk about mediations, interrelations, interdependencies, about totalizing forces in the world. In other words, a measure of synecdochical thinking must be preserved, thinking that would still invoke relations of parts to the whole. … It is true, on the other hand, that we can no longer hang on to crude orthodox “totalities” such as the idea of superstructure and base. (West & Stephanson, 1989, p. 270)

More recently, Patti Lather—a scholar whose application of feminist poststructuralist theory to social science research practice has helped shape the contemporary field of qualitative methodology—has remarked on the limitations of the strong social constructivist theories that shaped her earlier works. She writes:

Yet the scientificity is destroyed if all the sciences are looked at only socially. The thingness of the thing has to be taken into account. …To recognize the resistance of natural objects to social explanation is to call for a new respect for the adequacy of objects. … Another type of scientificity is needed for the social sciences, a postpositivist, interpretive scientificity that takes into account the ability of the object to object to what is told about it. Here objectivity renders objects capable of resisting social explanation. (Lather, 2006, p. 71)

The last few years has seen many poststructuralist-influenced methodologists looking to reaffirm the obduracy of objects in social science research without returning to a naive empiricism. This search has led some to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012; Tuck, 2010), to object to relations theory

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inspired by Bruno Latour’s sociology of knowledge (Lather, 2006; Lury & Wakeford, 2012; Mol, 2002), and to Karen Barad’s new feminist materialism (Bennett, 2010; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; MacLure, 2011). A similar evolution has been underway among standpoint theorists, who, in recent years, have shifted from an epistemic argument for the salience of identity in knowledge projects (Harding, 1998), through a postpositivist ontological defense of realist conceptions of identity in social analysis (Moya & Hames-Garcia, 2000), to a project-based conception of the utility of identity constructs for the study of culture and society. Th is latter, most contemporary iteration of standpoint theories, shifts the primary justification for listening to the experiences of oppressed classes from a claim that it will provide a more comprehensively objective description of social reality to a claim that such listening makes possible social transformations that will have real and desirable consequences for human communities:

Project identities attempt to redefine a group’s position and role in society, but unlike resistance identities, they expand outward in pursuit of radical transformation of society as a whole. In other words, their aim is not simply to redress the situation of one group, although they remain organized around that identity. (Hames-Garcia, 2011, p. 50)

Some of the most compelling alternatives to the realist/ social constructionist binaries in which contemporary social analysis seems to have stalled have been developed by scholars examining the intersections of multiple forms of oppression. Maria Lugones (2003) has offered the concept of “the limen” to describe an ontologically productive cultural borderlands in which an “active subject” can produce new social realities and possibilities. In his book Crip Theory, Robert McRuer (2006) explores the intersections of deeply anti-foundationalist queer theory and the more corporeally grounded themes of disability theory. From within this intersection, he sees the need for “contingent universalization” (p. 131) of resistant identities and a universal embrace of disability as a desirable and inevitable subject position. In her essay “Queer Theory and Native Studies,”

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Andrea Smith (2011) explores the productive tensions between the cosmopolitanism of queer theory and the anti-colonialist localism of indigenous studies. She cautions against the way the post-identity subjectless critique of queer theory often reinscribes the individualist subjectivities of settler society and overlooks the salience of relations to land and tradition. On the other hand, she calls for Native Studies to develop a “radical Indigenous subjectless critique” that exposes the workings of settler logic across a variety of fields (Smith, 2011, p. 60). We can discern at least two themes in this new wave of reflections on the ideal of methodological reflexivity. The first is a shift of attention away from epistemological concerns and a turn toward ontological concerns. For most of the modern era, epistemology was considered an antidote for unexamined or procrustean metaphysical assumptions. In the late 20th century, however, many philosophers and methodologists became convinced that epistemology had not actually liberated us from metaphysics and that all epistemologies carried with them implicit metaphysical assumptions about the nature of objects, subjects, and processes of representation. Initially, this led to the crisis of historicism in the sciences, the crisis of representation in anthropology, and the emergence of the field of the sociology of knowledge. From within these epistemic crises, the question arises: Why attempt to avoid metaphysics if we are so certain to commit metaphysics? An ontological pluralism seems to be emerging as a better alternative to both the monolithic metaphysics of the distant past and the more recent enlightenment aversion to metaphysics. Within an ontological pluralism, processes of inquiry would be less about revealing the one true reality, and more about navigating multiple possible practices of relation (Decena, 2011; Lather, 2006; Lugones, 2006; Sandoval, 2000). Metaphysics becomes a condition of simultaneous interiority and exteriority, deeply historicized and subject to change. A second related theme in this emerging literature is a focus on temporality and the future consequences of processes of inquiry. Lacking the possibility of a transcendent subject position from which to offer descriptions or a single reality in which to anchor representations of our social world, social inquiry becomes a movement within the stream of subject-object relations.

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Naturalized objects and subject positions are critically interrogated, not as a means of revealing the true subjects and objects behind an illusion, but as a means of opening up new possibilities for practices of being. New subject positions are forged, not as an expression of essence, but as means to projects of social transformation. This shift from description to intervention means that inquiry has an irreducible normative component. If inquiry is the practice of generating new ontological relations, and if there are many possible relations to which we might aspire, then inquiry will be guided by preference at least as much as necessity. Further, if the warrant of these relations is to be grounded in the quality of the transformations they effect on persons, communities, and other agents, then the norms guiding inquiry will be—at least in part—moral norms.

The Relevance of Pragmatism to Contemporary Methodological Discussions In the remainder of this chapter, I wish to draw attention to features of classic and contemporary pragmatic philosophy that have a great deal to offer this conversation about reflexive research methodologies. Classic pragmatism shares with irony-hugger approaches to methodology an anti-foundationalist conception of epistemology. However, it shares with experience-hugger approaches to methodology a respect for lived experience as a necessary ground of contingent knowledge projects. And it shares with the new directions being taken by both these streams of methodological literature an ontological pluralism and a futureoriented conception of meaning. The pragmatic philosophical canon is broad. There is considerable variation within in the classic texts and even more in the contemporary developments that build on that classic literature. Additionally, in the last decade there has been a renaissance of interest in pragmatism among social science methodologists in a variety of fields.1 A comprehensive survey of these variations and recent developments is beyond the scope of a single chapter, therefore I will focus my remarks on two specific aspects of the pragmatic literature—Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics and Cornel West’s notion of prophetic pragmatism.

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I will use these ideas to offer a modified conception of performativity as it applies to social science research methodology. This, in turn, will be used to point an expanded conception of responsibility in research and inquiry practices that can begin to meet those responsibilities. Peirce’s Semiotics

At a formal level, the irony-huggers often get the better of the methodological debate. The poststructuralist argument that our experience of the world is irreducibly mediated by history and various cultural discourses is difficult to deny. Even more difficult to deny is the assertion that whatever the source of experience, our representations of it are mediated by the historical and cultural contingency of the language and symbols with which we communicate. Scholars who find merit in experience-centric social analysts regularly acknowledge as much (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2006; Hames-Garica, 2011; Houle, 2009; Stone Mediatore, 2003). The resistance to an exclusive reliance on irony-centric modes of analysis comes less from logical objections than from a sense that they err too much on the side of ontological caution and thereby fail to provide means to respond to the way the equally undeniable materiality of experience surprises and shapes us (Barad, 2007; de Man, 1983; Hames-Garcia, 2011; Moya, 2000; Smith, 2011; West, 1989). The formal analytic advantages of irony-hugger analysis seem to me to derive almost entirely its semiotic conception of meaning—the idea that the relation between knowledge and reality is mediated by signs and that a theory of the operation of signs is needed in order to clarify that relation. Poststructuralist social theory has its roots in the dyadic semiotic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. It is called “dyadic” because, according to Saussure, a sign always had two components, a signifier and something being signified. Saussure was a linguist. Linguistic signifiers, according to Saussure, are only rarely poetic and are more often established by convention. In other words, linguistic terms have an arbitrary relation to the things they signify and get their meaning through culturally and historically contingent conventions. This arbitrariness

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introduces a foundational relativism into his theory of meaning. This relativism ultimately requires an anti-foundationalist or ironic approach to the analysis of linguistic representations. Later structuralists and poststructuralists such as LeviStrauss, Foucault, and Derrida extended Saussure’s theories, offering that all human meaning operated like a language. They developed new approaches to social analysis based on that premise. Saussure’s anti-foundationalist linguistics became an anti-foundationalist theory of culture, sociality, and being. It is through this relativistic theory of signs that poststructuralist scholars have not only asserted the discursively mediated nature of our understanding of the world, but also provided detailed analyses of that mediation through cultural genealogies, deconstructions, parodic representations, and so on. Experience-huggers also acknowledge the mediated nature of our knowledge of the world but have provided no methodological architecture of similar reach and precision largely due to a lack of an underlying semiotic component to their social theories. This difference is often treated as a necessary feature of the differences between irony-hugger and experience-hugger approaches to methodology. This seems inaccurate to me. Experience-centric approaches to social analysis could not make use of Saussure’s dyadic semiotics because of its strong relativist implications. For personal experiences of meaning to provide a source of leverage against hegemonic systems of meaning, it cannot simply be regarded as an arbitrary convention.2 Saussure’s theory of semiotics, however, is not the only theory of semiotics available to contemporary methodologists. One alternative was developed ten years before Saussure’s theories by American philosopher and chemist, Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce, the founder of the pragmatist philosophical tradition, developed a semiotic theory based on his work as a scientist. He did not use language as the model for all signs. In addition to symbolic signs established by arbitrary convention, Peirce included in his theory two types of non-linguistic signs: (1) iconic signs (such as drawings or photographs) that share qualities with the things they signify; and (2) indexical signs (like weather vanes or thermometers), which have a causal relationship to the things they

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signify. Additionally, Peirce’s conception of the sign was triadic. Its third element involves an embodied interpreter of the sign. The implications of this more inclusive theory of semiotics for cultural and social analysis are potentially vast. A comprehensive inventory of these implications is beyond the scope of this chapter.3 Here, I will focus on two key implications of Peirce’s philosophy that are relevant to the emerging conversations about reflexive research methodologies. First, Peirce’s triadic sign includes the experience of an interpreter as a necessary component in the generation of meaning. All interpretation, according to Peirce, is a form of first-person experience. This experience is not taken as transparent or outside of time and culture. The practice of interpretation is made possible only through socially and historically conditioned habits of interpretation. In other words, Peirce provides an anti-foundationalist theory of the relevance of first-person experience to processes of inquiry. Second, the broader conception of signs in Peirce’s theory points to a more robust conception of the possible purposes and products of inquiry. Two types of inquiry will be broadly familiar. Logical, critical, and formal analysis focuses on clarifying our understanding of the relationship between symbolic signs. Empirical research involves the study of indexical signs for what they can teach us about causal relations within the stream of our experiences. A third type is less commonly found in social science practice—though it will be familiar to the growing community of arts-based researchers. It involves creative exploration of new ways to represent the possible qualities of human experience and sociality. Through artistic modes of representation, an inquirer can introduce new ways we can individually and collectively experience the world, which, in turn, makes new forms of empirical and critical inquiry possible. More significant, perhaps, is that Peirce’s theory does not treat these three types of inquiry as ultimately separable. All semiotic activity involves iconic, indexical, and symbolic elements, even when centrally focused on one aspect of our experience. This would mean that all research representations are subject to critique and refinement in all three of the above dimensions. No one dimension of evaluation transcends the others. For example, all

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representations of empirical research on causal and material relations would ultimately be expressed through symbolic signs like language and thus be constrained by the cultural and ideological limits encoded in those languages. Those constraints would need interrogation. Empirical research is also ultimately constrained by the qualities that the researcher is capable of noticing and interpreting. Those habits of attention would need creative expansion if they are not to become insular traps. Similarly, formal inquiry—such as philosophical or theoretic analysis—often denies its own corporeality by pretending to a transcendence, be it platonic or ironic. All formal inquiry, however, is possessed of phenomenological qualities that can become habituated and selfinsulating and thus need indexical checks and creative renewal. Finally, all arts-based research ultimately uses materials and refers to actual experiences that are subject to the brute resistances of causality. Artistic representations are often expressed in language (e.g., fiction) or through the use of other recognizable symbols (e.g., familiar cultural references). It is constrained by the very same cultural and ideological habits that make the artistic representations legible. Thus, no artistic representation of experience can claim phenomenological transparency and all such representations, according to this view, would be in need of critical interrogation. In short, Peirce’s semiotics implies that an expanded and multifaceted sense of responsibility is needed in all social science inquiry. This is, admittedly, messier than the more compartmentalized standards of inquiry that define our more established disciplines. However, the boundaries between disciplines have been giving way to more interdisciplinary conceptions of scholarship for some time now. What has been lacking is a vocabulary for negotiating the real differences between disciplinary practices that neither privileges one over the other, nor collapses their differences into a single epistemic or ideological standard. Peirce offered a heuristic for negotiating this kind of openended terrain of inquiry. He recognized early in his work that inquiries that attempt to ground claims in some unmediated access to extra-human reality—what we might today call a metaphysics of presence—is not possible. As an alternative, Peirce (1878) offered

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his pragmatic maxim, which informed and gave a name to the philosophical movement known as pragmatism: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (p. 294). The implication of this shift in our conception of knowledge and reference has been the subject of a century’s worth of scholarship. Again, summarizing this literature is beyond my scope here. What I wish to draw attention to is how Peirce retains a realism in his conception of anti-foundationalist inquiry, but it is a futureoriented realism. These discussions about the implications of an interpretation for our future actions and the conceivable consequences of those actions would necessarily be open ended, subject to revision. They would be informed by tentative normative as well as ontological commitments—or perhaps they would better be called practices—which would themselves be subject to revision based on inquiry. John Dewey (1981 [1931]) summarized the implications of this shift better than most: Pragmatism, thus, presents itself as an extension of historical empiricism, but with this fundamental difference, that it does not insist upon antecedent phenomena but upon consequent phenomena; not upon the precedents but upon the possibilities of action. … Pragmatism thus has a metaphysical implication. The doctrine of the value of consequences leads us to take the future into consideration. And this taking into consideration of the future takes us to the conception of a universe whose evolution is not finished, or a universe which is still, in James’ term “in the making,” “in the process of becoming,” of a universe up to a certain point still plastic. … This consideration confirms the human and moral importance of thought and of its reflective operation in experience. (p. 50; emphasis added)

This shift of the focus of inquiry from metaphysical essences to the real contingent consequences of our interpretations of experience sounds similar themes to the project-based turn in recent standpoint theory. It also resonates with the shift in more ironycentered methodological literature toward Deleuzian theories of becoming and new feminist materialism.

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The classical pragmatists, however, did not develop the methodological implications of their philosophical theories in any detail. Nor did they explore its relevance to more radical projects of political and cultural transformation that are of central concern in the social sciences today.4 To find resources for that work, we need to turn to more contemporary pragmatist philosophers.

Contemporary Pragmatism, Cornel West, and the Politics of Transformative Social Analysis In the last decade, there has been a renaissance of interest in pragmatist philosophy among social scientists frustrated with the methodological options made available by other theoretical frameworks.5 Scholars in fields as diverse as political science (Berk, 2012, Forthcoming; Wolfe, 1998), sociology (Abbot, 2001; Baert, 2005, 2007; Collins, 2011; Morgan, 2007), applied psychology (Cornish & Gillespie, 2009; Giacobbi, 2005; Jayanti, 2011), economics (Khalil, 2004); education (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2006; Maxcy, 2003; Rosiek, 2003; Rosiek & Atkinson, 2005); and organizational theory (Matthews, 2006; Metcalfe, 2008; Miller, 2004) have been exploring the relevance of pragmatism for social science methodology. At the same time, there has been a transformation of the pragmatist philosophical tradition itself. Part of this transformation has been retrospective. The canon of pragmatic philosophy has been expanded by scholars such a Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996), Cornel West (1989), Scott Pratt (2002, 2004), Lee McBride (2008), and Erin McKenna (2001) to include the influence of early feminist philosophers, Harlem renaissance intellectuals, civil rights activists, ecological activists, interactions between Indigenous Americans and European settler society, and others. This historical revision of American philosophy has located pragmatism in a broader tradition of more radical political action. Another part of this transformation has been precipitated by the engagement of pragmatist philosophers with late 20th-century developments in continental philosophy—especially Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Latour (Hickman, 2007; Koopman, 2009; Rorty, 1989; Sorrell, 2004; Sullivan, 2001).

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In the remainder of this chapter, I focus specifically on Cornel West. I do so in part because West is among the most visible figures of late 20 th-century pragmatism and thus serves as a useful example of the general relevance of this literature. I do so more specifically because West’s philosophy grounds an anti-foundationalist social analysis in a materially substantive conception of experience and a normatively laden conception of the future. Interpreting Dewey, but arguably describing his own view, West writes: Philosophy is a mode not of knowledge but of wisdom. And wisdom is conviction about values, a choice to do something, a preference for this rather than that form of living. Wisdom involves discriminating judgments and a desired future. It presupposes some grasp of conditions and consequences, yet it has no special access to them. Rather methods of access must be scrutinized in order to decide which ones are most reliable for the task at hand. In this way, Dewey does not devalue knowledge, but only situates it in experience. (1989, p. 86)

West builds on this conception of philosophy by appropriating the notion of prophecy from Christian liturgy to inform what he calls a “prophetic pragmatism.” His use of the term “prophetic” does not refer to mere predictions of the future but rather to a mode of address and analysis that seeks to produce the possibility of a transformed future: Prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past. In this sense, the praxis of prophetic pragmatism is tragic action with revolutionary intent, usually reformist consequences and always visionary outlook. (West, 1989, p. 229) West is not alone in discerning agency for radical cultural transformation in the pragmatic philosophical tradition. He is somewhat unique, however, in trying to develop an intellectual practice that goes beyond description of possibilities to a performative mode of speaking and writing that seeks to interpellate subjects as agents of creative ameliorative action. It is this aspect of his work that is particularly relevant to contemporary conversations about reflexive research methodology. West’s appropriation

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of pragmatism both models and provides a justification for the project-based, political, and subject-transforming direction of recent methodological scholarship.

Conclusion: Implications for Methodological Practice It is not an accident that interest is increasing in pragmatic philosophy among both methodologists who seek to leverage the immediate reality of personal experience against hegemonic ideologies and those who seek to relativize the authority of all representational processes as a way of undermining such ideological effects. Both of these communities of thought are undergoing a shift from theorizing primarily focused on the problematics of description to theorizing focused more on the ontological generation of future possibility. Both groups are also searching for a research practice that through descriptions of our experience seeks to open up possibilities for the transformation of that experience. Pragmatism is a philosophy framed on the ontological substance of future possibility. If contemporary methodological debates are caught between the Scylla of needing to risk essentialism for the sake of realist claims that can leverage action and the Charybdis of a relativizing ironism that preserves the possibility of new analysis at the cost of deferring specific normative commitments in the present, then pragmatism offers a way to think outside of this double bind. Its pivot toward a pluralist ontology of the future collapses this apparent opposition without negating the need for critical debate. By locating discussions about the merits of representations in their future consequences, specious descriptions that contradict the empirical patterns in our experience and ideologically problematic descriptions of experience are subject to a similar critique. Both impair our ability to build a better future. Of course, which futures are desirable and possible given our available means remains a subject for contestation. But the debate ceases to pit concerns about commitment against concerns about premature closure. I have focused on Peirce in this essay because, in my estimation, it is the semiotic theory at the root of poststructuralism that made its anti-foundationalism so methodologically generative.

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Genealogy, deconstruction, and performative methodologies that link processes of representation with the production of human subjectivity require a semiotic theory. Peirce’s semiotics provides the analytical tools necessary to give methodological legs to pragmatist philosophy. His is a more inclusive semiotic theory, including reference to non-arbitrary sources of meaning but retaining the irreducible mediation of meaning as a central premise. The “colossal” methodological potential of this semiotic theory was alluded to by Peirce himself (Peirce, 1935 [1878], p. 454), but has yet to be developed in any systematic way by social science methodologists (Rosiek & Atkinson, 2005). I focused on Cornel West for three reasons. First, he is one of several scholars who provides a more inclusive revision of the pragmatist canon to include more politicized thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Second, he sees the value of pragmatic inquiry in its ability to frame inquiry undertaken in service to culturally and politically transformative projects. Third, he both enacts and gives a name—prophetic pragmatism—to a mode of analysis that performatively produces a subjectivity in its audience that, in part, constitutes the future possibilities being described. That name is prophetic pragmatism. The work of these two scholars, the edifice of literature of which they are a part, and the current conversations about reflexive methodologies in the social sciences all appear to be approaching a confluence of sorts. They point to the possibility of a methodological practice in which interpretations of social phenomena would be warranted, not by an implied exclusive correspondence to some preexisting metaphysical presence, but by the appeal of the ontological possibilities generated by an interpretation. Because the future is subject to change, in part due to our activities and inquiries, a methodology framed by pragmatist philosophy would be necessarily open-ended, always subject to revision. In this regard, it would resemble hermeneutic analysis but would be focused on future possibilities and infused with tentatively held normative commitments. I have referred to this future-oriented mode of inquiry as a “prometheutics.” At its best, such analysis would be performative in nature. It would not simply describe a possibility, but through acts of

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interpretation call us into a subject space that can contribute to the existence of the possibility. If all acts of interpretation are also incidental acts of cultural reproduction, then in this case the function of cultural reproduction or transformation would be selfconscious and deliberate aspect of the methodological practice. Debates about the merits of a representation would be simultaneously about fidelity to known patterns of experience, about the relative appeal of visions of the future, and about the degree to which the representation conjures identities, actions, and relations that contributes to the realization of possible futures. Such analytic activity, we should assume, would not produce new and possibly totalizing consensus about any particular topic of inquiry. In fact, in affirming an ontological pluralism it is likely to surface conflict that has been buried beneath presumptions of unified metaphysical foundations or shared visions for the future. It would, however, provide a path out of methodological debates trapped in narrow conceptions of the relationship between knowledge, reality, and action. Inquiry would no longer pretend to the stance of an advisable prelude to action but would take responsibility for being a particular form of culturally productive activity. Such inquiry would be grounded in humility by recognizing the radical contingency of the experiences by which it is inspired and informed. It would invite a wider range of representational styles and techniques. Finally, it would require a more activist bent from scholars by evaporating the insular descriptive perch on which much social science tends to rest. It would call social scientists to a greater responsibility than simple fidelity of description by locating the ultimate justification of our analysis in the transformations of human experience it helps make possible. All of this, of course, itself remains at the level of possibility. I am convinced, however, that these methodological possibilities are worth pursuing—especially in the current moment. With so much at stake, it seems that every effort should be made to develop available leads.

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Notes 1. For example, there is renewed interest in political science, education, sociology, and anthropology, and a welcome interest among philosophers in social science of scholars as diverse as Bruno Latour, Patricia Hill Collins, Paula Moya, and Cornel West.

2. Note that the political work of more irony-hugger methodologies is accomplished by problematizing the ontological and epistemic foundations of hegemonic systems of thought. 3. A thorough mapping of the differences between Saussurean semiotics as they have been appropriated by poststructuralists and Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics can be found in John Sherriff ’s excellent short book (1989). 4. Th is statement refers to the classic figures of American pragmatism, Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Herbert Meade, and perhaps Josiah Royce.

5. Th is would include frustrations with earlier unreflexive appropriations of pragmatist philosophy by the Chicago School of Sociology or anthropologists like Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz.

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Morgan, D. L. (2007). Paradigms lost and pragmatism regained: Methodological implications of combining qualitative and quantitative methods. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1, 48. Moya, P. (2000). Reclaiming identity. In P. Moya & M. Hames-Garcia (Eds.), Reclaiming identity (pp. 1–23). Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Pratt, S. L. (2004). Jane Addams: Bread and patriotism in time of war. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 28, 102–118. Rorty. R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rosiek J. (2003). A qualitative research methodology psychology can call its own: Dewey’s call for qualitative experimentalism. Educational Psychologist, 38, 165–175.

Rosiek J. & Atkinson, B. (2005). Bridging the divides: The need for a pragmatic semiotics of teacher knowledge research. Educational Theory, 55, 231–266.

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Chapter 9

Navigating the Terrain of Social Justice Multiple Voices in Mixed Methods Research Donna M. Mertens

Philosophical positions in social science research are used in various ways to address rigor, and these positions are also associated with different arguments to support the use of mixed methods research. Rigor in research methodology is integral to addressing issues of social justice, lest poorly conducted research yield inaccurate findings that can do more harm than good. In this chapter, I argue that mixed methods research holds the potential to address issues of social justice in ways that are not possible using a single methodology because it allows the researcher to present the complexities of the phenomenon under study with both quantitative and qualitative data. To this end, I explore the multiple voices associated with the shared territory of philosophical frameworks, views of rigor, justifications for mixed methods research, and implications for social justice. The major philosophical positions associated with mixed methods research include the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods when working from postpositivist, constructivist, pragmatic, or transformative paradigms (Mertens, 2010).

Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry edited by Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina, 181–193. © 2013 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Johnson (In press) also writes of dialectical pluralism as a philosophical stance that situates mixed methods research in a dynamic tension between the postpositivist and constructivist paradigms. These various philosophical positions share this point of agreement with regard to rigor: Serving social justice requires rigor in the form of credibility and credible evidence in that if our findings are not believable by accepted criteria, how can they be used as a basis to address inequities? Points of disagreement or tension arise because each paradigmatic position is associated with a different perspective on the purpose of research and the criteria used to determine rigor. For example, the postpositivists view rigor as derived from the validity associated with experimental designs and the validity and reliability of instruments used for data collection. Constructivists view rigor in terms of credibility (including triangulation) and dependability of evidence (i.e., that there is a data trail that supports the conclusions) (Lincoln, 2009). A researcher who works from a dialectical position seeks rigor through critical reflection between the different philosophical stances (Johnson, In press). The transformative paradigm defines rigor in terms of research that supports the pursuit of social justice and the furtherance of human rights (Mertens, 2009; Mertens & Wilson, 2012). The transformative paradigm holds that rigor in and of itself is meaningless if the questions and processes of the research are wrong, in the sense that they do not reflect the critical issues that will lead to social change. This brief discussion of rigor, mixed methods, and paradigms generates a few questions, such as: Are we still stuck in the paradigm wars with the incapability thesis? Is pragmatism the philosophical way forward or has it been inaccurately construed in mixed methods literature? Is the constructivist framing of mixed methods better suited than others to address social justice issues? How does the transformative paradigm contribute to the thinking about mixed methods for social justice purposes? In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on the overlap and tensions between the critical theory constructivist and transformative researchers because adherents of these two philosophical positions have been most closely associated with the role of research in addressing issues of social justice.

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Critical theory constructivists (e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 2011) and transformative researchers (Mertens, 2009) seem to agree on several points that resonate with social justice and social change. For example, both stress the importance of the inclusion of marginalized communities’ voices and that the goal of research is to address social inequities and promote social justice. Also, both emphasize the use of critical theories to guide thinking (e.g., feminist, critical race theory, indigenous theory, disability theory, queer theory, deafness rights theory, and human rights theory). There is also agreement on the essential need to include multiple voices through triangulation, whether this is viewed as crystals (Ellingson, 2011) or prisms (Mertens, 2009). Torrance (2012) describes the role of triangulation as a means to establish credibility of social science claims, not by consensus but as a way to reveal diversity and explanations of diversity. He suggests that qualitative researchers do this by means of member checks and respondent validation. In addition, researchers should include participants in setting the research agenda, developing questions, and constructing reports. This conceptualization of triangulation and its potential contribution to social justice is congruent with the writings of indigenous scholars (Chilisa, 2012), researchers in the American Sign Language community (Harris et al., 2009), feminists (Hesse-Biber, 2012), and transformative participatory action researchers (Brydon-Miller & Maguire, 2009). It is also important to recognize that several points of tension exist between the constructivists and transformative researchers in terms of a researcher’s ethical obligations and the potential for mixed methods research to contribute to improved social justice. First, Denzin (2012, p. 86) claims that: “Qualitative research scholars have an obligation to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive different. We are challenged to confront the facts of injustice, to make the injustices of history visible and hence open to change and transformation.” Denzin’s statement stimulates questions such as: Is the broader constructivist community in agreement with this statement? Must constructivists work to change the world? What about constructivist researchers who want to provide an accurate picture of what goes on in a classroom or in a home, rather than trying to address inequities? Are qualitative

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researchers the only breed that can conduct research that will lead to world change? Second, Denzin (2012) criticizes the way that mixed methods researchers use the pragmatic paradigm as a philosophical framing for their work. He asserts that mixed methods researchers have adopted a “what works” or practical consequences version of pragmatism, ignoring the fundamental beliefs associated with pragmatism as they were developed in the thinking of Dewey, James, Mead, and Peirce, as well as with neo-pragmatists such as Rorty, Habermas, and West. Based on this criticism, Denzin proposes a moratorium of sorts on mixed methods when he states: “Can we have a moratorium on mixed methods talk about designs and typologies and get back to the task at hand, which is changing the world?” (p. 85). And he continues by presenting the argument that the hope for a brighter future resides in renewed efforts to embed all our interpretive methodologies in expanded social justice discourses. These discourses will interrogate the ways in which power, ethics, and social justice intersect. Multiple models of justice will be explored. Feminist, communitarian ethics will be informed by empowerment ethics of specific indigenous and oppressed peoples. Indigenous and nonindigenous scholars will refine models of restorative justice that heal the wounds of globalization. They will develop new methodologies that better address the social and economic concerns of oppressed persons. (Denzin, 2012, p. 86)

Transformative Paradigm Here I argue that such a philosophical framing for research has already been developed in the form of the transformative paradigm, a philosophical framework that incorporates the use of mixed methodologies. Rather than relying exclusively on qualitative, interpretive researchers to explore this terrain, the transformative paradigm has already been used as a philosophical framing for research conducted by feminist, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities and those who are deaf, and other marginalized communities who seek to use research as a tool for increasing social justice. The transformative paradigm is

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constituted by four philosophical assumptions that align conceptually with those developed by Guba and Lincoln (1989, 2005): (1) axiological (the nature of ethics); (2) ontological (the nature of reality); (3) epistemological (the nature of knowledge and the relationship between the knower and that which would be known); and (4) methodological (the nature of systematic inquiry). The transformative axiological assumption explicitly posits that the nature of ethics lies in the potential the research has to improve social justice and further human rights. While a constructivist researcher can address social justice, the transformative researcher believes that this is essential to conducting ethical research. In order to address social justice and human rights, transformative researchers must be aware of the diversity of cultural beliefs, norms, and practices in the communities, especially as they reflect differences in access to power. The development of such a deep level of understanding is premised on the ability of the researcher to establish trusting relationships within the communities in which they work. Trust can be built when researchers enter communities humbly, respectfully, and with a desire to recognize the strengths and resilience within those communities, rather than focusing only on the negative, problematic aspects. Trust is also built by incorporating aspects of reciprocity into the research in the form of legitimate involvement and creation of knowledge that is found to be useful for social change purposes. Mixed methods approaches play an important role in making visible the differences in the communities in terms of culture, language, power, and inequities. For example, to understand the reason that HIV/AIDS infection is increasing in Botswana youth, researchers needed to collect both quantitative and qualitative data in ways that revealed the meaning of the disease in the youth’s life spaces, the prevalence of the disease by various demographic characteristics, and the youth’s knowledge about the disease (Chilisa, 2012).1 The primary investigator (Chilisa) is a person of Botswanan origin who hired and trained youth from the local communities as co-researchers in order to collect qualitative information about the youth’s experiences with HIV/AIDS. These data revealed that the youth’s experiences were characterized by a feeling of sadness based on the loss of loved ones,

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pleasure associated with having sex, and a sense of hopelessness for a meaningful future based on the death that was all around them. The quantitative data revealed that the disease prevalence was different based on characteristics such as age, gender, disability, tribal membership, economic status, educational level, and home and school language. The quantitative data also revealed that the majority of the youth already knew that either saying no to sex or using a condom were effective means to prevent the spread of the disease. The integration of these data allowed for a more complete picture of the power dynamics and inequities that had to be taken into account to develop a potentially effective intervention. Ontologically, the transformative paradigm raises questions about the nature of reality: Is there one reality that we know imperfectly? Are there many socially constructed realities? Are there many versions of reality that require us to delve deeply into understanding factors that lead us to accept one version of reality over another? What are the consequences of accepting one version of reality over another? Who is hurt if we accept multiple versions of reality or if we accept a “wrong/privileged” version of reality? The transformative ontological assumption holds that there are many versions of reality, but these versions emanate from the different social positions that we hold, such as race/ethnicity, gender, disability, deafness, indigeneity, religion, and the like. Throughout history, certain positionalities have been imbued with unearned privileges in terms of power to define what is real, (e.g., the rich, the powerful, colonizers, White males, nondisabled persons). The transformative researchers’ responsibility is to reveal the various positionalities that lead to different versions of reality and to challenge those versions of reality that further an oppressive status quo and to make visible those that further social justice. Mixed methods can play a role in equipping the transformative researcher to negotiate this ontological terrain that includes being able to challenge systemic discrimination and oppression. To continue the Botswana example, faculty partners from the United States recommended that the intervention to reduce HIV/AIDS infection in youth should be based on the assumed lack of knowledge that the students had about preventing the

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disease.2 The rate of infection was expected to decrease if they gave the youth accurate knowledge about abstaining from sex or using condoms and having only one partner in English, a language assumed to be universally understood in Botswana. The plan included the presentation of this information to youth who would attend a weekend experience at the university. The results of the data collection described in the previous section on transformative axiology were used to challenge this version of reality. First, the quantitative data demonstrated the majority of the youth already had academic knowledge about use of condoms and abstention from sex. Second, the quantitative data revealed that language was an issue; English was not the language used by the youth who were at greatest risk of infection. The two most common languages in Botswana are Setswana and English (the latter imposed during British occupation); however, Botswana has thirty-four languages. Third, the qualitative data revealed that the intervention had to take into account the sadness and pleasure found in sex and the sense of hopelessness before the youth would be open to behavior change. In addition, the inequities and associated power differences between men and women in this society had to be addressed. The epistemological assumption deals with both the nature of knowledge and the relationship between the researcher and the participants in the study. The aforementioned relationship of trust implies that the researcher needs to have an interactive relationship with study participants that is based on mutual respect in which issues of power and language and culture are understood, and that participants see a legitimate reason for sharing their experiences, secrets, and hopes for change. Participants need to believe that their knowledge is valued and given weight in discussions about the meaning of the relevant phenomenon, especially when this knowledge is represented in forms other than what is considered scientific. In Botswana, the relationships were strong because Chilisa is an Indigenous transformative researcher who hired co-researchers who were young and could hang out with the youth in the places that they normally congregated. She emphasized the importance of gathering data in ways that reflected the youth

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experience; hence, she encouraged the youth researchers to collect songs, stories, myths, dances, and poems that reflected how young people experienced HIV/AIDS. These forms of knowledge were then incorporated into the intervention as a way to integrate and validate their knowledge. These practices helped address the power inequities between the university-based researchers and the participants as well as between the U.S.- and Botswanabased researchers. The quantitative and qualitative data already described earlier, combined with the culturally based knowledge in the form of songs, myths, stories, dances, and poems, provided a strong justification for changing the model of the intervention from an infusion of knowledge during a weekend at a university campus to a youth-led, Afro-centric intervention that took place over several weeks in the local schools. The transformative methodological assumptions have already been implied in discussions of the other transformative assumptions. One implication is that researchers can use a cyclical design that is culturally responsive as a guide to collecting data that integrate their use periodically throughout the research process to effect social change. This means the researcher is involved with the community from the beginning in framing the meaning of the phenomenon under study. The researcher engages in contextual analysis to gather knowledge about culture, language, and diversity within the community. The researcher asks such provocative questions throughout the research as: How does the proposed theoretical framework reflect the diversity of the culture in this community? How is this proposed intervention reflective of the cultural nuances in this community? And the researcher designs the study in ways that ensures authentic engagement of diverse participants in culturally and linguistically appropriate ways. The implications of the transformative methodological assumption are visible throughout the preceding discussions in this chapter. The meaning of a cyclical approach can be seen in the figure that represents the transformative indigenous mixed methods design used in the Botswana youth HIV/AIDS prevention study (see Figure 9.1). The researcher moves through several stages, beginning with understanding the context by assembling an appropriate

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Figure 9.1. Transformative Mixed Methods Indigenous Design

team that is reflective of the diversity in the community, reading available documents (document review), engaging in dialogues (interviews), and observing in appropriate settings to understand relevant contextual factors. This first stage is primarily qualitative in nature. The second stage involves concurrent collection of quantitative and qualitative data in the forms already mentioned, preliminary studies with youth, use of extant data bases, and surveys to collect demographic data and to determine knowledge levels about the standard procedures for preventing infection. The data collection during this period revealed that one reason that HIV/AIDS was spreading was because of a mythical belief held by some that if a man had AIDS, he could be cured by having sex with a virgin. To determine how this myth was being used to justify having sex with young girls, the researcher decided to collect data by means of several call-in radio shows on this topic. Men from different regions called in and said that they believed this myth and that their means of procuring a young girl was to drive to the areas

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of high poverty. They would offer a family some basic necessities in the form of food or fuel in exchange for being able to have sex with a young girl. They also said that they were able to persuade slightly older girls in these neighborhoods to have sex with them in exchange for a cell phone. These quantitative and qualitative data were used to develop an intervention that was youth-led and Afro-centric. The intervention was pilot tested along with the instruments that would be used to measure the changes in attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, behaviors, and ways of representing their experiences with the disease. Thus, quantitative and qualitative data were collected to improve the intervention before it was introduced on a wider scale. The design during the intervention was also a mixed methods design; this time, it included a randomized control trial as part of the implementation process. The randomization was done by school, using the justification that the project could not implement an intervention in all the schools in Botswana at one time and that they were not sure of the effectiveness of the intervention. Th is random denial of treatment has always been problematic as an ethical issue. However, given the reality that they could not logistically implement the project in all schools at the same time, and might actually be unethical to do so, and given the uncertainty of its effectiveness, the researchers determined that this was the best course of action. They continued to collect quantitative and qualitative data throughout the implementation and used the results to influence policy at the national level to enhance HIV/AIDS prevention projects throughout the country. In addition, representatives of other African countries contacted Chilisa to determine the possibility of transferring the intervention to other contexts.

Conclusion The research community stands in a place full of potential and challenges to make the world a better place. For those who agree that the goal of research should be to contribute to supporting social justice, furthering human rights, and social transformation in that spirit, there are choices to be made. We could say that we do not know enough about mixed methods or that the use of pragmatism

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has been distorted by mixed methods theoreticians and conclude that we should place a moratorium on mixed methods designs and typologies, letting the qualitative, interpretive researchers find the way. Or, we could recognize that members of marginalized communities and their advocates have already spoken and continue to build on that foundation. Hesse-Biber (2012) writes about the contribution that a feminist lens can make in mixed methods studies that also use a randomized control design. As described in this chapter, Chilisa (2012) provides an elegant example of a transformative Indigenous mixed methods design. Canales (2013) provides an example of transformative mixed methods that integrates the Chicana/o perspective with multi-racial feminism for research with Mexican Americans. Sweetman et al. (2010) identified thirty-four studies that used a transformative mixed methods lens, ranging in application from the study of escaping partner violence by rural women (Riddell et al., 2009), to evaluating a health promotion program for people with disabilities (Boland et al., 2008), interventions for drug users in India (Kumar et al., 2000), and families facing eviction (Hill et al., 2002). We might mark our progress on criteria that capture the intent of social transformation and give serious consideration to how mixed methods research enhances our ability to contribute to that change. Transformative researchers begin with being connected to communities and engage in practices that reveal the complexities of those communities that are relevant to nurturing or obstructing social change. They use theoretical lenses that open up possibilities of examining inequities and capitalizing on the strengths within communities that have been denied access to privileges. Those lenses include feminist theories, critical race theories, human rights theories, disability rights theories, transformative participatory action theories, Indigenous theories, deafness rights theories, and queer theories, among others (Mertens, 2010). They are explicit in addressing the need for their research to further the goals of social justice and human rights and addressing issues of discrimination and oppression. They are conscious of the diversity within the communities within which they work in terms of inclusion and exclusion and power differentials and the need to

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arrange conditions for data collection that allow for the voices of all those effected by the research, and especially those who have been marginalized, to be included and validated. They design their research with the intent to stimulate change in the communities and to leave the members of the communities better off than they were before the research began. We have this rich foundation; we have hope for a brighter future. We do not have all the answers; we have not solved all the problems. The terrain is challenging, but not insurmountable. There is room for multiple voices in negotiating this terrain.

Notes 1. I was a member of the Advisory Committee for this Botswana HIV/AIDS prevention project.

2. Th is information is based on my observations at the Advisory Committee meeting for the Botswana HIV/AIDS prevention project.

References Boland, M., Daly, L., & Staines, A. (2008). Methodological issues in inclusive intellectual disability research: A health promotion needs assessment of people attending Irish Disability Services. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 21, 199–209.

Brydon-Miller, M. & Maguire, P. (2009). Participatory action research: Contributions to the development of practitioner inquiry in education. Educational Action Research, 17, 79–93. Canales, G. (2013). Transformative, mixed methods for psychological research with Mexican Americans. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1, 6–21. Chilisa, B. (2012). Indigenous methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Denzin, N. K. (2012). Triangulation 2.0. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 6, 80–88. Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (2011). The SAGE handbook of Qualitative Research (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Ellingson, L. L. (2011). Analysis and representation across the continuum. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 595–610). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Guba, E. G. & Lincoln, Y. S. (1989). Fourth generation evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Guba, E. G. & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Harris, R., Holmes, H. M., & Mertens, D. M. (2009). Research ethics in sign language communities. Sign Language Studies, 9, 104–131.

Hesse-Biber, S. (2012). Feminist approaches to triangulation: Uncovering subjugated knowledge and fostering social change in mixed methods research. JMMR, 6, 137–146. Hill, M., Dillane, J., Bannister, J., & Scott, S. (2002). Everybody needs good neighbours: An evaluation of an intensive project for families facing eviction. Child and Family Social Work, 7, 79–89. Johnson, B. (In press). Considering the evidence-based discussion in evaluation through the lens of dialectical pluralism. New Directions in Evaluation.

Kumar, M. S., Mudaliar, S. M., Thyagarajan, S. P., Kumar, S., Selvanayagam, A., & Daniels, D. (2000). Rapid assessment and response to injecting drug use in Madras, south India. International Journal of Drug Policy, 11, 83–98.

Lincoln, Y. S. (2009). “What a long, strange trip it’s been …”: Twenty-five years of qualitative and new paradigm research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16, 3–9.

Mertens, D. M. (2009). Transformative research & evaluation. New York: Guilford. Mertens, D. M. (2010). Research and evaluation in education and psychology: Integrating diversity with qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mertens, D. M. & Wilson, A. T. (2012). Program evaluation theory and practice: A comprehensive approach. New York: Guilford. Riddell, T., Ford-Gilboe, M., & Leipert, B. (2009). Strategies used by rural women to stop, avoid or prevent intimate partner violence. Health Care for Women International, 30, 1–25.

Sweetman, D., Badiee, M., & Creswell, J .W. (2010). Use of the transformative framework in mixed methods studies. Qualitative Inquiry, 16, 441–454.

Torrance, H. (2012). Triangulation, respondent validation, and democratic participation in mixed methods research. JMMR, 6, 111–123.

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Coda

Are You Serious? Playing, Performing, and Producing an Academic Self Laura L. Ellingson

The world of play favors exuberance, license, abandon. Shenanigans are allowed, strategies can be tried, selves can be revised. —Ackerman (1999, p. 6)

Ackerman’s description of play bears little resemblance to any description of academic life that I have ever encountered; indeed, it is nearly antithetical to the staid and serious, antique patina of the ivory tower. Even gentler, more contemporary notions of universities as collaborative spaces for teaching scholars and engaged learners seldom go so far as to incorporate exuberance and license. I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the last shenanigan I participated in, and I seldom act with abandon as a professor, researcher, and knowledge constructor. What a shame. I propose that the dominant metaphor of qualitative research as work—fieldwork, working with data, producing a body of

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work, working toward a conclusion, “I put a lot of work into developing that typology,” her work uses critical theory—may be productively reframed through conscious efforts to incorporate playful attitudes and playful techniques into qualitative research. The metaphor of work is limited by its connotations of capitalism, status, stress, and fatigue, all of which are deemphasized by the notion of play. In this chapter, I demonstrate how playing with participants, data, and representation creates opportunities for humane, profound, and pragmatic research processes. A few caveats. I am not arguing here that faculty need time off from work in the face of ever-growing demands at institutions decimated by draconian budget cuts and pressured to produce students/customers with specific job skills—although that case needs to be made. Nor am I suggesting play as an important pedagogy for teaching, although others have written about that topic and more remains to be said (Farné, 2005). Finally, I do not mean to imply that qualitative researchers or our products are monolithic; rich variations in our use of theory, epistemology, ontology, and methods constitute a distinct strength of our field. Instead, I suggest that our reasonable desire for academic legitimacy has led our community to deemphasize a crucial sense of playfulness within—rather than as a break from—our research processes.

Taking Work Seriously How did researchers become so serious? It is due at least in part to self-selection bias. Adherence to rules and hard work overcame the lure of play a long time ago for those of us who were attracted to the idea of graduate school in the social sciences, education, or allied health fields. We fulfilled requirements, filled out forms, followed procedures, jumped through hoops. We worked hard to earn the right to call ourselves researchers, and among the hard workers who strive to justify daily their place in the academy are feminists who want to be taken seriously as both cultural critics and knowledge producers. Explained one feminist scholar: Feminisms work. And then work more. Feminist work is occupied with women’s rights: in homes and in offices, with bodies, with technology, with health, and with politics. The feminisms

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of the past three hundred years have all been inextricably entangled with these matters of gravity and importance. As such, there has been no playtime in feminism. (Chess, 2009, para. 3)

The lack of playtime has become largely taken for granted as normal in academia. Even those who embrace artistic, narrative, performative, and autoethnographic forms of representation regularly speak of work, struggle, trauma, loss, and frustration in carving out spaces for alternative logics (e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Gergen & Gergen, 2012). Qualitative and interpretive researchers want the same thing other researchers want—jobs, tenure, and the space to pursue our passions in teaching and research. To gain access to the academy, we have framed qualitative research—including and especially what Richardson (2000) called “creative analytic practices” that embrace aesthetic and evocative ways of knowing—and ourselves as qualitative researchers as serious, that is, as worthy of inclusion in the academy. Because academic training still teaches us to think in terms of dichotomies—right/ wrong, good/bad, mind/body, science/art, work/play—we turned away from the devalued side of the serious/frivolous dualism and celebrated our seriousness. But our over-emphasis on seriousness comes at a cost, one that many scholars recognize intuitively. I suspect that Lugones’s longing for a playful self as a feminist researcher is easily recognizable to readers, feminist or not: I am also scared of ending up a serious human being, someone with no multi-dimensionality, with no fun in life, someone who is just someone who has had the fun constructed out of her. I am seriously scared of getting stuck in a “world” that constructs me that way. A world that I have no escape from and in which I cannot be playful. (Lugones, 1987, p. 15; emphasis added) Seriousness may be important, but when taken to extremes that exclude playfulness, it becomes a barrier to constructing and sustaining productive and meaningful academic careers. As with all dichotomies, the play/work boundary ultimately proves elusive: “As a binary, [work/play] often breaks down, blurring and marking a continually shifting set of distinctions” (Brooks & Bowker, 2002, p. 114). These blurred boundaries are apparent in qualitative research in which creative sparks and sudden critical

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insights form as much of our processes as rule-bound actions. Brooks and Bowker (2002) advise instead that we recognize “elements of play at work.” paying attention to both opportunities and constraints imposed within work environments. Thus far, I have asserted that qualitative researchers should be playful in our work, without posing work and play as mutually exclusive opposites. But I have not answered the question: What is play? Simply, “play is free movement within a more rigid structure” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 304). Play is voluntary, not coerced, and is consciously engaged; that is, we know we are playing, and we choose to do it (Hinthorne & Schneider, 2012). Yet play also can incorporate a serious element. I have urged qualitative researchers to think of our forays into new methods of analysis and alternative forms of representation as more an adventure than a hassle and to engage in learning and experimentation as a form of serious play rather than as a series of trials and errors (Ellingson, 2009, p. 81). We can construct our methodological work as play(ful) and our play as (somewhat) serious. Serious play includes free movement plus the element of critical reflection. “Rather than simply engaging in an enjoyable, intrinsically motivated activity, serious play invokes conscious reflection on the activity itself in a way that directly connects the play space to real-life issues and concerns” (Hinthorne & Schneider, 2012, p. 2808). We can play seriously with our participants, data, and representations. As we move freely in creative spaces, we pause for reflection, particularly on the ways in which not only our minds and words but also our embodied selves enter into our play (Ellingson, 2012).

Playing at Work, Working at Play In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss several ways in which qualitative researchers may embrace consciously a variety of playful elements in research processes, including passion and pleasure, deep attention, creativity, performance, and multiplicity. Passion and Pleasure

Somewhere along the line, many of us forgot that we get to choose (some of) the games we play as scholars. We are a passionate lot: Ask most researchers a question about their current projects, and

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they will eagerly spout a wealth of facts, ideas, and possibilities embedded in their ongoing research. Passion guides our choices and drives us to continue with the often-frustrating processes of research (Reinharz, 1992). I have argued elsewhere that a sense of playfulness can turn study design into an experience of wondering, an enjoyable process of considering not only what would be expedient, theoretically sound, and methodologically rigorous, but also what would be satisfying, rewarding, and fun (Ellingson, 2009). I am not promoting mere self-indulgence; rather, I argue that making choices that satisfy the researcher’s mind/body/soul self will yield more insightful findings. We are more motivated to continue the drudgery of typing field notes and transcriptions, asking yet another question, staring off into space for hours as our brains wrestle with thousands of details, building coherent themes, writing evocative narratives, and constructing compelling performances instead of settling for the simplest answers to our research questions. Lofland (1970, p. 35) called the premature stopping at surface answers “analytic interruptus,” a failure to continue until we have delved below the surface to access the deeper meanings in our findings. We continue to play with pleasure long after we lack the energy to work. I describe wondering as a playful process of asking questions about researchers’ project goals, intended audiences, abilities and interests, data collection and ongoing analyses, topics of investigation, and choice of genres for representation. In this context, I also urge paying attention to one’s own preferences and desires (Ellingson, 2009, pp. 75–77). Our passions—what we care about, what excites us—are important to pay attention to when harnessing the power of play. The following questions are meant to inspire a playful approach to the choices we make at the beginning stages and throughout the lengthy course of a qualitative research project: • What is my favorite thing about my data? What makes me smile when I think of it? What makes me cry? What makes me angry? • What would be fun to write?

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• What process issues or ideas come up in my journaling that intrigue me? • What strong emotions do I have about my participants, their stories, and our relationships? • Whose research do I admire? Why? • What about my study embarrasses me or makes me feel selfconscious? Why? • What am I most proud of in my data? • If one of my mentors asked me about my project, what would I want to tell her/him? (Ellingson, 2009, p. 76) Wondering, that is, conscious consideration of ideas and free writing on possibilities, can be a playful approach to design and ongoing choices in the iterative processes of qualitative research. By consciously acknowledging our passions and preferences, we can harness the energies that come with affirming our passions as researchers. What we did naturally as children and perhaps do now in other contexts of our lives—as fans of musicians, theater, or sports; as family photographers, creative cooks, or involved parents (and aunts, uncles, grandparents, and chosen family); as engaged citizens at the local, national, and global levels—is to tie our passions to that in which we invest our time and energy. Passion and pleasure go hand in hand with play. P(l)aying Attention

Ackerman (1999) defines deep play as the experience of a full immersion in which one becomes lost within the playful world created in the moment and, for a time, escapes the boundaries of the outside world. All aspects of qualitative research benefit from such periods of playful immersion. Being in the ethnographic field, keenly attentive to the grand narratives of culture, the norms of language, etiquette, and social roles, while simultaneously noting the minutest details of eye contact and gestures, can constitute a form of deeply meaningful play. As I observe and participate, I continually try to exceed my normal capacity for attention, to take note—literally with a pen and figuratively with my eyes, ears, mind, and gut—of the mundane details that swirl around

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me. Going for a personal best, I try to etch the phrases and inflections of a particular conversation into my brain for later recall. Th is form of play can become a test of my skills against the limits of perception and attention. Such moments stand out against the backdrop of average days of fieldwork (long after the rapt discovery of the honeymoon phase is over), during which, if I am honest, I often feel so bored that tears threaten and elaborate excuses about why I must leave the setting immediately take root in my mind, making attention to my participants a painful struggle. Turning observation and note-taking into play makes the experience not only more enjoyable but also far more productive than framing the process as work. Deep play also enhances data analysis. Analyzing field notes, interview transcripts, and other qualitative materials can be tedious. But it also occasionally achieves a sense of such effortless flow that I am at play with my findings, happily stacking bits of language and description into this pile and that one, reconfiguring them to see how they best fit, like brightly colored building blocks arranged into a fresh architecture of patterns that illuminates complex phenomena. Deep play in data analysis is akin to what Eisenberg (1990) called jamming, a type of flow or transcendence, wherein the individual is joyfully subsumed into a group experience. For Eisenberg, jamming involves highly coordinated action with others, absent the normally expected shared interpersonal and organizational history and infrastructure. In data analysis, jamming can be thought of a surrender of the researcherself to the process of organizing huge amounts of material into meaningful patterns or coherent narratives. In seeking order from chaos, I can at times be so fully immersed in playing with the data or materials that I attain a sense not of mastery over the materials but of the materials mastering me, making me part of the order that is being constructed. As with fieldwork, extensive periods of drudgery and boredom are necessary groundwork for these rare periods of playful sense-making, but these joyful interludes are what inspire me to continue my research. Reflexivity benefits from playfulness as well. What is reflexivity but a continual playing with one’s own sense of self in relation to one’s participants and their space(s)? We are taught in methods

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courses to reflect on how our gender, race, religion, education, class, sexuality, and abilities contrast with and overlap with participants’ social categories. Such reflections can become rote after a while if we are not attentive, yielding little but obligatory statements about researchers’ standpoints. Yet deep play with categories—and with the very notion of dividing people based on certain characteristics and not others (see Bowker & Star, 2000)—tosses those categories, personalities, and spaces up into the mental air and down onto the page, over and over again, playing with possibilities. Such deep consideration is facilitated by embracing the patience of play, the willingness to try over and over again until the sculpture of blocks resembles the ethereal form just beyond your mind’s grasp. When you come upon the insight, you recognize it as the one, the answer you have been waiting for, the final piece of the puzzle. Playing Outside the Box

Along with passion and deep attention, research play sparks creativity and innovation. Play involves risk, a willingness to proceed into the unknown. When we try something different, we improvise. Improvising is critical to play, and this leads us to ask new questions, make connections among disparate topics of study, apply theories to new areas, and bridge interdisciplinary boundaries. I urge qualitative researchers to think of the theories, topics, and methods that they learned in graduate school as starting points, rather than career constraints. Tremendous creative energies emerge when we embrace learning new methodological skills not for the sake of mere novelty but as an opening to possibilities, an openness that we cannot sustain if we are too serious and not interested in play and adventure. Ackerman (1999, p. 7) says: “Make-believe is at the heart of play, and also at the heart of much of what passes as work.” If we take the term “make-believe” literally, we may make or construct a belief or a set of rules or a whole other world, and then we act as if we believe it/them to be true. As children, most of us played make-believe and constructed fantasy worlds of knights and dragons or cops and robbers. I remember play inspired by the Little House on the Prairie books in my friends’ backyard (I had

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dibs on being the young Laura Ingalls Wilder, due to my name), being a family of birds in a nest my brothers and I made out of blankets and couch pillows in our living room, and recreating the worlds of our favorite TV shows with neighborhood kids (such as CHiPs, which featured handsome California Highway Patrol officers, and the campy 1970s version of Battlestar Galactica, where brave women and men named for Greek mythological characters charged about outer space blowing up anyone who threatened their community of intergalactic refugees). Thinking back on the ways in which we seized on an idea, proposed basic rules of behavior, and then improvised an enjoyable coordinated performance of another world with friends, I draw inspiration for research. Our “make-believe” muscles may need to be toned after years of little use, but with practice, we can harness our ability to imagine other ways of being and doing. Such skills can aid our research in many ways. Imagination is necessary when constructing a performance or creative presentation of findings that is designed to educate, persuade, and support community groups, children, or other audiences. Imagination also comes into play when we contemplate our findings and generate novel solutions to ongoing problems or design culturally appropriate campaign messages for reaching underserved communities, or develop new models and extend theories. We have to ask ourselves and our collaborators, “What if we tried it this way?” and then be willing to make-believe our way through many ideas until we find one that best serves the goals of our research. Playing the Fool

The trickster is a playful character who reveals us to ourselves by showing social norms in exaggerated, multiple, dichotomyresistant ways: “Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox” (Hyde, 1998, p. 7). The trickster offers double-vision: When I travel from one “world” to another, I have this image, this memory of myself as playful in this other “world.” I can then be in a particular “world” and have a double image of myself as, for example, playful and as not playful. … I can have both images of myself and to the extent that I can materialize or

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animate both images at the same time I become an ambiguous being. This is very much a part of trickery and foolery. It is worth remembering that the trickster and the fool are significant characters in many non-dominant or outsider cultures. One then sees any particular “world” with these double edges and sees absurdity in them and so inhabits oneself differently. (Lugones, 1987, p. 13)

Frentz (2009) draws on Haraway’s (1991) extension of the trickster as a “split self ” or shape shifting character who generates embodied and located knowledge that decries detached objectivity and embraces specificity. Such “situated knowledges” may embrace a way of knowing and of communicating that knowledge to others within a third space of play. Here, the trickster character reveals the taken-for-granted constraints of the institutional context (e.g., health care, education) by playfully violating accepted rules of interaction, giving us the opportunity to see beyond the rigid either/or of the system (e.g., either physician or patient, teacher or student) to both/and, a doubling of vision that reveals what is usually hidden (e.g., physicians also have vulnerable bodies and patients may recognize significant symptoms in their bodies; teachers also are learners and students have knowledge to offer others). My way of playing the fool—academically speaking—has been to participate in performances of The Ethnogs, FemNogs, Rip Tupp, and assorted others who have joined in a performance (e.g., a fan who gets rousted by security, curtain girl) (Ethnogs et al., 2011). Our performance of aging rock stars, women’s liberationists/groupies, and band security detail illustrates what we call automythography: Automythography is the excavation of cultural myths (including beliefs, practices, and stereotypes) through the critical reading of narrative accounts, invented or experienced, of a particular period or about a set of events. We believe that scholars can learn about the myths that drive a certain group or era by creating and telling stories about that group or era. (Ethnogs et al., 2011, p. 673)

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Our collaborative invention of a shared past casts a critical eye on rock music culture by ironically embodying exaggerated stereotypes of rock stars, groupies, and roadie/security guy. While the knowledge generated by our performances is noteworthy, the sheer joy of performing our theme song, “Ethnography Is a Way of Life”—complete with dancing, screaming fans—is the most meaningful aspect of our work for me. The joy I experienced was not only pleasurable but also instructive; my memories of the performances help me reflect on how I conduct ethnography. In particular, I question the quality of attention that I am able to give my participants and my ability to remain mindful and present with them while my busy mind whirls with theories, insights, and to-do lists. My ironic embodiment of the feminized role of a groupie—even with our backstory as radical women’s liberationists—engenders a critique of my feminist standpoint and calls attention to my embodied presence as a woman whose White privilege intersects with her status as an above-the-knee amputee. As we play the fool in academia, taken-for-granted aspects of academic culture, collegial friendships, rock music fandom, and ethnographic methods are revealed and opened up for questioning. Memories of our tremendous fun repeatedly enacting this performance within academic conference spaces (National Communication Association and International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry) are now made poignant by the sudden loss of our bandleader, Nick Trujillo, who passed away in October 2012. The loss of our friend remains too fresh, but I imagine that in time I will reflect and recognize more lessons on life, relationships, academia, and myself that Nick gifted me through his presence in my life.

What Do You Know? Epistemic Play As a confirmed methodology geek, perhaps my favorite form of play involves moving fluidly along the methodological continuum, refusing a fi xed state as an interpretive social scientist, feminist researcher, narrative ethnographer, grounded theory practitioner, or health care reform pragmatist. I openly embrace a multiplicity of paradigms, refusing to frame art and science as

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mutually exclusive or as at odds. Instead, I embrace a range of complementary methodologies, each of which is more suitable for some goals and questions than for others. We usually base our defense and promotion of a particular methodology by critiquing its perceived opposite, but we can instead embrace multiplicity without attacking other ways of knowing. Recalling the definition of play offered earlier, it focused on (relatively) free movement as critical to the experience of play. To move with significant freedom among methodological and epistemological possibilities, one must move beyond the art/science dichotomy. Elsewhere, I have written at length about a continuum approach to mapping the field of qualitative methodology that constructs a nuanced range of possibilities in place of what traditionally have been constructed as the art/science dichotomy, linguistically reified by further oppositions such as hard/soft, quantitative/qualitative, positivist/interpretive, and statistics/ stories (Ellingson, 2009). I proposed a qualitative continuum comprised of a vast and varied middle ground, with art and science representing only the extreme ends of the methodological and representational options. Building on Ellis’s (2004) representation of the two ends of the qualitative continuum (i.e., art and science) and the analytic mapping of the continuum developed in Ellis and Ellingson (2000), I envisioned the continuum as having three main areas, with infinite possibilities for blending and moving among them. The goals, questions, methods, writing styles, vocabularies, role(s) of researchers, and criteria for evaluation vary across the continuum as one moves from a realist/positivist social science stance on the far right, through a social constructionist middle ground, to an artistic/interpretive paradigm toward the left (Ellingson, 2009, 2011). Each of these general approaches offers opportunities and constraints, and none are mutually exclusive. No firm boundaries delineate any regions of the continuum. Furthermore, terms of demarcation and description used throughout the continuum (e.g., interpretive, postpositivist) have proven inconsistent, suspect, and contestable; terminology in qualitative methods remains dramatically variable across disciplines, paradigms, and

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methodological communities, with new terms arising continually (Gubrium & Holstein, 1997; Lindlof & Taylor, 2010). At any point on the qualitative continuum, a set of assumptions about epistemology (i.e., about what knowledge is and what it means to create it) influences choices surrounding the collection of empirical materials and analysis methods, which, in turn, tend to foster (but do not require) particular forms of representation. Engaging multigenre and multimedia analyses and representations within a qualitative research project is playful because no one standard of truth is enabled to emerge; the multiplicity of beauty, rigor, pragmatics, and theoretical insights offers up a range of truths (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). Skipping along and across methodological and paradigmatic boundaries and threading among the many standards of truths may foster transformation of the very methodological rules by which we play. “Transformative play … occurs when the free movement of play alters the rigid structure in which it takes shape. The play doesn’t just occupy and oppose the interstices of the system but actually transforms the space as a whole” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 305). Seemingly chaotic or contradictory maneuvers may thus generate insights into the limitations of the structures and enable us to break them down and re-create them to be better, more flexible, more spacious options, or simply further alternatives for qualitative researchers to play. Crystallization, a postmodern form of methodological triangulation, explicitly requires one or more forms of art and of science in order to multiply a research project’s possible truths while denying the possibility of a single, conclusive truth (Ellingson, 2009). The transformative possibilities of serious play through crystallization and other multimethod, multigenre, multimedia, and multiparadigmatic frameworks give me hope for a qualitative community that comes together across software and stories, p