This article offers a critique of dissemination models that are based on technical rationalist ontologies. We argue that such models privilege a particularly narrow set of meaning and in consequence preclude other ways through which we might imagine dissemination acts. Our article therefore seeks to deconstruct dissemination in order to illuminate the ethical, political and communicative issues that lie at the heart of dissemination practices and to offer a range of alternative ways that dissemination might be conceptualized. These issues are illustrated through a series of vignettes that are drawn from research in the fields of education, health and social care. These focus on the everyday features of qualitative research that are more usually discussed in relation to substantive issues of methodology rather than dissemination per se. These vignettes are designed to demonstrate how dissemination is present at the very moment of conceptualizing research and that it continues in ways we have yet to explore well after the formal stages of research are complete.
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