Qualitative Inquiry

This article focuses on relational ethics in research with intimate others. Relational ethics requires researchers to act from our hearts and minds, acknowledge our interpersonal bonds to others, and take responsibility for actions and their consequences. Calling on her own research studies, the author examines relational ethics in ethnographies in which researchers are friends with or become friends with participants over the course of their projects. Then she examines autoethnographic narratives in which researchers include intimate others in stories focusing on their own experience. Considering ethical responsibilities to identifiable others, she discusses writing about those who are alive and those who have died. She then reflects on the ways co-constructed autoethnographies circumvent some of the ethical issues in traditional qualitative studies on unfamiliar others, yet avoid some of the ethical concerns in writing about intimate others. The last section presents advice for those who long to write about intimate others.

Along the way, as we get older, as T. S. Eliot writes in his poem, “The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated/Of dead and living.” Lately, I have been spending more of my time at the farm. This is the farm that has belonged to my family for generations, since first being settled by my great-grandparents fleeing the potato famine in Ireland, and it is the farm of my birth and early years. Although it would be easy to think of the farm more in the past tense than in the present, I have come to know the place in present terms. Solace is found in this place, here and now. Even among the ruins, in a world becoming stranger, and a pattern more complicated.

By juxtaposing the experiences of conducting research at two schools, one a Charismatic, evangelical, fundamentalist Christian school, the other, an ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish girls’ school, the author discusses prevailing notions of subjectivity, arguing that postmodern and postpositivistic models of subjectivity apply, but that their applications are best imagined as profoundly context driven.

In this article, the authors trace the possible political potential of their post-modernist, feminist approach to life story research with people with the label of “learning difficulties.” As a self-advocate with an ally, they define tagging along with each other as discovery science. The authors reflect on how they openly and critically write themselves into their life (story) as subjects in dialogue, which makes the driving force to negotiate openness, expose hegemonic power arrangements and inherent silences, highlight secrets of oppression and resistance, and revalue knowledge that risks being disqualified in current social sciences. To be able to do so, and to recognize activism, the authors reveal their choice to creatively apply a variety of research methodologies. Finally, they attempt to rethink and refine conceptualizations that pervade current theoretical developments in disability studies.

Drawing from recent analytical developments in semiotics and postmodern ethnography, this article exposes and assesses the combination of social semiotics and fieldwork as a form of qualitative inquiry. Approaches to semiotics and fieldwork are not new—structural ethnographers in cultural anthropology and structural interactionists in sociology and communication studies have previously laid the foundations for the integration of formal methods of analysis and inductive approaches to data collection—yet, as this article argues, structuralism’s limitations have hampered the growth of semiotics within qualitative inquiry. By presenting social semiotics as a viable alternative to structural semiotics, by describing in clear pedagogical fashion how social semiotics can be used as a research strategy, and by exposing its potential for applicability, this article attempts to bring sociosemiotic ethnography to the forefront of contemporary qualitative inquiry.

This article ethnographically analyzes the use of direct action, or “jail solidarity”, behind bars, during mass protest episodes. The global justice movement has been the most recent inheritors of this historical tactic, and it has been utilized since the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle. Unjust arrests are countered with noncooperation behind bars, to pressure for charges to be reduced or dropped. Ethnography is appropriate for obtaining information on this high-risk, concealed behavior. Based on fieldwork, participant observation, and in-depth interviewing, the perspectives, self-reflexivity, and sociolinguistic construction of jail solidarity is presented in the participants’ own words.

This article presents a conception of the qualitative research interview as discourses crossing swords. The article draws on examples showing how the researchers’ view on learning is challenged by the interviewed apprentices. The apprentices do not assume learning in itself to be an important aspect of their lives. They consider the process of becoming a competent professional the main motive of their working lives. In the presented interview situations, these differing assumptions of the researcher and the apprentices become apparent as competing discourses: learning versus professional competence. These discourses cross each other and become the context of a productive negotiation of meaning. In the article it is suggested that in such cases, the qualitative research interview can be understood on the background of a battlefield metaphor highlighting the antagonistic character of conversations in an interview setting aimed at research.