Qualitative Inquiry

The ethnography of violence presents dilemmas that are at once ethical, corporal, intellectual, and political. Drawing on fieldwork experiences from the study of mothers and female infanticide in south India, this essay elaborates on one ethnographic encounter that both informed the representational process and talked back to its normative assumptions. The dynamics of the encounter are used as a point of departure to reflect on gendered violence, the limits of feminist ethnography, and the admissibility of fragments as evidence of subaltern subjectivity.

Feminist interpretive methods informed our understanding of the role of the community and family-based services in women's trauma and recovery. Amy's story illustrates how trustworthy community relationships have a role in healing past experiences of isolation and points to the need for community supports to understand their power and responsibility to facilitate women's individual and family empowerment.

In this reflective account of a researcher's experience in Rwanda, the author examines how being at the place where violence occurred revealed how Rwandan women construct and name their reality in postgenocide era. The author discusses the questions people asked her in Rwanda and those she asked herself upon her return to the United States, which provide insights on how to share her experiences with others. The purpose in writing this article is to create a dialogue that brings together women's narratives and the author's opinions and positions to offer new ways to understand and give meaning to Rwandan women's experiences of genocide. The article concludes by reiterating the significance of acknowledging different ways of knowing those being studied and the ways how those who conduct the study understand themselves as researchers in that context. Names of the actual women who shared their stories have been changed to assure confidentiality.

This piece delves into an identity shaped by and a history filled with sexual violence. It was created from a performance script, various journal entries, and field notes, using the process of systematic sociological introspection¹ to write through emotional experience. It also takes the form of autoethnographic ² research, where I use self-reflection, connecting personal experience to a larger social context of violence against women. “Finding my . . . ” embodies gender identity and uses voice/telling to show the move into a more confident “self.” While I attempt to make sense out of and share my experiences, I hope to encourage further conversation on this topic and reduce the stigma and shame that accompanies these encounters.

This article centers on the renaming of violent sex narratives through the resignification of penetration and the dildo. The dominant sex narrative in much of our cultural conversation is one rooted in heteronormativity. Additionally, the dominant narrative often eclipses the importance of sex as intimate ground in which people share knowledge of the body—the body being a complex site of personal perception and social interpellation. Bricolage as a method operates as a helpful conduit in revealing this complexity, as it allows for multiplicity of construction and meaning. By intertwining theory and method from various disciplinary perspectives, a rich text emerges full of questions, possibilities, and agency.

This article presents five poems constructed from interviews conducted with five women about their sexual experiences as college students, as well as one poem written by the first author about her own experience. Young women were asked about confusing, problematic, and shameful sexual experiences. The Listening/Reading Guide, a feminist method, was used to identify segments of each interview that were then arranged in poetic form. Poetry was used as an evocative means to present information that does not have a traditional narrative structure. These poems are structured to convey the difficulties inherent in understanding and talking about these experiences. Current discourses of sexual assault and recovery are insufficient for understanding and meaning making in these cases.

This article presents two different ways of understanding silence, through a discussion of women's narratives of violence from Lahaul, India. Here I illustrate how feminist ethnography works its way into re-conceptualizing silence as a tool women use to resist existing patriarchal discourses of honor, tribe and nation.

Outcomes-based accountability in the form of test scores and performance indicators are a primary lever for improving student achievement in the current educational landscape. The article presents communicative evaluation as a complementary evaluation approach that may be used along with the primary methods of school accountability to provide a more comprehensive picture of the school environment. Through document reviews of state school report cards and the communicative evaluation of an educational program, the article discusses the study on challenges to academic achievement and possible solutions proffered by the students struggling to meet state graduation standards. The article identifies several issues emerging from the case connected to moving communicative evaluation from theory to practice. A brief discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of communicative evaluation and how it might best be utilized in evaluation practice is included.

The Wedding Dress presents an epiphanous shift in a couple's understanding of exogamy and commitment when confronted with extended family's clannish expectations. Submitting to and then challenging and destroying this power's hold is symbolized in the wedding dress. As an autoethnography, this story resonates with Sophocles's Antigone, in which choices must be made that challenge the law of the father (King Kreon, Jane-family) and demand the law of nature (marriage rights) to prevail. In Antigone, Kreon's son Heron is engaged to Antigone, who challenges the king's unnatural edict to leave a warrior's body unburied. In the end, Heron chooses Antigone over his father and dies with his fiancé in a tomb—thus shattering the laws of humans while upholding the laws of nature. A story of survival, a fight for autonomy, The Wedding Dress captures marital tensions that arise from forced choices and the triumph of facing them truthfully together.

In an effort to investigate the epistemological implications of a stable notion of ontology, and thus concerns about bodily determinism, the author offers narratives that explore how the material body and discursive formations interdependently constitute one's ontology. Each narrative posits that ontology is fluid and that interests in the ontological dynamics of the body cut across multiple and varied experiences. The author examines the ways bodies are constrained and regulated through both discourse and material conditions by examining a sick body, a fat body, a dancing body, and an academic body. Although each narrative begins from a different place, they all explicate the relationships that exist among and between epistemology, ontology, materiality, and discursivity.

Many qualitative researchers have puzzled over the question of how to write more engaging, more communicative texts. “Why” we write, however, is not often part of our scholarly conversations. In this article, I examine the writing process and position writing as a learning tool which enables what researchers know about themselves and their topics. I engage with writing as a product, process, form of invention, and instrument of self-reflection. Ultimately, I suggest that writing should be included more intentionally in our research methods courses. Writing is not simply what we “do,” but also how we become better writers and scholars.