Qualitative Inquiry

This article deploys the concept of rhizoanalysis in order to disrupt, to think, and to do qualitative research differently. Rhizoanalysis is a concept created out of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome. The article explores what rhizoanalysis can do, how it functions, and what it produces in relation to research on literacies, in particular multiple literacies theory (MLT). The article is a rhizome having multiple entries: concept creation, rhizoanalysis the concept, an introduction to MLT followed by a detailed presentation of a rhizoanalytic study on conceptualizing writing systems in multilingual children. The article exits with an intermezzo and a potential becoming of rhizoanalysis as an approach to qualitative inquiry.

La Loba, an arts-informed, pilot research project brought together health-care workers from diverse disciplines who met over a span of 6 months, to create a space of praxis within which we could reflect upon the experiences of bearing witness to suffering.

The poem (nurse) is writing with; using the method of poetic transcription (Richardson 1992, 1994a, 1994b), memories, gestures, and words from the inquiry are returned to public space to bear witness to the suffering that is unacknowledged within our contemporary health-care institutions.

These two poems come from my experience as a qualitative researcher in Nigeria where this method of research is not a very common phenomenon. I was dazed by the vast opportunity this method gives a researcher to dig deep into a research problem and be submerged into the world of participants. Understanding the experiences of young smokers and how they were influenced into picking up the habit was the aim of my study but I got more than what I asked for. These two poems give an insight into the experiences of cigarette smokers and the researcher as captured during the research. Journeys had to be made to get willing participants and when the willing participants were found, it was a worthy ride from cities to suburbs.

This essay is an exploration in the process of queering hegemonic paradigms of grieving and body image. I use autoethnography to question my feelings about my own body hair and the sudden death of my mother. I show how experiences of sudden death not only allow us to reflect upon our current relationships and life stories, but help us transform them as well. I take the reader through my own contradictory history with body hair from childhood to the present, through times my mother helped me love it and times others pushed me to hate it. Ultimately, I argue that through writing a deceased loved one’s legacy on our own bodies and holding onto grief, we might not only reframe minor bodily stigmas but also transcend them.

In this article, a researcher and collaborator present stories about the second author’s survival during the Holocaust. They propose that their approach of collaborative witnessing is a form of “relational autoethnography” that allows researchers to focus on and evocatively tell the lives of others in shared storytelling and conversation. The authors address the benefits and complications of collaborative witnessing and how it extends an autoethnographic perspective in its emphasis on writing for and with the other, listening and working together with care and compassion, and bearing witness to others as well as to oneself.

This Is Another Place is an autoethnographic narrative written while I was a live-in caregiver for my Nan who was 96 years old and suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. During this time I was also writing my literature review on autoethnography and reflexive research as part of the initial stages of my Masters by Research.

The narrative focuses on the juxtaposition of my life as a student of art and my life as a granddaughter who was dealing with the loss of her grandmother. It is also a glimpse into the associated depressions, experiences of guilt, and joys brought about by caring for a loved one toward the end of life.

It is a narrative that I hope may provide a possible back story to some of the surly students we may come across as educators of real people and focuses on the space and time that alternative learning environments can give to us mere mortals when we may need somewhere to breathe.

This article recounts what happens when an increasingly commonplace technology such as the smartphone is mobilized in ethnographic fieldwork practice, investigating the particular research-related affects and intimacies that are produced by/in this sociotechnical assemblage. I start with a brief account of my research project, after which I discuss the ways in which my smartphone has informed and modulated the different components of my fieldwork, conceived as a heterogeneous practice of logistical and affective labor. In the last two sections, I reflect on the methodological consequences of incorporating a smartphone into ethnographic research and address the question of how this practice prompts a reconsideration of the relation between knowledge production, research intimacies, and mobile technology.

The article describes the author’s experience of a day-long class in glassblowing at a studio in London. It draws out a number of analytic themes in making sense of the pedagogy and the learning experience. The article also makes explicit comparison with the work of Erin O’Connor, who has also studied glassblowing at a studio in the United States. Conclusions are drawn simultaneously about the stability of the craft and pedagogy of glassblowing, and also about the craft of ethnography itself.

A poem that explores the boundaries of what can be written in the social sciences and how far we can push those norms of social science. It addresses the discomfort many social scientists feel when writing in the active, first person singular, while raising questions about qualitative inquiry that plague those who choose to venture into literary writing styles that offer a greater expressive range and more emotive language.