Qualitative Inquiry

This post-qualitative ethnography reveals elements of childhood and learning that may remain constant across the lifetime continuum. The research occurred for 13 months on a rural peninsula in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Traditional ethnographic data collection methods included field notes, shooting scripts and photo documentation, document collection, interviews, and talks. A post-qualitative analysis produced rich narratives through the lenses of space–time physics, new materialism, and the field of Children’s Geographies. Findings indicate new ways to consider childhood and how humans across the lifespan continuously make meaning about both local environments and the greater world.

This article is a collective act of writing preoccupied with the future of education. Our perspectives are different but what we have in common is a wish to explore and contribute to educational innovation. Through knowledge brokering, we try to create openings toward expanded meaning fields nourishing valuable diversities of onto-epistemic cultures ultimately preparing students for fugitive futures. Our project is complex and pluriverse like any brokering process for Other and innovation might be. Both method and means however are simple: Through using the concept of oxymoroning as a rhetorical and epigrammatic device for revealing paradox and through this taking part in polysemantic ambiguity, new concepts, knowledges, and habits are possibilized. Through a montage of thoughts, theories, and stories, hopefully thinking for innovation is given a constant continuation.

Working with the concept of “leaking,” two art education researchers explore methodological and philosophical approaches to researching with children. Thinking with their individual studies in early childhood classrooms, the authors consider how conventional methods and methodology might leak when encountering the relations of children, classroom, materials, teacher, researcher, and so on. In both of their fieldwork, the notebook intended for field-note taking began to leak, becoming a sketchbook where the researcher and children could engage in collaborative thinking, making, and doing. This leaking provoked a (re)consideration of research with children as a site in which proficient and equally capable participants conjoin to explore the possibilities of research. The emergent events surrounding the sketchbook allowed to rethink the liminal space of researcher positionality, methodology, methods, children’s art, and childhood.

This article deliberates the contribution of a methodological “mattering” tool, word association as inquiry. Word association generally involves responding to a word prompt, or series of prompts, with the first word or idea that one can think of. It might be assumed that word association activities yield eclectic and unpredictable reactions. During interviews with 16 U.K.-based academics, however, the idiom “publish or perish” was repeated by eight individuals. This article considers such repetition in view of new materialist and Deleuzian ideas, speculating the influence of prepersonal and affective practice processes on participant responses. By putting three nonrepresentational concepts to work—becoming, sense, and affect—it is argued that word association tasks and the “sense-event” they incur both highlight and interrogate taken-for-granted truths and ways of being. Consequently, this methodological intervention could generate new relations and material effects that render resistance “becoming not impossible”.

In this article, we share some poststructuralist ideas for interacting and intra-acting with photos as visual data in qualitative inquiry. The discussion of photos as visual data has mostly drawn from representational perspectives. Furthermore, poststructuralist theorizing has been mostly utilized to discuss discursive data. Drawing from poststructuralist ideas, like Derrida’s discussion of the absent-presence, we offer a poststructuralist glance at photos as spectral visual data. We view such approach as liberating of visual texts and as denotative of the unfinalizability of meaning. To illustrate our point, we engage into a dual mode of narrative, of both words and images, that is photos. Following a brief overview situating the use of photos as data within a representational framework in qualitative research, we illustrate our poststructuralist glance inspired by a Derridean framework. As an epilogue, we share reflections in the form of questions aiming to challenge our narrative in this article.

We are members of CANI-Net.¹ Sue Porter was pivotal in our efforts to create and sustain the necessary, loosely fashioned spaces to inquire artfully and collaboratively into our fragile existence on this shared and damaged planet. Then suddenly she died. We were grief-stricken. There was a pause. We reconvened, to honor Sue through the ways of working we had accumulated between us over the past decade. We offer you this glimpse into our collaborative mourning for Sue and her ways of sustaining us (including her delight in the company of rolling hills, crows, cormorants, frilly knickers, and red dogs). We talked together. We wrote together. We ate together. We drank together. We made art together. We laughed a lot. We cried. We were altered by the possibilities of collective mourning—finding new ways to carry on being together. We remembered Sue.

This performance on Black love is framed by Xavier University of Louisiana faculty, Dr. Ayshia Mackie-Stephenson, and undergraduate students who took Introduction to Performance Studies. Young Black people are choosing Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) because they want a learning environment with Black people and they want to be away from the dangers of white supremacy. An HBCU is a place where Black people can be themselves and push each other to thrive and succeed. However, to resist centuries of White supremacy tactics of divide and conquer, Black love needs to be an intentional practice. I asked my students what Black love is and they share their thoughts in this performance.

In collaboration between a researcher and poet, we have used poetry inquiry to create a collection of found poems from open-ended survey data. Found poems were created using the written responses from the Australian Birth Experience Study survey and the poems highlighted women’s experiences of traumatic birth. Analysis was undertaken through reflexive poetry from the poet and through reflection by the researcher. The poems display themes of lack of control and consent. These poems illuminate the voices of the women who shared their traumatic birthing stories to gain understanding and raise awareness in the community on aspects of birth trauma.

In this paper, the author reflects on her own work in the agritourism field as a Latina woman in the Midwest. Connecting place to lived experience, the author describes how her gender, ethnicity, language, and education are positioned within the food industry and within her career trajectory. By examining her individual journey, the author reveals systems of oppression that continue to maintain colonial divisions of labor in ways often overlooked or ignored in the everyday. Her story is an example of the struggle many women of color face as they navigate upward mobility within White and/or male-dominated arenas. Utilizing logics based in intersectionality, feminism, raciolinguistic, and racial capitalism, this story bears witness to the ways identities continue to be perceived, performed, accepted, and rejected against dominant narratives in small-town America.

This article draws from the narratives through oral story telling of my great grandmother’s experience during Girmit. It aims to preserve the past and present for future generations in a creative manner. Narrative and poetic inquiry has been used to bond the Girmit root and the Pacific shoot. Inspiration from Teresia Teaiwa’s (1968–2017) efforts which emphasized creative practice as a path to drawing out and deepening one’s knowledge guided this article. Data, presented as poems, express and communicate the stories pertaining to Girmit and its descendants. Present curriculum should seize opportunities to cultivate the usage of narratives and poetry to create a creative curriculum. This article, hopes that the poems could be used in the curriculum to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct the colonial mind-sets. It is written from my heart to the many hearts who, like me, are still in search for answers and insights of being and belonging to the diasporic/Hybrid identity.

Here the author presents a sequentially yet nonlinearly organized collage of previously published writing, curated under the title “Replication Crisis: Framing Science for Untold Crimes.” The collage is composed entirely of quotations. Here, a thesis-driven expository regime is replaced with open-ended discursive potential. The excerpts include assessments of the replication crisis in science; discussions of p values and their centrality in the crisis; reviews and analysis of recent scientific hoaxes, “sting” operations, and/or fraudulent studies (some attempting to delegitimize poststructuralist, postmodernist, and feminist critiques of science); discussions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Wittgensteinian language games; and quotations from contemporary social theory and literature. The collage, as an experiment, offers readers an opportunity for re-contextualization through their own associative sense-making. Readers determine what is important information, what might be fruitfully compared and contrasted, and how discourses come to “mean.”

The purpose of this narrative study is to understand the experience of a transgender woman through the process of self-discovery in contrast to a society often in opposition to transness in a rural town in the Rocky Mountain region. The findings of this study illustrate the perseverance of gender identity despite personal and cultural obstacles. The results provide further evidence of gender identity as personal, persistent, developing, and undeniable. The alternative writing of this story is designed to capture the unique story of a young woman whose trans community has been overlooked by traditional research writing.

A poetic inquiry on how people’s world views may unknowingly lead to divisions. This poem offers a journey from destructive invisibles such as privilege, oppression, -isms (e.g., sexism, racism, classism), and silence to constructive visibles such as equality, dialogue, attentiveness, and collaboration. The poem was presented during Poetry for Change in the IdeaFest at the University of Victoria, Canada, as part of the Social Movement Poets Collective in March 2020.

In this micro-memoir, I show how I adopted, like John Keats, a “posthumous existence.” I draw a parallel between his terminal tuberculosis and my own diagnosis of End-Stage Renal Failure though not between his brilliant talent as a poet and my own humble skills as an academic developer and writer. I also express my support for the idea of playing dead as a writer as suggested by the Nobel prizewinner Nadine Gordimer.

These poems were written and shared during the October 2019 International Poetic Inquiry Symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia.