Qualitative Inquiry

In this conceptual paper, we speculate on some goals and methodologies for social inquiry responsive to a viral and potentially unthinkable world. Rather than following old methodological scripts and validated practices, we imagine fluid, responsive, and urgent methodologies as needed responses to better show and vividly document our progression toward a possible (methodological) “apocalypse.” As such a real/imaginary apocalypse enables us to (un)think what is currently thinkable, to postulate, speculate, and hesitate as we stretch to imagine inquiry and knowing in more immediate, deeply responsive, and responsible ways.

This article explores the evolving concept of feminist interviewing and its contemporary use, exploring key conceptual moments from the past 40 years of feminist interviewing, and concluding with current implications for feminist researchers interested in using qualitative interviews in social science research. Faced with multiple possibilities for approaching feminist interviewing, this article argues for the importance of cultivating an ecosystem of care, a framework for inviting stories rather than coercively courting headlines. Considering various approaches to feminist methodology and interviewing, this article suggests using the theoretical framing of “feminism for the 99%” to guide the use of feminist interviewing in our current moment to cultivate feminist ecosystems of care and avoid dominating practices in research.

There is consensus around the value of conducting literature reviews across disciplines; however, little attention has been given to the potential(s) of engaging in a qualitative methodological literature review (QMLR). This article examines the possibilities of engaging in a QMLR by showing how it can inform qualitative research practice. After overviewing the history of literature reviews, we offer a series of questions that can inform and be integrated into a QMLR. We then demonstrate how such reviews can serve as an opportunity for qualitative inquirers to critically engage with the methodological literature with the intent of better understanding, enacting, and generating new methodological practices.

People’s names and the places, animals, and items named by people are deeply personal and reflective of their culture and identity, yet in qualitative research, the standard is to use pseudonyms. This practice is thought to protect research participants, but when are “real” names most respectful and appropriate? How might researchers include research participants in these considerations? The purpose of this methodological article is to increase transparency and collaboration around the participant naming process, bringing much-needed attention to issues of power in the naming process in research. The authors review the literature and detail their reflexive engagement with pseudonyms; they advance issues for consideration and provide recommendations in the areas of power in participant naming, culturally responsive research, and pseudonym use with trans people and incarcerated people. Throughout the article, the authors interrupt the text with reflexive narrative interludes to share personal experiences with naming.

In this collective biography, we follow the question: What does it do to think~post? We navigate~circle~un/do the entanglements of institutional and disciplinary boundaries and researcher identities, increasing striations of post-thinking within qualitative inquiry, teaching practices, ethics, and becoming. Our data include personal journals, crafts and collages, collective writing, dialogues, and images from a conference session where we engaged participants in our thinking. Our memory work enacts post-qualitative becomings, opening space for questioning and reflecting (&&&), undoing and unfolding individual subjectivities, and examining the vulnerabilities, tensions, and possibilities of becoming~post.

This article focuses on the mentoring relationships Black women create and develop. The authors highlight how mentoring is communal and the ways these relationships serve to connect communities of Black women as resources of support. The article illuminates the generative power of Black women’s mentoring relationships to create alternate realities that make the academy more accessible, supportive, and beneficial for Black women. Black women engage in these mentoring relationships as acts of resistance by fighting to make space for their voices to be heard. As members of marginalized communities and outsiders within the academy, the article utilizes conversation as a method of inquiry, to share a curated exchange between the co-authors, Nicole M. Brown and Ruby Mendenhall, discussing the evolution of their decade’s long mentoring relationship.

Black Storytellers and Everyday Liberation addresses the question, “How do Black folx cultivate everyday practices of liberation?” This article details the inception of an ethnographic Black Storytelling research project between 2021 and 2022 that centers the lived experiences of 18 people around the United States. The participants, including myself, collectively explore how various institutions have shaped individual and family identities. As an outcome of this work, I provide analysis that disrupts institutional anti-Black racism (specifically naming schools) and identify ways that we can heal and affirm ourselves through everyday practices. I conclude with a data excerpt in the form of poetic transcription.

In recent years, suicide and nonsuicidal self-injury researchers and practitioners have identified the need to amplify the lived experiences of individuals who experience and engage in self-injurious thoughts and behaviors in research and clinical practice (hereinafter referred to as “self-harm” to honor the words used by the youth who participated in this study). In the present study, we sought the wisdom and perspectives of youth who engage in self-harm in response to the following questions: What do you think needs to be done to address self-harm? What would you say to parents of youth who engage in self-harm? What would you say to other youth who are engaging in self-harm? Utilizing data from in-depth interviews (N = 59), we constructed a series of three found research poems to center their words and perspectives in answer to each of the research questions.

Conventional research ethics focus on avoidance of harm to individual participants through measures to ensure informed consent. In long-term ethnographic research projects involving multiple actors, however, a wider concept of harm is needed. We apply the criminological concept of social harm, which focuses on harm produced through and affecting wider social relations, to a research project that we undertook in Malawi. Through this, we show how structural economic inequalities shape the consequences of research for the differently positioned parties involved. Specifically, we focus on dilemmas around transferring resources within three social fields: our relations with a Malawian ethics committee; our interventions in a rural community; and our efforts to engage the policy community. Each of these involved multiple and differently placed individuals within broader, multi-scalar structural relations and reveals the inadequacies of conventional codes of ethics.

This reflexive account of fieldwork with disaster-affected communities in Kerala, India, recounts the researcher’s engagement with positionality and ethics. A participatory method was adopted—enlisting local field guides who mediated the researcher’s interactions with participants. Apart from offering pragmatic solutions for accessing participants, the method enhanced the researcher’s contextual/cultural insight, and facilitated a relationship of trust. The researcher-guide dynamic is explored as a co-constructing and relational method that minimizes harm and maximizes benefit for participants. Ethics of care is elucidated as a practicable ethical framework for thinking and doing disaster research, illustrated with reference to the present method.

In this autoethnography, I reflect on the last 72-hours of telephonic experiences with my godmother’s decision to live or die before entering a nursing facility. “Don’t I have a say” is a broader critical reflection about older adults’ lack of personal choices with regard to their health care without advance directives and the caregiver’s best interest decision-making approach. The central ideas in this autoethnography illuminate choice theory and the essentiality of being. From my godmother’s point of view, choice theory and essentiality of being highlight the need for her “owning” her health care decision. From my perspective, choice theory offers new perspectives and solutions to best interest decision-making as a potential caregiver. While in the final hours of my godmother’s life, she “owned” the decision; however, years later, I am still processing what happens when a person wills death to have the final say.

In this study, I draw upon Endarkened Feminist Epistemology (Dillard, 2012) and Decolonial Feminist Research (Rhee, 2020) to explore the epistemology of my mother, a first-generation Chinese immigrant. Based on data generated from the video-cued qi ethnography methodology, I pay attention to my Mama’s ways of knowing as she cooks in the kitchen. Qi is a Chinese concept that means breath, spirit, and life force. I draw on qi as the ongoing connectivity toward wholeness and movement toward harmony in the way I collected and analyzed data. I share my findings as a series of interconnected poetry, images, and narratives to (re)member my mother’s life as well as mine as we (re)claim what we have forgotten and (re)turn to a place of wholeness. I conclude the article by exploring the implications for the Asian American Pacific Islander community and beyond, as we conduct the work of collective rememory.

This autoethnography reflects the author’s devastation and recovery after being victimized by a stranger amid a surge of racist and anti-Asian attacks during the pandemic. Triggers and images impact her mental health which highlights her need for professional trauma therapy. During healing, she discovers how leaching images and triggers can spark fear and anxiety. The author lives the irony of both a culture of campaigns against anti-Asian racism and a culture of violence targeting Asians. Overall, the autoethnography provides a deeper sense of the social and cultural issues involved in the post-traumatic effects of anti-Asian racist incidents.

I use headings from Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man speech to structure a narrative about an academic’s progress through his own seven ages.

The memory of inhabiting the room of a departed brother is explored in this narrative poem.

In an autoethnographic journey through two losses that occurred months apart, I explore my own sense of disbelief, pain, shock, and horror while accompanying each of my parents through their final months of illness that were anything but peaceful and calm. In a twin set of poems, the pieces problematize the pathologizing label of “complicated” grief by asking how—and if—loss can be experienced as anything other than complicated with all the mess, tension, and conflict it brings.