(Performance Is) Metaphors as Methodological Tools in Qualitative Inquiry

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Benjamin Myers ◽  
Bryant Keith Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Heterogeneous Ensemble ◽  
Key Questions

In his germinal essay, “Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion” Dwight Conquergood (1995) uses the compelling metaphor of a caravan to describe performance studies; a “commitment to praxis, to multiple ways of knowing that engage embodied experience with critical reflection … a caravan: a heterogeneous ensemble of ideas and methods on the move” (pp. 139–140). This expanded discussion on the relation between performance and metaphor first presented at the 2009 Qualitative Inquiry Congress asked each of the original participants to develop new metaphors for performance that open up an aspect or understanding of performance that is underdeveloped, underutilized or untapped. Key questions were explored in discussion: How are these metaphors provocative and what to they provoke? How do metaphors work in understanding performance in performance studies? What is the critical service these metaphors make in/as qualitative inquiry? How do or can these metaphors be made to work for social justice? Whose interests are served by particular metaphorical constructions? This Special Issue includes a section entitled “New Metaphors for Performance” which included the original metaphors offered by Ronald Pelias, David Hanley-Tejada, W. Benjamin Myers, Season Ellison, Lesa Lockford, Shauna MacDonald, D. Soyini Madison, and Della Pollock. The second section entitled, “Listeners/Respondents” includes generative autobiographical metaphors, from key audience members as their experiences/ responses to and in dialogue with the originating metaphors presented in the panel (Christopher N. Poulos, John T. Warren, Nicole Defenbaugh, Tami Spry, Karin Schlücker, Claudio Moreira, and Hari Stephen Kumar).

scholarly journals Critical Qualitative Inquiry in China Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110146
Author(s):  
Ping-Chun Hsiung
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Community ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
China Studies

This Special Issue aims to advance critical qualitative inquiry in China studies and contribute to a vibrant, inclusive global community. It builds upon debates and efforts in the behavioral and social sciences among area specialists in two eras: researchers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora in the 1980s who sought to sinologize behavioral and social sciences, and sociologists in China in the 2000s who are seeking to indigenize these fields. The Issue takes a two-pronged approach toward advancing critical reflection in knowledge production: (a) it aspires to diminish the current influence of Western and positivistic paradigms on behavioral and social sciences research; (b) it seeks to challenge discursive hegemonic influences to create and sustain space for critical qualitative inquiry. The Issue traverses disciplinary boundaries between history and behavioral and social sciences within China Studies. It opens dialogue with the non-area specialists who are the primary audience of the Qualitative Inquiry.

Performers, Structure, and Ways of Knowing

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Daphne Leong
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Video Frame ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Theme And Variations ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Subjective Agency ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Violin And Piano

This opening chapter presents the book’s overarching project: the illumination of relations between analysis and performance through theorist-performer collaborations on twentieth-century works. The project is set in the context of two distinct though overlapping disciplines: the tradition of relating analysis and performance within the field of music theory, and the field of musical performance studies. Musical structure, on which the book focuses, is broadly defined as relations among parts and whole, emerging through interactions of objective materials and subjective agency. Ways of knowing that arise in the course of relating analysis and performance are encapsulated by wissen (knowing that), können (knowing how), and kennen (knowing, as in knowing a person). The book’s title and form (a theme and variations) are briefly described. Two rehearsal vignettes (from Crumb’s Four Nocturnes for violin and piano and Shende’s Throw Down or Shut Up!), the first accompanied by a performance video, frame the chapter.

scholarly journals CPI Welcomes Kathleen Sitter’s Special Issue Artistic Pedagogies in Academia

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecille DePass ◽  
Ali A. Abdi
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Rich

Inspired by Heron’s research on different ways of knowing, as importantly, as a result of her considerable knowledge and expertise in the field, Kathleen Sitter has designed, developed, indeed masterminded and crafted, a very special CPI issue. Textual discourses, in this issue, are often complemented by artworks. Yet, at other times, works from the visual arts occupy centre stage. Within Sitter’s issue, the range of ways of depicting not only, how one knows that one knows, as well as, the who- what- where and whys, become lively players in processes of knowledge-making. For educational purposes, the rich combination of types of texts and artworks demonstrate interactive pedagogies for teaching and learning for social justice.

The Concepts of Qualitative Data: Challenges in Neoliberal Times for Qualitative Inquiry

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (8) ◽  
pp. 713-720 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uwe Flick
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Virtual Data

Qualitative inquiry always used various kinds of data for understanding social issues and participants’ perspectives. Research and methodologies were debated for what data are adequate for studying social justice issues. Current challenges for concepts of data are new, for example, virtual and digital data, question traditional data (interviews, ethnography, etc.) in their relevance for understanding current life worlds. New methods produce new and other forms of data (e.g., mobile, virtual data). Neoliberal contexts produce questions about qualitative research and its data. What is an adequate and contemporary understanding of the concept of “data”? These questions are discussed in this special issue.

Thinking with and beyond the informal–formal relation in urban thought

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 620-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin McFarlane
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Formal Relation ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way ◽  
Multiple Ways Of Knowing

This commentary to the special issue on ‘Transcending (in)formal urbanism’ reviews key threads common across the issue and opens up questions as to the work that the informal–formal dynamic does for urban studies. It points out the general agreement in that none of the papers rejects the utility of the category of informal and that the terms informal and formal still have value and utility. In doing so, the special issue articles offer three key contributions to demonstrate the ways in which the informal either composes or becomes a close partner to the formal, de-link informality from its more commonplace registers, and sketch how the formal and informal have always been blurred in practice. Centrally, this calls for a critical reflection on the structures of thought through which the informal–formal relation emerges. It advances an understanding of how informal and formal operate as a kind of ‘intellectual governmentality’ reiterating the same ways of seeing, carving up, and analysing the city, getting in the way of our ability to research urbanism differently. The appreciation of the informal–formal dynamic is situated as part of the challenge to build a more global urban studies that works with multiple ways of knowing and researching. To what extent does remaining within a structure of thought around the informal–formal relation enable or get in the way of that? Borrowing alternatives from movements to ‘provincialising’ that structure of thought, this commentary calls for a renewed interest in the potential, and limits, of the informal–formal inheritance in urban thought.

We Listen Together

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-97
Author(s):  
Craig Gingrich-Philbrook
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Ways Of Knowing

In this brief essay, the author responds to a performative panel of essays by students of Devika Chawla. He situates his reading of the event betwixt and between typical modes of performance studies research, demonstrating how the panelists reveal narrative's power to reflect on the layering of time, power and privilege, and ways of knowing.

scholarly journals Grand Challenges, Feminist Answers

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 263178772110203
Author(s):  
Yvonne Benschop
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Situated Knowledge ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Grand Challenges ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Feminist Organization

Feminist organization theories develop knowledge about how organizations and processes of organizing shape and are shaped by gender, in intersection with race, class and other forms of social inequality. The politics of knowledge within management and organization studies tend to marginalize and silence feminist theorizing on organizations, and so the field misses out on the interdisciplinary, sophisticated conceptualizations and reflexive modes of situated knowledge production provided by feminist work. To highlight the contributions of feminist organization theories, I discuss the feminist answers to three of the grand challenges that contemporary organizations face: inequality, technology and climate change. These answers entail a systematic critique of dominant capitalist and patriarchal forms of organizing that perpetuate complex intersectional inequalities. Importantly, feminist theorizing goes beyond mere critique, offering alternative value systems and unorthodox approaches to organizational change, and providing the radically different ways of knowing that are necessary to tackle the grand challenges. The paper develops an aspirational ideal by sketching the contours of how we can organize for intersectional equality, develop emancipatory technologies and enact a feminist ethics of care for the human and the natural world.

Exploring the place of spirituality in Canadian health promotion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karina Gerhardt-Strachan
Keyword(s):  
Health Promotion ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Sampling Frame ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Canadian Health ◽  
Commission Report ◽  
Social Environmental

Abstract The field of health promotion advocates a socioecological approach to health that addresses a variety of physical, social, environmental, political and cultural factors. Encouraging a holistic approach, health promotion examines many aspects of health and wellbeing, including physical, mental, sexual, community, social and ecological health. Despite this holism, there is a noticeable absence of discussion surrounding spirituality and spiritual health. This research study explored how leading scholars in Canadian health promotion understand the place of spirituality in health promotion. Using the fourth edition of Health Promotion in Canada (Rootman et al., 2017) as the sampling frame of recognized leaders in the field, 13 semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with authors from the book. This study is situated within a critical health promotion approach that utilizes methodologies aiming for social justice, equity and ecological sustainability. I argue that by avoiding spirituality within health promotion frameworks and education, the secularism of health promotion and its underlying values of Eurocentric knowledge production and science remain invisible and rarely critiqued. This study intends to open up possibilities for centering spiritual and non-Western epistemologies and ways of knowing that have been marginalized, such as Indigenous understandings of health and wellbeing. Restoring right relations with Indigenous peoples in Canada has taken on new urgency with the calls to action of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission report (NCTR, 2015). This is one important way that health promotion can fulfill its promise of being inclusive, relevant and effective for human and planetary wellbeing.

A Politics of Witnessing: Definitional Ceremony as Social Justice Work in Academia

2020 ◽  
pp. 194084472096820
Author(s):  
Sarah Strauven
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Australian Case ◽  
Narrative Practice ◽  
Work First

The work outlined in this article has in part evolved as a response to Mr. Behrouz Boochani’s call to academics to engage with his work. First, I propose academics consider a form of public engagement drawn from narrative practice as social justice work in academia. In the next section, I illustrate my argument with an Australian case by discussing (a) a peaceful resistance undertaken by the refugees on Manus Island through the lens of definitional ceremony, (b) a public witnessing response by Dr. Surma to the written account of Mr. Boochani of the resistance, and (c) his reply to this act of witnessing. I complement this with my own response to both scholars on account of witnessing their exchanges. In the final section of this article, I articulate in more detail how this proposition of conceiving social justice work in academia is based on a politics of witnessing and acknowledgment. I argue that its epistemological and ontological dimensions hold promise for post-qualitative inquiry and that narrative practices more generally, can assist us in performing relationally situated research.

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