Critical Qualitative Methodologies

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman K. Denzin ◽  
Yvonna S. Lincoln ◽  
Maggie MacLure ◽  
Ann Merete Otterstad ◽  
Harry Torrance ◽  
...  

Critical qualitative scholarship offers humble grounds and many unforeseen possibilities to seek and promote justice, critical global engagement, and diverse epistemologies. This dialogical and interactive paper is based on a panel session at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry that highlighted diverse areas of critical qualitative inquiry, namely justice, difference, ethics, and equity. Authors in this paper share their critical qualitative research practices and provide examples of how justice can be addressed through research foci, methods, theories, and ethical practices.

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Nina Lester ◽  
Emily A. Nusbaum

This article introduces the special issue, “Reclaiming” Disability in Critical Qualitative Research, which aims to center disability and disabled people in critical qualitative research. More particularly, we highlight here how the articles included in this special issue collectively consider new possibilities for the place and practice of critical qualitative methodologies and methods in research involving disabled people. We begin this introduction by discussing the meaning of reclaiming disability and foreground the importance of critical qualitative inquiry. Then, we offer a brief discussion of the interdisciplinary field of disability studies and the fruitful possibilities for its generative intra-action with critical qualitative research. In doing so, we also point to the often taken-for-granted ableist practices that have historically been used in qualitative research. Finally, we offer a brief overview of the articles included in the special issue and conclude with a call for consideration of next steps for the qualitative research community.


2020 ◽  
pp. 107780042091161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Hodkinson ◽  
Ella Houston ◽  
Norman Denzin ◽  
Heather Adams ◽  
Davina Kirkpatrick ◽  
...  

The article introduces the concept of the “intertwangle,” a concept grounded within the gentle collisions of delegates at the 13th International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois and the simultaneous retelling of multiple autoethnographies of such encounters. Through such encounters and “retellings,” perhaps a different way of thinking about autoethnography is developed. The article presents a story of a journey to and through the 13th Congress. A journey of no answers and no certainty—this journey is not a collaborative sharing of data but more of the gentle collisions and the recounting of different stories located within shared experiences. It is a simple journey bounded by way-markers of uncertainty, at times self-deprecation, loss, and death. It is a journey of new beginnings, of no ends—of uncertainty rather than certainty, revealing rather than obscuring and expanding rather than reducing.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (9) ◽  
pp. 712-719
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Wolgemuth ◽  
Pauliina Rautio ◽  
Mirka Koro-Ljungberg ◽  
Travis M. Marn ◽  
Susan Nordstrom ◽  
...  

Inspired by work/think/play in qualitative research, we centered the idea of “play” in a qualitative research project to explore what proceeding from the idea of work/think/play might look like and accomplish. We pursued play in an experimental qualitative inquiry over dinner one night at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Our article centers on one work/think/play inquiry three of us conducted. Through a playful account of how play unfolded in our work/think/play inquiry that evening, we explore research play as generative, deadly, and censored in the context of neoliberalism and other terrors. We reflect on what (good) play does in qualitative research, what our work/think/play/birth/death/terror/qualitative/research accomplished, if anything. Maybe research play is vital, what keeps us fit to do critical qualitative research. Yet research play moves (well) beyond normative rules of much qualitative research. Is it worth the risk? Can we know? Even after?


Author(s):  
Aaron M. Kuntz

Conventional approaches to qualitative research seek to distill and capture meaning through a sequence of determined, progressive methodological steps that serve to synthesize difference toward a series of overarching claims regarding human experience. This approach reifies contemporary neoliberal values and, as a consequence, short-circuits any possibility for progressive social change. Through conventional research practices, the principles of security, schizoid, and statistical society accelerate, extending normalizing processes of governmentality, and producing a docile citizenry adverse to key elements of an engaged democracy. In such circumstance, risk is identified as the production of findings that are ambiguously defined, not attending to values of certainty and generalizable outcomes. As a consequence, conventional methodological practices fail to engage the postmodern condition—fragmented experiences with inconclusive outcomes are displaced by methodologies bent on merging difference into foreclosed meaning. Contrary to conventional approaches to research, post-foundational orientations emphasize relational logics that maintain difference within the inquiry project itself. A provocative example of this extends from newly materialist approaches to qualitative inquiry that emphasizes the productive possibilities inherent in difference and, as such, displace the simplified dialectical reasoning of conventional approaches in favor of more dialogic recognition of diffractive patterning. In this sense, open-ended difference makes possible previously unrecognized (even unthought) possibilities for being otherwise. As such, newly materialist approaches to inquiry manifest alternative ontological and epistemological practices that are not available to the conventional methodologist; they make possible an open-ended vision of the future that is necessary for radical democratic action. Furthermore, the fluid nature of such methodologies align well with Foucault’s explication of parrhesia, a means of truth-making that creates new possibilities for becoming otherwise. The intersection of newly materialist methodologies with parrhesia challenges methodologists to risk the very relations that secure their expertise, establishing a moral challenge to the impact of past practice on the possibilities inherent in the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 511-518
Author(s):  
Eva King ◽  
Elizabeth J. Norman ◽  
Liz H. Mossop ◽  
Kate A. Cobb ◽  
Susan M. Matthew ◽  
...  

Qualitative methodologies are relative newcomers to health sciences education research. While they may look very different to their quantitative counterparts in terms of size and scope, when well-applied they offer a fresh perspective and generate valuable research findings. Although qualitative research is being increasingly conducted in veterinary medical education, there are few contextualized resources to assist those who would like to develop their expertise in this area. In this article, we address this by introducing the principles of qualitative research design in a veterinary medical education context. Drawing from a range of contemporary resources, we explore the types of research goals and questions that are amenable to qualitative inquiry and discuss the process of formulating a worthwhile research question. We explain what research paradigms are and introduce readers to some of the methodological options available to them in qualitative research. Examples from veterinary medical education are used to illustrate key points. In a second companion article, we will focus on the decisions that need to be made regarding data sampling, collection, and analysis. We will also consider how qualitative research is evaluated, and discuss how qualitative findings are applied. Taken together, the two articles build an understanding of qualitative research, illuminate its potential to contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning in veterinary medical education, and equip readers with an improved capacity to appraise its value.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Winter

With his path-breaking The Qualitative Manifesto. A Call to Arms (2010), Norman Denzin calls for qualitative inquiry to be carried out with the aim of contributing to the empowerment of subjects involved in the research. He pleads passionately and vehemently in favor of a research process that is led by the ideal of social justice. My contribution wants to plead for making radical equality between researchers and research subjects a core element of qualitative inquiries as well. For this purpose, I will turn to the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has been largely ignored in qualitative inquiry. His work, though, is of central importance for critical qualitative research. The idea of equality opens up a new and more profound understanding of politics that would allow us to specify the political meaning of qualitative studies in late capitalism more accurately.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Alan M. Jacobs ◽  
Tim Büthe ◽  
Ana Arjona ◽  
Leonardo R. Arriola ◽  
Eva Bellin ◽  
...  

In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1


Author(s):  
Thalia Mulvihill ◽  
Raji Swaminatha ◽  
Lucy Bailey

This article responds to the call for deeper examination of qualitative inquiry teaching practices by presenting representative examples from the pedagogies of three teacher-educators who have taught Qualitative Research Methods courses for the past 15 years. We focus in particular on the pedagogical complexities of teaching data analysis, which is a topic that remains under-theorized and under-represented in contemporary scholarship on qualitative methodologies. Using a critical friends framework, we analyze and synthesize our pedagogical responses to key dilemmas we have encountered in our respective contexts, all state universities, to introducing qualitative inquiry to novice researchers who often enter the analytic process with positivist notions of knowledge creation. They sometimes enter the analytic process with the belief if they can only “catch the tail” of this thing called qualitative research they will be able to “do it right.” Yet, as the metaphor implies, catching a fierce beast by the tail, thinking you can control its actions, can intrude on the inductive and holistic character of the qualitative inquiry process.


Author(s):  
Svend Brinkmann

This chapter presents the phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophies that have been immensely relevant for qualitative research. Phenomenology began with Husserl and was continued by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and it was developed into tools for qualitative inquiry by scholars such as Giorgi. Hermeneutics dates back to Scheiermacher and Dilthey, and it was in a sense merged with phenomenology by Heidegger and brought up to date by Gadamer in particular. Many qualitative methodologies employ strategies from phenomenology and hermeneutics, which can be condensed to the essential idea of making the obvious obvious. The difference between phenomenology and hermeneutics in their purer forms concerns the extent to which they view interpretation (rather than description) as a necessary component in making that which is implicit in an “obvious” way explicit.


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