(Un)Settling Imagined Lands

De/colonial methodologies and ontoepistemologies have gained popularity in the academic discourses emerging from Global North perspectives over the last decade. However, such perspectives often erase the broader global agenda of de/colonizing research, praxis, and activism that could be initiated and engaged with beyond the issue of land repatriation, as that is not the only agenda in de/colonial initiatives. In this chapter, I coin a framework, Par/Des(i), with six tenets, and offer three actionable methodological turns grounded in transnational de/colonial ontoepistemologies. I locate, situate, and trace the Par/Des(i) framework within the South Asian diasporic discourses and lived realities as evidenced from my empirical work with transnational South Asian women, my community, and my colleagues. Therefore, I offer possibilities of being, knowing, and enacting de/colonizing methodologies in our work, when engaging with the Par/Des(i) framework, with an invitation for an expanded conversation.

Online, Asynchronous Data Collection in Qualitative Research

The authors discuss the use of online, asynchronous data collection in qualitative research. Online interviews can be a valuable way to increase access to marginalized participants, including those with time, distance, or privacy issues that prevent them from participating in face-to-face interviews. The resulting greater participant pool can increase the rigor and validity of research outcomes. The authors also address issues with conducting in-depth asynchronous interviews such as are needed in phenomenology. Advice from the field is provided for rigorous implementation of this data collection strategy. The authors include extensive excerpts from two studies using online, asynchronous data collection.

A Brief Statement on the Future of Public Scholarship and the Research Methods Landscape

The book editor offers some final comments about the state of the field and promise for the future. Leavy suggests researchers consider using the language of “shapes” to talk about the forms their research takes and to highlight the ongoing role of the research community in shaping knowledge-building practices. She reviews the challenges and rewards of taking your work public. Leavy concludes by noting that institutional structures need to evolve their rewards criteria in order to meet the demands of practicing contemporary research and suggests that professors update their teaching practices to bring the audiences of research into the forefront of discussions of methodology.

Ethical Challenges Community-Based Researchers and Community-Based Organizations Face

Community-based research (CBR) has grown rapidly since its origins and has helped to make substantial and positive changes within communities. The goals of CBR are to collaborate with community-based organizations (CBOs) and community partners in culturally sensitive, synergistic relationships to address community-defined problems and find community-relevant solutions. This chapter focuses on the ethical challenges that community-based researchers and CBOs face when working with traditional Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to guide and evaluate their projects. Traditional IRB standards regarding informed consent, personal and professional boundaries, and decisions regarding risks and benefits to communities need to change. Academic researchers, community partners, IRBs, and institutions of higher learning must work together so that community-based researchers and CBOs can continue to work in community and communities for social justice and social change.

Public Scholarship Goes Online

This chapter addresses the intersections between public scholarship, impression management, and email as a qualitative research method. Through a discussion of Erving Goffman’s theory of impression management, the author contends that the use of email in qualitative methods must first be considered as an exercise in how we manage identities online. When public scholarship is attached to online research, qualitative researchers can take an act that is already public and form a methodological route to devise studies. The chapter outlines the use of email as a qualitative method by exploring logistics like recruitment, rapport building, ethics, consent, transcripts, and privacy expectations. The chapter ends with suggestions for future areas of research.

Disaster Research

This chapter provides an overview of the history and development of research examining disaster events. The historical review includes discussion of the three core research traditions (disasters, hazards, and risk) and the more recent focus on public administration. A focus on research methods unique to disasters guides a review of the challenges of research in the four phases of disaster. The chapter also examines specific methodological challenges related to disaster field research, including sampling and data collection. The chapter concludes by reviewing issues in the transfer of research findings to emergency management practice and discusses the future of disaster research.

Grant Writing as a Creative Process

This chapter emphasizes creativity as an important, but often forgotten, methodological aspect of grant writing as a rhetorical genre. Sharing knowledge of three experienced grant writers in communication, the co-authors reflect on the role of creativity in developing and sustaining fundable grants, and on larger research prospects and implications of inspiration, which span careers in knowledge-based sectors. The authors provide helpful context and proven strategies to support the grant writing process. Literature on grant writing in the humanities and social sciences points to innovative grant writing as a productive approach or method of doing public scholarship. Creativity often sets apart winnable, funded grant projects from projects that are less impressive to funders in real-world settings. Counterintuitively to higher education’s increasing bureaucratization, lofty, aspirational artistry is central to successful grants development, particularly writing persuasive grant narratives. Grants entail creative problem solving to address pressing issues and remediate urgent challenges across multidisciplinary fields.

Audience and Voice (and Sometimes Reflexivity)

As qualitative researchers reach out to expand the reception of their research, they must consider both the kinds of audiences they wish to reach and the discourse—or “voice”—that will have the maximum impact for that audience. A careful consideration of this interaction can often be found by using deep reflexivity, or the reflection on the self-in-interaction with an audience and its preferred discourse(s) and media. Researchers will need to “shift registers,” or transfer from one kind of discourse to another, which is not always easily accomplished. This chapter considers the potential audiences, the types of languages and discourses familiar to those audiences, and the forms of communication most likely to reach a given group or audience.

Academic Blogs

Academic blogs are an increasingly popular form of social media that allow scholars to enact public engagement. This chapter examines academic blogs as scholarship, blogs about scholarship, and blogs as a tool to generate scholarship. After reviewing key terms and processes related to blogging, a brief history of blogging is provided. Then three types of blog environments are reviewed: personal, topic-driven, and filter blogs. Next, five metaphors for academic blogs are considered: blogs as education, information, relationship, engagement, and scholarship. These metaphors illustrate the breadth of blog functions, specifically their use for research innovation, mobility, connection, and reflexivity as well as for educational possibilities. Blogging as a form of scholarship is then explored in depth, especially the use of blogs for content analysis, multiadic discourse analysis, forms of diary research, and arts-based approaches. Finally, two key tensions regarding blogs as scholarship are explored: how the expedience of blog scholarship comes into conflict with concerns about credibility and how the accessible language and approaches to blog writing come into conflict with a blog entry’s enduring popularity or appeal.

The Impossible Task of Community Art Practice

Through a formal examination of some of the most important long-term community art practices in Chicago, Mexican American artists and educators Jorge Lucero and William Estrada recount their own community art work in the Chicago area. The chapter is divided into three parts: Precedent, Contemporary Stories, and Tips. The first section is an overview of relevant markers and important precedent in community art practice. The second part comprises two stories of contemporary community art practice in which the authors have been involved. Finally, the authors propose 13 tips for enacting the “impossible” act of community arts practice. Lucero and Estrada recommend that community art practitioners pay close attention to the longevity of their work, incorporating difference, listening, “deskilling,” playfulness, love, failure, the complicated relationship with institutions, collecting data, co-creation, inquiry, and situationality.