Qualitative Inquiry current issue

Fragments

Moreira, C. — 2008-06-26

This performance autoethnography shows the author's struggle in finding his place, scholarship, voice, and body, into the academic setting. Mixing together memories of his lived experience with sugar cane workers, notes, and leftovers of different fieldworks, plus 6 years of life as grad student at the University of Illinois, the author looks for ways to decolonize inquiry; to decolonize academia. From a present space created by a deep immersion in the past, he challenges the White's man ideology, trying to create a performative action/ space, whose goal is to bring more justice and dignity to more people. This performance discusses and interrogates forms of representation, knowledge and experience, method and theory. All of these issues are pertinent to any field of knowledge which deals with the lives of human beings.

New Strategies of Control: Academic Freedom and Research Ethics Boards

Lewis, M. — 2008-06-26

This article, detailing the implications of "ethics drift" for critical work in the academy, reports on an ethics challenge to a non-research-based scholarly text. It analyzes how General Research Ethics Boards (GREBs) can threaten academic freedom when they lack a clear definition of "human subject" research, fail to distinguish between empirical research using humans and scholarly engagement of important social/political issues within human contexts, and overstep the limits of their jurisdiction when they agree to arbitrate on scholarship that ought to be resolved through open debated rather than administrative mechanisms. The article emphasizes that in public democratic institutions, those who contribute to decisions and policies, whether through formal process or by informal tacit ideology, are acting not as individuals but as functionaries of the institution and must bear public accountability and its attendant critiques. The article ends with a recommendation for arms-length oversight of the workings of GREBs.

Listening and Musing to Grant Kien's "Wireless Mobility and `Being' Canadian in Toronto" at the QI Congress May 4, 2006 (With Apologies to Grant)

Lewis, P.J. — 2008-06-26

This work is a narrative musing inspired by, and entangled with listening to the auto-ethnographic piece shared by Grant Kien at the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry May 4—6, 2006 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

an ILL/ELLip(op)tical po--ETIC/EMIC/Lemic/litic post(R) uv: ed DUCAT ion recherche repres(C)entation

Smith, P. — 2008-06-26

An approximately excessive, already-much-too-full, incomprehensibly elliptical poetics of research representation, this post/conceptual writing/writhing about research explores a poetic, poemic, polemic, politic, post discourse, and describes a new grammar and rhetoric for understanding education and social science. It offers an undiscovered set of metaphors to unpack ed DUCAT ion scanty science. It is a spoken/written langue/tongue piece based on an intentionally outlandish and overwhelming form used by (some) conceptual, and POST poets. Avoiding the never-transparent language that inscribes the offalic and violent taxonomy of norm(&)al academic research Repres©entation, this writ(h)ing outlines, through a flagrantly and literally/littorally entirely tiresome, unspeakably visual and aural word conflagration, a po-etic that begins to de-inscribe the nature of metaphoric, medicalized, ventriloquizing, normative discourse of social science/education.

Talking About Race: Shifting the Analytical Paradigm

Pascale, C.-M. — 2008-06-26

This article examines patterns of common-sense knowledge about race to understand how race is made to appear both self-evident and inherently meaningful in daily interactions. It explores a new methodological imaginary by drawing strategically from ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis to examine the histories and the visions of power that rest beneath the surface of common-sense knowledge about race. Because common-sense knowledge links the production of meaning in local contexts to the broader production of cultural knowledge, it provides a key focal point for examining the dialogical relationship between the apparent agency of local practices and the efficacy of cultural discourse. The article concludes with implications for social research and social justice.

Festum Asinorum: A Trickster at Play

Frentz, T. S. — 2008-06-26

In January 2000, I was diagnosed with cancer. This story tells of my relationships with the medical professionals who treated me. Like Arthur Frank, my goal was to receive the treatment I needed without sacrificing the humanity I valued. Being socialized by my father's self-destructive wolfish approach to authority, I struggle to overcome those tendencies with medical practitioners and to replace them with a more benign canine—the humor-laced, rule-violating, coyote/trickster of ancient mythology, a persona that challenges dehumanizing institutional structures but not always the people who uphold them. This then is a tale of my emerging trickster as I negotiate my treatment options as a cancer patient.

Old World Sexism Transplanted: "Test of the Sheet"

Athens, L. — 2008-06-26

When Nick visits the café of his brother-in-law, Lombros, they become embroiled in a heated discussion over who is and who is not genuinely Greek. Nick takes the position that to be a true Greek you must not only have been born and raised in Greece but also speak Greek perfectly. On the other hand, Lombros takes the position that being Greek depends only on how much you love Hellenic culture and thereby what is in your heart. The conversation then turns into the real reason for Nick's visit. He wants to arrange a marriage between their sister-in-law, Penelope, and Yiannos, an older Greek man who owns a thriving restaurant. Yiannos's demand for a virgin bride threatens to doom any possibility of his marrying Penelope, until Lombros's cook, Josephine, saves the day with a fool-proof plan for Penelope to pass the "test of the sheet."

The Search for Emerging Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Further Strategies for Liberatory and Democratic Inquiry

Lincoln, Y. S., Gonzalez y Gonzalez, E. M. — 2008-06-26

Many non-Western and non-English-speaking scholars express the need for supporting a methodological approach that foregrounds the voices of nationals and locals (or indigenous peoples). Supporting this stance, Western scholars will reach out in democratic and liberatory ways that effect research collaboration, helping to foster social justice and locally desired change. This article supports this search via presenting some methodological strategies culled from six different cases of cross-cultural and cross-language research in which both Western and non-Western scholars were involved and/or collaborated. A comparative study of the inquiries themselves, with follow-up interviews with their U.S.-based authors, is the strategy that has been chosen to respond to this search for additional, emerging methodological and narrative approaches to cross-cultural/cross-national research that is useful to both local and Western scholars equally.

The Wanderer, the Chameleon, and the Warrior: Experiences of Doctoral Students of Color Developing a Research Identity in Educational Administration

Murakami-Ramalho, E., Piert, J., Militello, M. — 2008-06-26

In this article, the authors use their personal narratives and collaborative portraits as methods to shed light on the complexities of developing a research identity while journeying through a doctoral program. Using the metaphors of a wanderer, a chameleon, and a warrior, their narratives represent portraits of experiences faced by doctoral students at the peak of their epistemological and ontological growth. Borrowing from Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis's alternative methodology of portraiture, the authors create portraits through personal narratives, which provide voice, reflexivity, and context to the stories told. Significant factors that fostered the students' research identity were present within the author's lived experiences and continued to evolve throughout the doctoral program. Inhibiting factors included the negotiation of a temporary loss of identity for full-time students, normative and analytical modes required by doctoral programs, and a lack of consideration for issues of diversity within the doctoral program.