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This article aims to provide a record of how the use of the method of photovoice facilitated an enriched teaching and learning experience for graduate students in a Theories of Social Justice in Health class. The course required students from multiple disciplines to learn about social justice theories and then apply them to a health issue/concern. For their final project, students chose a topic of interest and choose to complete a traditional paper or a photovoice project using one (or more) of the social justice theories examined in the course. Our manuscript describes four students' and the professor's experiences to document the positive impact the photovoice project had on their learning of social justice theory. Through this process, the students found the qualitative research method of photovoice to be a successful pedagogical tool for engagement and provided an experiential learning opportunity for co-creating and sharing knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diffraction has emerged as a concept and methodology through opposing reflexivity. In this paper, I argue that reflexivity and diffraction are not external to each other. In contrast, I propose that they blur into each other and so we do not find ourselves using pure reflexivity or diffraction. Furthermore, I contend that categorically distinguishing reflexivity and diffraction can generate practices of exclusion and the unwitting reproduction of what we would like to avoid. Through letting reflexivity and diffraction intra-act, I develop my notion of a diffracted reflexivity. A reflexivity that acknowledges that in reflecting about ourselves we are not representing something but producing something; specifically, we are relating to ourselves in ways that are relationally, culturally and materially enabled, continuously producing ourselves and the world in that process of relating. Consequently, I propose to meta-reflexively focus the attention on the ways of relating that we enact and what they produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes the argument that new global spatialities and new governance structures in education have important implications for how we think about education policy and do education policy analysis. This context necessitates that researchers engage in new methodologies to ensure that there is a suitable link between their research problem and the methods utilised for its investigation. To this end, I suggest that network ethnography can be conceived as a ‘threshold’ methodology; a new way of looking at social relations in changing times with attendant methodological benefits and shortcomings.Here I constitute the network ethnographer ascyberflâneur, who, like the nineteenth-centuryflâneuris lured by and attentive to the ‘new’, where they embrace the convergence of space and new technologies to become a well-positioned observer of contemporary policy processes. In focusing on thecyberflâneur,this paper aims to provoke debate amongst policy sociology researchers about how we can reflect on and modify our practice to ensure we are contributing to meaningful research in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper privileges thevoicesof British social anthropologists examining their perceptions of how their research expertise was acquired. Reference is made to the case of education research in Britain, which, by comparison with social anthropology, reveals limited capacity as measured through performance audits of scientific research quality. The paper endeavours to facilitateknowledge transferby uncovering and theoretically classifying the origins of research capacity. Life history interviews provide the data which illuminate the grounded nature of symbolic capital. The intellectual formation of the sample is characterised through Pierre Bourdieu’s theorisation of symbolic capital. The results indicate that research capacity can be characterised in terms of a transmission of symbolic capital, including that gained in the field through institutional affiliations whose reputational assets enhance the power of academics to play the game. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Looking across the six articles in this issue, this paper argues that promiscuous uses of feminist methodologies offer a unique constellation of conceptual, pragmatic, material, and ethical strategies with which to understand and engage some of the social and cultural tensions that are occurring within and outside schools. It presents a promiscuous etymology of the word “promiscuous” in which a varied set of definitions provide a backdrop against which to study the project of these six scholars. Seven areas are developed with which to cluster the main themes of the articles including: (1) post-critical, (2) feminisms becoming, (3) productive unease, (4) not bound by gender, but always grounded in gender, (5) always already historical, (6) bodies that still matter, and (7) post-representational. These clusters illustrate how the authors are always becoming, sometimes intentionally and sometimes serendipitously, scholars and women who are willing to reconsider, reposition, reclaim, and rewrite a past, present, and future method, angle perspective, or identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author examines some claims about the nature of metaphor, its possible significance in illuminating cultural, institutional, and personal constructs, and some ways in which this has been applied in educational research. To illustrate the application of metaphor analysis, the paper describes an examination of the figurative language used by teachers and headteachers in six English secondary schools when speaking about their new vocational curriculum and its students. Transcripts of interviews were scrutinized for metaphorical and other figurative modes of expression, and instances were identified of recurring patterns and themes. This paper argues that the metaphorical language employed within each of the schools reflects a lower level of esteem for the vocational qualification and the pupils taking it than that which is overtly expressed, and suggests that the negative metaphors employed by the headteacher may be instrumental in determining the status of such qualifications within the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I respond to the provocation of this issue focusing on the action [reading] to theorize it in its openness to what is not present, as the texts are never present to be read. Using the Derridian quasi-concepts of trace and specter, I understand "reading" as a long exercise of responding to the otherness of the text. I defend that it is necessary to refuse the representational tradition of reading, to continuously deconstruct the metaphysical colonial legacy of what does it mean to read. Mostly, I argue that this process requires more and not less readings of what one seeks to deconstruct—a long preparation that is the research-event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary offers an outsider’s perspectives on this Deleuzian- and Baradian-inspired constellation of ideas on “post-qualitative research.” My perspectives engage three primary issues: First, is this way of thinking about post-qualitative research still research? Second, the “post” part of the “post-qualitative research” label suggests movement and trajectory, but from where and, perhaps more importantly, to where and to what? And third, what is being accomplished by this shift to a post-qualitative framing of the social world, and what is being lost? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative feminist studies are much challenged by the contemporary critique of social constructionist postmodernism, as well as the renewed search for the body and materiality. The result is (at least) two diverging research accounts: arenewed feminist materialism, relying on some foundational ontologies and what has been called anewmaterialist feminist account that constitutes radical ontological rewritings. The aim of this paper is to investigate what kind of researcher subjectivities these different accounts produce for qualitative inquiry. This investigation will be unfolded using an example from a collaborative research process involving 10 PhD students. The example is woven into Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on the Image of Thought and the three images of thinking outlined inA Thousand Plateaus. The investigation shows that although the aim of our collaborative process was to resist the assumed Cogito/“I” of philosophy and qualitative inquiry, we still got caught up in taken-for-granted images of thinking and doing analysis. A deterritorializing of habits of thinking and practicing in order for new and other researcher subjectivities to emerge required collaborative efforts that put to work a rhizomatic image of thinking and operated from within an ontology of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper notes that there has been a relatively recent revision of the pragmatist philosophy canon, one that moves beyond a focus on epistemic and pedagogical theories, and locates pragmatism in a tradition of radical ontological theorizing and political action. This essay examines this revision for its relevance to the emerging materialist turn in qualitative research methodology. The essay focuses on two themes within contemporary and classical pragmatist philosophy: a reflexive realism and an ontology of the future. The methodological implications of these features are explored in detail. These implications are compared to post-structuralist conceptions of reflexivity that informed the last wave of qualitative research innovation and to the new materialism theories that are inspiring a new wave of methodological innovation. The most significant methodological implications of pragmatic philosophy are located in its ideas about the ontologically co-constituting relationship between inquiry practice and future possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks “after what” and situates qualitative research in the present moment in the midst of various “deaths” and “returns.” With a focus on fleshing out post-qualitative research, it first sketches efforts to discipline qualitative research via standards and rubrics as a part of neoliberal govenmentality and then elaborates what post-qualitative might mean via four exemplars. The first is from Sweden, a focus on relational entangled data analysis in the feminist classroom; the next two exemplars are collaborative studies from Australia at the intersection of Western and Aboriginal knowledge systems; the final exemplar is from Egypt, a feminist post-colonial study of the women’s mosque movement. The paper concludes with a call to “imagine forward” out of troubling a narrow scientificity and enacting an “after” of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper opens the space of post-qualitative research through an exploration of how acts of recognition and non-recognition work on and through the bodies of individual subjects. Using stories generated in a collective biography workshop and drawing on concepts from Foucault and Butler, and also, in contrast, Barad and Deleuze, the paper explores the way these different epistemologies intra-act with ways of seeing/reading/being recognizable subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I map important 'messy' elements that I learned from my five-month small-scale research project, one that was designed around pivotal works on online social research. I used computers and the Internet with Minan, a young man living in Guinea, West Africa, in order to examine his perceptions surrounding the value of these technological tools for his future. Throughout the paper, I address multiple levels of ethics in practice such as recognizing the different effects that the Internet environment can have on participants, the realities that cross-cultural barriers pose the researcher and the participant, the impact of previous relationships on the research process, and how meanings produced by language are easily misinterpreted via the Internet. As a result, I assert that during online social research, reflexivity is a moral obligation, where meaning and representation can have a tendency to be skewed, especially when working in cross-cultural situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of positionality in researching the researcher’s own culture and discusses its epistemological implications. Drawing on the researcher’s own field experience in which she entered teenage cultural space, this paper is an attempt at a self‐reflexive analysis of the relationships between the researcher and the participants (teenage youths, former dropouts). In so doing, it aims to discuss the methodological significance of the researcher’s subjectivity, positionality and reflexivity. The paper unpacks the researcher’s journey with first‐person voices, intending to illuminate a poststructural thesis regarding the knower’s implicatedness, multiple and shifting subjectivities, and the negotiated and situationally contingent nature of stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a model is offered that allows for the construction of a theoretical explanation on the basis of data accumulated in the field for the purpose of constructing a meaningful description. In this endeavour a distinction is proposed between two methods of theoretical analysis: first-order analysis and second-order analysis. First-order theoretical analysis is the process of constructing a theoretical explanation that we arrive at by way of directly translating descriptive categories into theoretical categories. Second-order theoretical analysis is a process of constructing theoretical explanation through a conversion of the descriptive categories based on the less than ideally dense data pool we already have. The theory that qualitative researchers attempt to construct is 'low level theory' that evolves from the study of a phenomenon in a particular situational context and is applicable to immediate and specific situations. In this paper, the second-order theoretical procedure will be explained and exemplified in an analysis of teachers' images, which is presented as a theoretical model for understanding teachers' conceptions of the pedagogical encounter between teachers and students in Bible classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces body lines in feminist poststructural research by identifying the conditions under which research into the lived body can be brought into discursive relation with contemporary theoretical formulations of the body. It begins by identifying the erasure of the corporeal body in the somatophobia of essentialism and the exclusive focus of poststructural research on the constitution of bodies in language. Potential methodologies for researching the lived body are suggested and the problems of phenomenological research identified. The theoretical conditions, methodological gestures, and analytical strategies for researching the body in body/place relations are explored in relation to the author's own work in Body/landscape journals (Somerville, 1999) and the work of other Australian researchers. These are brought together in relation to a small sample of the author's current research into safe bodies in the mining industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key ‘generic’ assessment task words such as ‘discuss’ and ‘critically evaluate’ are integral to higher education assessment. Although sources such as study skills guides give generic decontextualised glossaries of these words, much research rightly argues for greater dialogue between students (particularly ‘non-traditional’ students) and lecturers to help students understand and use such words. This paper presents the results from ‘staged’ focus groups with lecturers and students from the UK and China that created a forum for such dialogue, where many of these words and their interpretations were talked about. Results show very different interpretations, informed by factors such as ‘language’, ‘culture’ and ‘subject’. We propose these factors be used in an ‘anti-glossary’ approach, which we describe here. This approach is not against glossariesper se, but counteracts the assumption that glossary definitions are explicit, and adopts a social constructivist contextualisation of the task words through teacher-led dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Campaign for Learning’s Learning to Learn Phase 4 was a research project in which teachers undertook practitioner enquiry to explore innovative pedagogies under the umbrella term of learning to learn. In 2008, to gain greater understanding of what this process meant to the participating teachers the research team at Newcastle University undertook narrative interviews which examined three key areas: the motivation for undertaking practitioner enquiry, the experience for both teachers and students, and the support needed to facilitate success. This paper examines how the decision to use narrative interviews in conjunction with an iterative validation process supported a meaningful and ethical exchange between the teachers and researchers, where knowledge generation was foregrounded, and how despite each teacher producing a unique, highly contextual story, cross-narrative themes emerged which have enabled the research team to broaden our understanding of practitioner enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I argue against traditional coding in interpretive data analysis and offer a posthumanist alternative that offers qualitative researchers a new way to create ontological becomings in their reading of data. I begin with an overview of how humanism enables us to think qualitative data analysis ascoding, and then counter human-centered inquiry with a description of Pickering’smangleand its potential as a both a figuration and a different tool for analysis. I then give an example of a reading of data as/in/of the mangle. I show the agentic features of both human and non-human elements of the mangle to move away from epistemological representations of the “real” to practices of decentering the human in social science inquiry. I conclude that using Pickering’s posthumanist ontological theory of agency is one gesture toward the becoming of what the editors of this issue call post-qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes assumptions of representational logic and phenomenology that organize much of Enlightenment humanism and one of its knowledge projects,conventional humanist qualitative methodology. The author argues that the ontological critiques of “post” theorists, including Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, were set aside in favor of epistemological projects following World War II and that, in general, the “posts” had little effect on that methodology. Those critiques are now being put to work and extended in the new empiricism and new materialism to re-imagine being, always an ethical task. Whether humanist qualitative inquiry can survive the ontological turn is a question to consider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-engages the paradigm wars of the 1980s, discussing their relevance in the current historical moment. It extends Egon Guba's call for dialogue across paradigm communities. Ten theses and three agenda items are advanced. Let us engage in the paradigm wars. Let us defend ourselves against those who would impose their modern notions of science on us by exposing the flaws in what they call scientifically based research (SBR). Let us mount a strong offense by generating qualitative studies that are so powerful they cannot be dismissed. (Hatch 2006, 407) Society in general is unimpressed with the contributions of social/behavioral inquiry; a pox will soon be called down on all our houses, if there is continuing conflict rather than cooperation among the paradigm adherents. It is to everyone's benefit to cooperate. (Guba 1990b, 374) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this instrumental case study (Stake, 2003) is to explore the role of social class in student adjustment to the college environment. The story of Anna is presented to illustrate how social class impacts on the ability of students to participate in campus life and engage in their academic work. Anna’s story is interpreted through the lens of research that examines the role of social class in the choices and experiences of college students, as well as through Bourdieu’s (1977, 1987, 1993) ideas of social class reproduction. This paper contributes to the conversation about how higher education institutions respond to the needs of an increasingly diverse student population that includes working‐class students, students of color and first‐generation college students like Anna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the productive challenges of researching communities one identifies with and calls for the need to consider race/ethnic interpretations of research methods. By examining participants’ perspectives on research, the author argues for the need to further consider culturally appropriate ways of researching communities of color. Drawing on his research with Asian immigrant and Asian‐American teachers, the author describes the challenges he faced in negotiating access and conducting interviews with participants. This discussion proposes that researchers consider the multiple ways they are positioned in fieldwork. It similarly argues that by fully recognizing respondents’ ways of being, researchers can engage in ethical research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As university-based educational researchers who have engaged in participatory methods with marginalized populations, we have rising concerns about how interpersonal and institutional power dynamics affect co-researchers from racial and ethnic minority groups. In this manuscript, we use critical race and critical whiteness theory and counter-storytelling methodology to examine three experiences of the same event, which occurred in the context of an ongoing participatory action research project with youth of color, from the perspectives of three female, early career scholars: an Asian American doctoral candidate, a Black doctoral candidate, and a White junior faculty member. Our goals are to encourage increased reflexivity about racial dynamics in participatory research and to grapple with the ways in which educational institutions often subtly perpetuate colorblind ideologies and prop up White privilege. We conclude with considerations for enacting a critical race praxis in intergenerational and multiracial educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I consider how cartographies have become a onto-methodological approach that seeks to produce, rather than represent, the world that they are enacting. Going beyond Alfred Korzybski's famous axiom that 'the map is not the territory,' my point is that the map can shake up the territory. This shift is discussed in relation to the post-qualitative research project How Teachers Learn: Educational Implications and Challenges for Addressing Social Change, which focuses on mapping places and spheres that function as a source of knowledge and experience for thirty educators. The cartographic objects they composed around their learning trajectories became a space for rethinking and reconnecting domains that schools often keep strictly separate. Thus in this case the maps worked as a flat terrain where different layers met and linked outside of traditional hierarchies, which ignore for example corporeality and affects in favour of cognition or formal knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extracts from the written conversation between research student and supervisor show the nature of educative research supervision. The authors argue that researcher–supervisor relationships are methodological in nature as they shape and influence the people, the project and the field. Such relationships, which construct meanings, are complex. A conversational approach, spoken or written, with its freedom, spaces and power dynamics, provides possibilities for reflexivity and growth for all parties. This conversational freedom is illustrated in the structure of this text, as a dialogue to which the voice of the UK editor of this journal is added, constructing another layer to the conversation. As in conversation, the form and content of the text is messy and open to interpretation, yet its construction reflects the argument presented in the text. Supervision as conversation replaces then subverts the managerialist approach to research supervision and its carefully planned, linear route to a dissertation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts ofvoces perdiasandvoces de poderare used as a symbolic representations and reflections of oppression and power in academia. Seventy-four percent of scholarship across the world is published in English. The author argues the importance of publishing in Spanish as form of liberatory practice to provide a voice for Spanish-speaking communities who currently do not have access (to the power of academia and of information), and whose lived experiences are not acknowledged or captured in this medium, and who have by-and-large been marginalized and forgotten in research. In attempt to help improve our understandings of Latinos/as in society – and provide access, give a voice, and reflect on their lived experiences – we must publish in Spanish and teach about thevoces perdidasthat have been erased from the educational curriculum, and thevoces de poderwho have dominated and silenced thevoces perdidas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on primary school children’s experiences of school-based social work programmes. These students, aged between 6 and 11, and drawn from a student population comprising 28 different cultural backgrounds and from low socio-economic backgrounds, participated in a case study that researched a school-based social work programme, the St Paul’s Model. The importance of this research lies in the fact that in the area of Australian school social work there is no documented information on how primary school children experience school-based social work programmes. Findings indicate that the school-based social work programmes enhanced the social, emotional, and personal well-being of primary school-aged children and provided enhanced social inclusion programmes and access to resources otherwise denied to primary school-aged children located in economically, socially and politically disadvantaged circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our knowledge of research cultures in university education departments is still evolving, particularly in connection with the departments which have achieved a high ranking in the UK government's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and also the conditions under which 'knowledge workers' operate are under-researched, although this is beginning to change. The purpose of this empirical study is to explore and describe characteristics of a research-intensive university education department in the UK through the accounts of five academics, with the aim of contributing to our knowledge about academic labour. Social anthropological and historical notions are utilised to illuminate and theorise their accounts. The analysis conceptually recasts Halsey's thesis about the decline of academic autonomy through the prism of feudalism. It is conjectured, using ethnographic analogy, that contemporary academics are akin to a twenty-first century peasantry in a feudal order where academic freedom to pursue independent research is subject to prescriptive transformations emanating from neo-liberal policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article frames the contributions for this issue on everyday ethics - moments that demand moral considerations and ethical choices that researchers encounter. We discuss concerns raised within the research community about the tendency to observe merely obligatory ethical procedures as outlined in Human Subjects Review regulations. We argue that these procedural rituals are manifestly insufficient for the moral challenges of ongoing and evolving research with people; we call for deeper engagement with the ethical dilemmas and defining moments that arise in the everyday conduct of research. We argue that considerations of ethics should be central to establishing the rigor or trustworthiness of research projects. Drawing on principles of systematic inquiry as transparent and grounded in conceptual reasoning, we describe research as praxis and the researcher as practitioner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an 'after-queer' vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an 'after-queer', we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We contend that these habits of thought require further interrogation because they are intrinsic to researchers' visions of their own research and to the constitution of fields of research in the broader research imagination. Queer research in education is often conducted in schools and its focus is often young people and their teachers, taking abjection and amelioration as points of departure. In this special issue, we hope to provoke different sorts of imaginings about the accomplishments, problematics, and futures of queer research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reflective and interrogative processes required for developing effective qualitative research questions can give shape and direction to a study in ways that are often underestimated. Good research questions do not necessarily produce good research, but poorly conceived or constructed questions will likely create problems that affect all subsequent stages of a study. In qualitative studies, the ongoing process of questioning is an integral part of understanding the unfolding lives and perspectives of others. This article addresses both the development of initial research questions and how the processes of generating and refining questions are critical to the shaping of a qualitative study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although critical ethnographers have explored in some depth the ways that social critique informs how youth assess their schooling experiences, the implications of social critique by educators themselves have been of much less interest. Yet, numerous professional educational movements have been wrought from social critique or, at the very least, from critique of school practices that fail to contribute to more equitable social outcomes. Featuring one middle-school classroom contextualized by such movements in the field of education, this article presents an analysis of student appropriations of the messages embedded in a year-long community service-learning project. The project engaged students in democratic action framed by the question: Do our voices count? It is argued that while students embraced a newfound political agency through this work, the lack of opportunity to question individualism, the structural dimensions of urban poverty and their own relative privilege in the school ultimately produced social divisions rather than social critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the usefulness of research assessed as university research becomes more and more commodified? The question is addressed through an analysis of how the results of a particular research project were received in a large private company that had provided the main funding for a research project on gender and top management, a project based on poststructuralist approaches. The ways in which the company received the research took many forms. There were differing responses from the organization's human resource staff, the managers and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) depending on their varying interests, hierarchical positions and individual investments in specific organizational moves and individual careers. People in different positions in the organization applied elements from rationalist and constructionist discourses and combined them in ways that were neither coherent nor fixed. The article offers a complex analysis of the many and still shifting forces involved in the recipients' assessments of usefulness. It poses questions for researchers and university management concerning researchers' current working conditions and the protection of research integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from a methodological experiment performed by the authors, this article reflects on and discusses issues of ethics and politics in poetic strategies of 'representation'. In relation to the experiment the article questions how to conceive the notion of connectedness between empirical time and the reconstruction of it in poststructuralist research. In continued reflection the article elaborates on the meaning and status of body and emotion in poststructuralist, feminist research. The article digs further into questions of poststructuralist epistemology and validity, and asks if poetic, open-ended ways of presenting lived experience are especially ethical. These reflections lead to a discussion of the possibility of complex and ambiguous poetic representations being politically influential, i.e. how this research can matter to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay calls for qualitative policy analysis that can engage strategically with the increased calls for the usefulness of social policy toward the improvement of educational practice. Michel Foucault’s concept of scientificity is used as a tool against the ‘repositivization’ at work in neo-liberal times and its ‘rage for accountability’ where refusing to concede science to scientism appears to be a central task for those invested in qualitative inquiry. The essay concludes with a sketch of a social science that stays close to the complexities of the social world in fostering understanding, reflection and action instead of a narrow translation of research into practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative research exists in a time of global uncertainty. Around the world, governments are attempting to regulate scientific inquiry by defining what counts as ‘good’ science. These regulatory activities raise fundamental, philosophical epistemological, political and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the academy. This essay contests this methodological fundamentalism, and interrogates the politics of re‐emergent scientism, the place of qualitative research in mixed‐methods experimentalism, and the pragmatic criticisms of anti‐foundationalism. Furthermore, it outlines three models of scientifically based research (SBR), and discusses how each is operative within the current historical conjuncture. In the process, it advocates for a qualitative research paradigm that is committed to social justice and the promise of radical, progressive democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the ‘state of qualitative inquiry’ in the sense of how that inquiry is being positioned in the current construction of a US national policy agenda for ‘scientifically based’ education research. In the author’s view, qualitative inquiry is being drowned out in the national agenda despite its ability to provide the kinds of answers regarding education that policy‐makers and others want. The drowning out is accomplished in part by discursive conflating of ‘experimental research’ and ‘scientifically based research’ and by use of the phrase ‘gold standard’ to position experiments as the exemplar of good and rigorous research in education. The article critiques these political‐linguistic moves and suggests two predominantly qualitative forms of inquiry—interpretive and practical science—as alternatives to experimental science. It ends with some thoughts, based in cultural anthropology, for improving the position of qualitative inquiry in the current political environment surrounding education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this essay contends that there is a need to expand the use of qualitative research methods to include healing and human restoration for the researcher as well as for the researched. This will require moving away from obsessions with positivistic conceptions of scientific research and exploring and using other possible functions of qualitative research methods that, by nature, respect the subjective dimensions of human experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two British authors reflect on the current state of qualitative research, viewed as a battlefield through roiling smoke. From a UK perspective they reflect on the perceived crisis in qualitative research in the United States. They also suggest that there are four important features that good qualitative research should rely on: problematizing ‘education’; avoiding ethnocentricism; appreciating the long history of qualitative research; and carrying out proper in‐depth ethnographic studies that generate adequately theorized analysis. If these features appear, qualitative research will thrive. Researchers need to reaffirm the significance of qualitative research but repeated searches for novelty and a denial of past achievements will weaken our overall claim for legitimacy. In the UK and Europe qualitative research is flourishing, but there too it needs constantly to demonstrate the quality of research and its enduring impact on high‐quality social research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author introduces a reflective model of racial, cultural and spiritual engagement for researchers and research participants in an attempt to guide them in the development of perhaps more empowering research about African‐Americans. The model focuses on three essential areas to help guide researchers and participants: the cultural self, the racial self and the spiritual self. Maintaining and centralizing these areas in the study of African‐Americans can be critical in developing empowering research that produces knowledge to inform theory, research and practice. The interrelated phases of reflection in the model are (a) researcher/participant racial and cultural identity reflection; (b) spiritual reflection; (c) history/literature on race, culture and spirit; and (d) situational context. After a review of the literature on the cultural, racial and spiritual line, the author introduces the model and concludes with examples of the model in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical account of conducting focus groups with gay and lesbian youth. Drawing on the insights of queer theory it attempts to reframe issues around sexual diversity by examining the heteronormalizing processes at work during these focus groups. This analysis is undertaken through a ‘study of the limits’ of the author’s own thoughts and practice while implementing a research methodology that endeavored to destabilize heterosexuality. The aim of this examination is to better understand the way in which heteronormativity operates to discursively constitute heterosexual normalcy and render anything but thinking ‘straight’ unintelligible. In the course of such analysis the way in which sexual identity politics are played out between gay and lesbian participants and a straight researcher is addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, some form of diversity ideology has been used in teacher education programs. Since these efforts have yielded few or no results, this response points out how various diversity ideologies guide research agendas, influence future scholarship, and propagate assumptions on the schooling issues facing our children. It describes the evolvement of a body of scholarship that appears to emphasize hope and advocacy, and tolerates excuses of poverty and racism, rather than focus on the psychological stress and academic failure our children experience daily. While we may have the ability to inspire, we have not demonstrated capacity to educate a professorate who can prepare teachers to succeed in diverse settings, nor have we developed teacher preparation programs that understand how to select the programmatic content, experiences, and strategies needed to help teachers develop from novice to expert levels and to apply cultural and language dimensions to curriculum and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical race theory (CRT) offers educational researchers a compelling way to view racism in education by centering issues of race and using counterstories to challenge dominant views in both research and practice. This article provides an overview of CRT and illuminates the dilemmas for white researchers wishing to incorporate CRT into their work. The author argues that while CRT may not be fully open to white researchers, their strategic use of CRT can help legitimize its use in fighting racism in educational settings. Building on her participation in CRT discussions in a mixed-race setting, the author suggests that white researchers must work to center race in their personal lives and work, engage in the strategic and sensitive use of CRT, and join in the effort to legitimize research that utilizes alternative methods such as CRT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conducting research in "native" communities is difficult. This article examines the tensions faced by an Indigenous researcher attempting to balance his identity as an Indian with his identity as an academic. Relying on field journals and personal experiences of change, the researcher explores how his attitudes toward the research participants and theories of authenticity changed over a period of time. Ultimately, there must be a way for Indigenous people to conduct rigorous research and maintain their Indigenous sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines a number of historical controversies over style in research article writing. Attic-Asiatic debates over style during the ancient times; Epistemological implications of the American Psychological Association (APA) style; Modifications of the APA style; Need for qualitative researchers to develop their own style guidelines; Rhetoric of research reports and articles.