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As part of an advanced doctoral course on representing qualitative research, the authors used collage to represent either who they were as researcher or the research they were conducting. The authors, comprised of the course professor and seven doctoral students, read about collage as inquiry and research representation and then participated reflexively in a course lecture on the background of collage, a collage creation activity, a gallery walk, written and oral reflection on each other's collages, a research poster presentation at a campus research event, and a final reflection of the entire process. As the process unfolded the authors represented the experience in the form of a collective collage poem, and a methodological and pedagogical article. Elements of this article include a review of collage as an art and research inquiry form, an overview of the pedagogical experiences, and the authors' experiences shared in the form of brief vignettes and collage images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper proposes that all methodologies create a footprint like the carbon footprint. Design and implementation of new methodologies require limited resources and funding, and these resources are not equitably distributed on a global scale. Thus, we argue for more ecological uses of methodologies, especially in the context of data collection and interdependent relations of knowledge/information creation. Like the excessive use of energy sources, potentially unnecessary productions of new data, information, and evidence should not be regarded as unproblematic, let alone virtuous. Rather, qualitative researchers, funding agencies, and other bodies that evaluate research, should question whether new data, information, evidence are needed and at what cost. We also propose more data recycling, data sharing, open access data, and other ecological ways of supporting shared knowledge and monitoring excessive data production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief article sets the stage for the three articles about causality and qualitative research by Maxwell, Donmoyer, and Anderson & Scott (as well as Erickson’s critique of these articles) that follow by placing the debate about causality in qualitative research in an historical context. This article notes that the use of qualitative methods historically often was justified by claims that qualitative methods represented a new and radically different paradigm, a paradigm that, among other things, rejected the notion that social phenomena could be described or explained in cause and effect terms. This article suggests that the paradigm talk of the past should not be dismissed cavalierly since all empirical research is framed and, therefore, influenced by the a priori assumptions of the researcher (and the particular research community that has socialized the researcher). However, the article also suggests that earlier thinking about paradigms and qualitative methods—and, more specifically, thinking that unequivocally dismisses the possibility of causal explanations in qualitative research—needs to be reconsidered. This reconsideration, of course, is what the papers that follow do, albeit in quite different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A call for papers on qualitative research in paradigms, epistemologies gain in interest, and teaching is presented.

At the invitation of Professor Carlson, this paper responds to his questions regarding the meaning, value, and the future of (post)qualitative research, and takes up some of the issues and provocations I raised with his graduate students: reciprocity, relationality, stewardship, and an ethics of care. These conditions, or what I call feltness, are deeply embedded and entwined in my doings of research, or more specifically the practice of research-creation. This feltness shifts research to become a practice of intimacy. The paper commences with a brief introduction to research-creation which is potentially a parallel methodological intervention to (post)qualitative research, as it challenges what counts as disciplinary and academic knowledge, and inherited forms of value in the institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a continuing conversation related to Indigenous methodologies in Western academic contexts, this manuscript includes a summary of the scholarly dialogue by providing background information and situatedness to an exchange that is positioned in the academy and Indigenous community simultaneously. The dialogue thus far includes a keynote presentation and a series of manuscripts that collectively help explain Indigenous research methodologies (IRMs) and delineates important considerations for practitioners and communities who relate to Indigenous research. The authors share where they agree, and where they diverge as well as their rationale for continuing the discourse in an academic forum. The paper concludes with an alternative method for dissemination (a winter count), that reimagines epistemological pluralism and knowledge protection through bicultural accountability. We consider the repatriation of Indigenous knowledge to be paramount in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While qualitative research has been among the more open of academic disciplines, processes for analyzing qualitative data have remained dogmatic. Most qualitative data are "coded" by breaking it into pieces of information that stand alone or through contextualizing it as researchers see fit. Data analysis thus remains a process of deconstructing participant voices and reconstructing stories through sound bites, creating an acceptable form of "fake news" to obtain a seat at the research high table. This continues established traditions of denying "subalterns," already less agentive in higher education spheres, the ability to speak as the voice of the participant is subjugated to the discourse community of the master. In this paper, we demonstrate how protocols for analyzing qualitative data represent the master's voice as they draw from Euro-Western ways of knowing the world. Possibilities that foreground indigenous and critical epistemologies are presented as alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autoethnography and dialogic interviewing are valued qualitative research methodologies across multiple disciplines. However, their use in college classrooms as a focal point of student writing, learning, and empowerment is less documented than its use in research studies despite being powerful learning tools. I describe my use of these methodologies in a women's and gender studies course. Grounded in compelling examples from students' autoethnographic papers and dialogic interview reports, I analyze how these methodologies enhance engagement with new academic knowledge and skills, guide meaningful self-reflexivity, foster evocative writing, encourage peer-to-peer learning, and create strong classroom relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I trace my pathways of de/colonial ontoepistemic orientations to qualitative research. I identify the work I do without the need for post-qualitative labels, noting that post-qualitative scholars purport to open up expansive spaces by moving away from such forms of labeling, structuring, belonging, and maintaining categories. I discuss how my academic trajectories, culminating in the current moment, have always already positioned me to engage in culturally congruent inquiry that challenges western structures of superiority of knowledge construction. To discover and incorporate into my approaches to qualitative inquiry, that which I have been unable to think about or think with, I journey through a process of un/learning and self-exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that post-qualitative inquiry offers scholars the opportunity to work with the articulation of language in the research endeavor. Drawing from literature, the author argues that scholars in the post-qualitative inquiry field can articulate the nuanced aspects of research rather than rely on rationalistic and propositional expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I reflect on the work of publishing contemporary qualitative research articles in academic journals in Spanish that are easily accessible to the communities that are being researched. Specifically, I reflect on the possibilities of doing qualitative research in a "successful" way, meeting the demands of productivity of Chilean universities (paper published in WoS journals, quartiles, etc.), which is necessary to maintain and develop a research career in the academy. Taking as standpoint the Chilean social context understood from the consequences of the dictatorship in the country and the boom of the immigrants of Latin American origin at present, this essay revolves around the attacks on freedom of expression through qualitative research in the Spanish-speaking context. The question that arises is: do the barriers and difficulties have to do with the methodology, the language, the characteristics and training of the researcher, or the traditions that predominate in the Latin American countries? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performing autoethnography is a dynamic and dialogic exercise, transgressing and exceeding traditional expectations of academic papers. In this freely spoken piece—of narratives, thoughts, poems, and reflections—you will meet three international mental health scholar-researchers seeking and deepening connection through friendship. The article began as a single story and developed, as stories often do, to become many stories. It is conversational, shifting discursively across many topics, including diagnosis, medication, mental health demedicalization and recovery, cultural colonization, language, narrative and human abuse, identity, human connection, being outside the academic mainstream, ethnicity, time, and transitions. It is a story of telling stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on data from an exploratory study into the social media engagements of LGBT+ young people aged 16 to 20 years old, in the United Kingdom, and considers how participant-led visual methods generated insights into different modalities of digitally mediated intimacy. It outlines the methodological paradigms dominating current research on LGBT+ young people's digitally mediated practices of intimacy and argues that visual methods have been underemployed to date. The participatory visual methods used in this study, including map-making and digital tours of participant's digital worlds along with visual elicitation interviews, are documented and explored in relation to Berlant's work on intimacy and theories of networked affect. It also reflects upon the ethical implications of re-presenting social media images and troubles interpretive imperatives within qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenomenology, peekaboo, and play are notions that may not tempt the reader to take a paper very seriously. Phenomenology is a philosophical form of qualitative research that is guided more often by the fortuitous serendipity of contemplative insights than by the rationality of reproducible social science procedures. Peekaboo is an infant game of the eyes that hardly seems worth addressing in a self-respectful research journal, and the topic of play is equally suspect to scientists for whom the cheerful idleness of play is the opposite of the seriousness and purposiveness of work or labor. However, here I will propose that (a) peekaboo may give us inceptual insights into the phenomenon of eye contact; (b) idle play is not just a counter concept of seriousness and work, but a phenomenon in its own right; (3) phenomenology is a serendipitous form of research that is philosophic and may give us compelling insights into the lived meanings of quotidian experiences in our lives, and (d) the mythological figure of Kairos speaks to the enigma of our humanness and provides an understanding of time as the discontinuous instant of the now and of the phenomenological method as intuitive grasping of meaning. Phenomenological writing is rarely easy and yet it can be highly satisfying in its results. I aim to show that meaningful insights are gained through a patient and attentively alert surrender to Kairos time and serendipitous moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special issue on digital tools for qualitative research, we focus on the intersection of new technologies and methods of inquiry, particularly as this pertains to educating the next generation of scholars. Selected papers from the 2015 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry special strand on digital tools for qualitative research are brought together here to explore, among other things, blogging as a tool for meaning-making, social media as a data source, data analysis software for engaging in postmodern pastiche and for supporting complex teams, cell phone application design to optimize data collection, and lessons from interactive digital art that pertain to the use of digital tools in qualitative research. This collection disrupts common conceptions (and persistent misconceptions) about the relationship between digital tools and qualitative research and illustrates the entanglements that occur whenever humans intersect with the nonhuman, the human-made, or other humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complicated title may put some readers off. Others may be intrigued by the complexities that a messy title suggests. “Un-doing a title” is an essay that focuses on unraveling the threads of Hanna Guttorm’s messy article “Becoming-(a)-Paper, or an Article Undone.” The essay, first, introduces titology and titles and subtitles as paratexts. Second, it examines the title’s main concepts, namely, Becoming, Paper, Article, Undone, (Post-)Knowing, Writing (Again), Nomadic, and Messy, which structure the article. It concludes with brief comments on topics raised in the main text including that of academic texts as love letters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper blends various accounts, materials, sources, and discourses involved in what I call “trickeries” of grant work. By combining different texts—academic, published, imagined, creative, and personal—I portray particular practices that highlight unpredictable and unreal processes of grant work. I share my experiences as a co-principal investigator (PI) in federally funded projects and offer images of projected conversations that have shaped my approaches to grant work. Even though I address some elements of grant proposals that have helped me secure external funding (e.g., the focus, innovativeness, manageability, collaboration, degree of detail, and epistemological and theoretical groundings of proposals), I also resist closure, singularity, and overly simplistic ways to describe how one can become or stay involved in funded research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I argue for a consideration of Foucault’s power/knowledge doublet as a spatial, analytic methodology for the use of studying the productive effects of practices in education. A spatial reading involves disentangling the complex production of subjectivity as an effect of power/knowledge relations and practices. A power/knowledge reading of the multiple effects of social, cultural, and material practices within relations of power/knowledge illustrates how educational subjects are in a continual process of constructing and transforming their selves and their worlds through their interactions with others. In particular, I sketch what this spatial methodology looked like in the context of an ethnographic study that I conducted on southern girls’ subjectivity and education. I conclude that a Foucauldian spatial methodology that analyzes power/knowledge practices within educational contexts shows that people and their practices are not causal results of educational discrimination or injustice but are ever-changing, interpretive effects of complex relations of power/knowledge that converge and are made visible by people’s responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we consider Tracy’s proposal for universal criteria to judge the goodness of qualitative studies, and we explore her criteria by applying them to our own work. As a test of Tracy’s claim to universality, we situate her ideas within a womanist caring framework, using it as an exemplar to theorize deliberately Tracy’s criteria. We do this to evaluate just how theoretically limber Tracy’s criteria actually are. We conclude that Tracy’s criteria are useful because they are universal but not fixed and we build on her thinking to foreground ethics as an overarching framework for criteria rather than a standalone category. We highlight the urgency of returning the debate about criteria for qualitative work to the qualitative research community during a period when the legitimacy of qualitative work is under assault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of numerical/quantitative data in qualitative research studies and reports has been controversial. Prominent qualitative researchers such as Howard Becker and Martyn Hammersley have supported the inclusion of what Becker called "quasi-statistics": simple counts of things to make statements such as "some," "usually," and "most" more precise. However, others have resisted such uses, particularly when they are requested by reviewers for journals. This paper presents both the advantages of integrating quantitative information in qualitative data collection, analysis, and reporting, and the potential problems created by such uses and how these can be dealt with. It also addresses the definition of mixed methods research, arguing that the use of numbers by itself doesn't make a study "mixed methods." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an autopsychobiography. It is, therefore, as described by Dr. William Todd Schultz, a combination of psychological theory and biography and not quite either one because it looks at only one subject or unit of analysis, and it does not presume to tell an entire life story but merely a splinter from a life story. It is a post postmodem woridview that it seizes the moment to capture a story on paper (http://www.psychobiography.com/definitions2.html). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses alternative models for a reflexive methodology and examines the ways in which doctoral students have appropriated these texts in their theses. It then considers the indeterminate qualities of those appropriations. The paper offers a new account of reflexivity as "picturing," drawing analogies from the interpretation of two very different pictures, by Velázquez and Tshibumba. It concludes with a more open and fluid account of reflexivity, offering the notion of "signature," and drawing on the work of Gell and also Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the inherently specific nature of "concepts" situated in space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on causality in qualitative research. He agrees with the argument by Joe Maxwell in his paper that causal relationship can be identified through direct observation in certain circumstances. He offers his viewpoint on the interpretive purposes of qualitative inquiry and their relation to causal analysis. He also explores the reasons for wanting to make causal claims.