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This paper develops and applies a methodology of qualitative inquiry that equips researchers to capture how social actors produce and contest accepted forms of knowledge at the margins of mainstream globalizing discourses in times of crisis. Standing at the intersection between conceptual and empirical research, our methodology builds on the common epistemological premises of 'narrative', as stories constructed and enacted in social life, and 'practice', as tasks and projects composed by 'doings' and 'sayings'. Overcoming the dualism between 'action' and 'discourse' in traditional social theory, this methodology integrates narrative theory and practice theory into a joint framework for fieldwork and interviews. The use of the narrative-practice methodology in ethnographic case studies – such as interpreters' experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Qatar – allows researchers to gain analytical granularity on participants' storied practice and practiced stories of the crisis, to harness 'peripheral' knowledge and refashion public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical epistemologies and methodologies have over time challenged the static and mono-dimensional approaches to fieldwork, allowing researchers to contemplate and conduct their research in spaces of in-betweenness. Despite this important shift, the essentialist idea that both 'the field' and 'home' in a fieldwork setting must be actual places persists. In this article, we challenge the conceptualization and operationalization of 'home' not only as the juxtaposition to 'the field', but also as the embodiment of a place in a specific temporality. We argue that the postulation of 'home' as a constant disregards the non-predetermined and unpredictable nature of fieldwork relationships that are often complicated by implicit and explicit power dynamics, especially in places researchers identify as 'home'. We demonstrate that unequal power relations, especially (1) between the Global North and Global South, (2) between majority and minoritized groups, (3) among genders, and (4) between elites and non-elites, require us to envisage 'the field' and 'home' in relative terms. We propose the reconceptualization of fieldwork place as a hybridized space that conjoins 'the field' and 'home' as 'field-home', particularly at a time when research mobility is restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, we extend the literature on issues related to power, positionality and reflexivity in qualitative research, and provide practical insights for those preparing for fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows how film can disrupt human-centred discourses about the use of video technology in qualitative research. Inspired in particular by Deleuze's film philosophy, a detailed analysis of an "ordinary" event in an early-childhood institution gestures at some of the possibilities that the manipulation of technology can offer. Filmmaking practices, such as framing, tracking, speed changes, reverse motion and use of sound, shape what counts as "data" and offer alternative modes of analysis that include more-than-human bodies. These playful techniques draw attention to how video technology can play a democratising role in qualitative research by paying more attention to the digital, the sensory and the visual and relying less on language as the mode of enquiry. Grounded in post-qualitative approaches of performativity, we indicate the radical implications of the ontological and epistemological paradigmatic shift in agency and causality when disrupting anthropocentrism in qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and anti-oppression (AO) policies are implemented in research to address intersecting systemic barriers for marginalized populations. Grant applications now include questions about EDI to ensure researchers have considered how research designs perpetuate discriminatory practices. However, complying with these measures may not mean that researchers have engaged with AO as praxis. Three central points emerged from our work as a women's research collective committed to embedding AO practices within the research methodology of our community-based study. First, research ideas must be connected to larger pursuits of AO in and across marginalized communities. Secondly, AO as praxis in the research design is an exercise in centering cultural knowledge and pragmatic research preparation and response that honours the collective. Lastly, AO approaches are not prescriptive. They must shift, adapt, and change based on the research project and team, creating space for transformative resistance and emancipation of racialized researchers and community workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative research literature discusses how power shapes the interview process and the resulting data and explores the epistemic basis for interview research theoretically. However, processes of negotiating epistemic authority in the interview situation, and in data analysis, are investigated less frequently. This paper draws on 34 interviews with social science academics interested in gender, feminist and queer studies in four English universities to reflect on the epistemological challenges of researching social researchers about their work. Through this, it contributes to explorations of how, in qualitative interviewing and data analysis, we can combine a critical reading of interview data with a commitment to respondents’ accounts of their realities. I argue that Black, anti-colonial, queer, feminist epistemological approaches can be well suited to navigate this challenge. I advocate for an epistemic reflexivity that acknowledges the fluidity of speaker positions while taking structural power relations, and their effects on epistemology, seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on various ethnographic procedures and findings in ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), addressing the question of how EM and CA relate to ethnography. Given the obvious answer that EM includes ethnography, we also argue that CA does as well, though just how EM and CA do so needs to be qualified and specified. Ethnographic procedures have been used in EM for decades, although often in non-standard ways, and currently with some ambivalence. In CA, it is more common to disavow ethnography in favor of recorded and transcribed interactional exchanges. However, we argue that CA often makes use of ethnographic insights drawn from extended study of recordings, while also identifying "ethnographic" inquiries of a sort that take place within the organizational settings studied. Our aim is to identify the place of ethnography within EMCA by taking an inventory of ways "ethnography" has been used, invoked, produced, and/or disavowed in particular studies and to highlight what is distinctive about those various EMCA uses of ethnography in contrast with more conventional ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]