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The article introduces the concept of the "intertwangle," a concept grounded within the gentle collisions of delegates at the 13th International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois and the simultaneous retelling of multiple autoethnographies of such encounters. Through such encounters and "retellings," perhaps a different way of thinking about autoethnography is developed. The article presents a story of a journey to and through the 13th Congress. A journey of no answers and no certainty—this journey is not a collaborative sharing of data but more of the gentle collisions and the recounting of different stories located within shared experiences. It is a simple journey bounded by way-markers of uncertainty, at times self-deprecation, loss, and death. It is a journey of new beginnings, of no ends—of uncertainty rather than certainty, revealing rather than obscuring and expanding rather than reducing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through exchanges within a doctoral supervision, the authors explore a range of dilemmas and challenges for reflexive inquiry. These include the problematic business of naming, the impossibility of objective separation of self from research, the merging of researcher subjectivities, and differences between performance and performativity. We note the educational potential in what can conventionally be considered “unprofessional” approaches to qualitative inquiry: neologisms, personal experience, stories, conversations, music, poetry, paintings, and film. We engage in reflexive interactions with each other and with such “data.” This was undertaken in the spirit of jazz improvisation—an unrehearsed performance—something that “happened,” an unplanned educational event but also an agency enabled by structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses practices of reflexivity, drawing on a number of stimuli, including Zizek’s formulation of Lacan’s “prisoners game,” whereby different circumstances generate a typology of reflexive responses from the prisoners in their competitive efforts to win freedom. The article also draws on reflexive performances based on literature and in history, and more extensively on the art of Rene Magritte. These various reflexive performances are then related to the reflexive “praxes” of the authors’ doctoral study. We conclude that reflexivity is always part of a necessary uncertainty, whose “remainder” between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, generates an inescapably qualitative symbolon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers 8 critical hypotheses that circumscribe the development of U.K. education in the 21st century. They all derive directly or indirectly from the “Great Recession” and have radical implications for any notion of a “knowledge economy” and the nature of educational professionalism. The authors conclude that neither a “scientific capitalism” nor its socialist equivalent provide a basis for future thinking and advocate a new beginning on the basis of critical qualitative thinking in relation to both education and the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project which focused on the issue of "touching" between education and child care professionals and children in a number of settings. This case study looks at a school once internationally renowned as the exemplar of "free" schooling. The authors consider how the school works as a community, how it impacts on its students, and how it copes with the strictures of the audit culture in relation to "risk" and "safety." The authors' experiences led them to the realization that physical "touch" was an irrelevant focus in this school, and they developed the notion of "relational touch." Summerhill works in ways that approximate an inversion of the audit culture. The authors argue that progressive and critical conceptions of education continue to have much to learn from concrete examples like Summerhill and conclude that a revival of such values in education is long overdue. [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]

This article offers a deconstruction of global evaluative discourses concerning school effectiveness and improvement. It portrays these discourses in anthropological terms, as 'cultural performances', and examines the ways in which technical discourses obscure elements of ritual, philosophy, myth and shamanism. The author concludes that such discourses, especially in their mediatized forms — as league tables — are a form of contemporary'spectacle'.They are our Olympic Games. The relation between these discourses and their cultural critique is then itself deconstructed in order to reflect on the nature and purpose of deconstruction as a means to contemporary cultural and educational insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]