Qualitative Inquiry

Martinez, Shantel

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508909pmid: N/A

What does it mean to unbind your tongue? Is it dangerous? Liberating? Or somewhere in between? The purpose of this article is to reconceptualize the tongue and the hand as sites of resistance and oppression for women of color scholars. Linking the act of writing with speaking, I explore the process of unbinding one’s tongue rather than biting it for the sake of academic, communal, and familial harmony and happiness. As a result, I examine what it means to break away from traditional standards and approaches to writing to engage fragmented bodies and voices that are rarely represented in the academy. Utilizing women of color and indigenous feminism, queer theorists, and disability studies, I critically engage metaphors of the tongue, issues surrounding voice and violence, and also present a poem showcasing my frustrations and insights.

Frentz, Thomas

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508535pmid: N/A

This is a story about how my obsessive lifestyle inhibits the development of a new intimate relationship. The story unfolds in three parts—the first, documenting obsessive disorders from two medical perspectives; the second, personalizing the disorder in terms of my past relational life; and the third, working through my current relationship through an extended conversation between that intimate other and me.

Giorgio, Grace

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508541pmid: N/A

As a short story “Ars Moriendi,” the art of dying, pays tribute to how social science and its methods such as autoethnography can enhance our understanding of life and death. Contrasting the limited medical technologies of the past with the abilities of the present, this story once told to me by my father, an oncologist/hematologist, captures the human element in the act of dying. Often, our culture works diligently to treat death as an obstacle to overcome, not something to embrace when its time has come. “Ars Moriendi” also pays tribute to my father and to the many medical professionals who aim to preserve life, and yet understand that death also needs to be accepted, artfully.

O’Brien, Dai; Emery, Steven D.

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508533pmid: N/A

The role and position of minority group intellectuals in the social sciences has been the subject of some research and debate, but not, until recently, within the field of Deaf studies. In this article, we will explore the role of the Deaf intellectual in their relations to the academic field and the Deaf community. We offer a critique of the prevailing theoretical framework of postmodernism and an alternative approach based on critical theory and Bourdieusian frameworks. There is a dearth of literature in the area, and this article is intended to initiate a much-needed discussion, including scholars within disciplines such as sociology, political science, cultural studies, and critical theory.

Nordmarken, Sonny

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508531pmid: N/A

In this autoethnography, I elaborate an analysis of interpersonal aspects of transgender life by narrating my everyday interactions living in a gender-ambiguous body as I begin a sexed transition from female to more masculine. I analyze my affective experiences in moments when I am in geographic and gendered transit, encountering social rejection, and connection. Analyzing my fundamentally relational transgender journey in light of the monster’s life in Shelley’s Frankenstein, I show how indignities I encounter in everyday life feel and how my transgender positionalities are complex. Following Susan Stryker, I proclaim “monstrosity” a tool of resistance and reconnection that can help us build connections across difference—that people of all genders might see ourselves in each other, and that, together, we might work against gender injustice and social distance, and toward a deeper kind of intimacy and freedom for us all.

LeMaster, Benny

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508532pmid: N/A

What follows are experimental autoethnographic tales of ambiguous embodiment. The tales weave in and out of the text and work to articulate gender in unsuspecting spaces. Together, we reconsider gender through multiple locations at once. I offer an autoethnography of multiracial tales: a simultaneous telling of embodiment as it manifests in my multiracial body. Rather than privileging one “side” of the family over another, I experiment with a concurrent telling. That is, multivocality in one body. To help anchor the telling, I use the academy as an assemblage of meaning. In the end, I find that my White family resists and rejects my queer masculinity because of my pursuit of higher education while my Asian family embraces my queer masculinity because of the same pursuit. These stories can only be known when told and processed concurrently; never alone, and never separate.

Al-Hardan, Anaheed

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508534pmid: N/A

This article builds on Indigenous and decolonial theorists’ and activists’ contention that European imperialism and colonialism are inseparable from modern knowledge production, and that the power/knowledge nexus continues to be implicated in the contemporary coloniality of the world. It examines the power relations inherent in imperialism and colonialism as they unfolded in the “before,” “during,” and “after” of a research project on Palestinian refugees that was conceptualized and initiated in the Anglo-Irish academy. It asks what kind of research can researchers, who are structurally positioned within the academies of the former/current imperialist powers and their allies, engage in while carrying out research in communities that are on the other end of the imperial and colonial equation. It concludes by discussing what the possibility of a decolonizing research practice in Palestinian refugee communities may begin to look like during the Palestinians’ settler-colonized and stateless present.

Christ, Thomas W.

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508523pmid: N/A

This article addresses three controversial issues related to mixed methods research and policy. First, “Scientific-Based Research” promoted by “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) reinforces diametrically opposed paradigmatic views and research methodologies. As policy, NCLB prioritizes specific methodologies prescribing what counts as scientific evidence. Second, from a critical stance, federal policies shape and control decisions that funding agencies make regarding methodologies (Randomized Controlled Trials—Gold Standard). Third, top-down policies are currently framed in postpositivist ontological and epistemological conceptions and should include constructivist, critical, transformative, and emancipatory paradigms supporting alternative methodologies. This article challenges current practices of prioritizing specific research methodologies used to evaluate interventions. As an alternative, logical purpose statements and research questions should be the standard used to guide decisions about appropriate methodologies and procedures.

Jegatheesan, Brinda; Witz, Klaus

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508521pmid: N/A

This article is based on a single interview session with a 7-year-old girl, Waheeda, regarding the cat Izzy that Waheeda used to have 2 years before the interview. The interview was part of a research project that explored the relationships of multicultural children with their companion animals. The article first tries to give a larger impression of Waheeda’s way of being (including consciousness) in two segments of the interview, using the philosophy, concepts, and techniques of Portraiture in the sense of Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis, and Witz. The last section suggests that Waheeda’s way of being in the interview is a natural developmental precursor of the consciousness in adults when they talk about things they have experienced in the past, and that her “self-actualized” behavior in the second segment shows the love that had arisen in her for her cat Izzy.

Tierney, William G.

doi: 10.1177/1077800413508524pmid: N/A

This article focuses on Danny, a low-income, first-generation college student living in Los Angeles, California, and the challenges he has faced in preparing for college. The author describes how Danny’s identity and “cultural flexibility” have aided him as he applied to college. Four themes dominate Danny’s life: his neighborhood, his father and family, school, and boxing and college. The author argues that better understanding such students might enable researchers and policymakers to create ideas for educational reform in a more cautious and meaningful manner. Life history is one way to gain a better understanding.