Qualitative Inquiry

Hamper, Josie; Niemelä-Nyrhinen, Jenni; Davidjants, Jaana; Rose, Gillian; Tiidenberg, Katrin; Lehmuskallio, Asko

doi: 10.1177/10778004251346741pmid: N/A

This article examines what happened during 50 semi-structured interviews that were designed to focus on the visual content of interviewees’ social media feeds. During these encounters, interviewees were invited to talk about content that appeared on their social media apps while showing their phone screens to the interviewer. Rather unexpectedly, the researchers experienced this sharing of screens as “messy” and disruptive to the interview. From that reflection, we argue that this mess was generated by the friction between a distracted disposition toward social media and the conventions of semi-structured interviews—a friction that is itself a form of research evidence.

Rice, Carla; Temple Jones, Chelsea; Collins, Kimberlee; Cheuk, Fiona Ning

doi: 10.1177/10778004251337413pmid: 42058933

This paper traces intersectionality’s theoretical-methodological “twists and turns” to reconsider its explanatory power in elucidating relations between selves and socialites and its application in research. Questions of how researchers take up the heuristic have become charged given intersectionality’s uptake by democratic institutions as a marker of excellence alongside critiques of its appropriation by systems advancing it. Adopting a processual-relational framing, we argue that difference represents a site of possibility—affirming life’s heterogeneity—and danger, exposing the unboundedness of monolithic identities upon which intersectional theorizing relies through misfitting/fracturing. This reveals intersectionality’s potential as infrastructure. Using an “infrastructural inversion” that makes the hidden work of intersectionality-as-infrastructure perceptible, we demonstrate how an infrastructural critique uncovers the socio-material implications of classification systems underpinning intersectionality. We approach research matrices as “wild containers” illuminating nondominant differences, suggesting this enables a decolonized understanding of intersectionality as inter-/intra-sectional becomings moving beyond hierarchical categorizations imposed by white supremacist thought.

Page, Tara

doi: 10.1177/10778004251355911pmid: N/A

Ethics in research is often treated as a procedural hurdle; a fixed, front-loaded checkpoint of compliance. I propose an alternative: an ethics that is intra-active, materially situated, and made with the unfolding of the research itself, making ethics. Drawing on feminist new materialist praxis, I explore how ethics emerges within embodied, co-creative, and affective research encounters, particularly in creative, practice-based, and post-qualitative methodologies. I examine not only the methodological implications of this remaking but also the institutional structures that constrain it. I call for iterative materially embedded ethics practices and a remaking of research governance that privileges responsiveness over risk-averse abstraction. With this paper, I offer making ethics, not a retrospective add-on or predictive mechanism but a generative, materially attuned, and institutionally consequential practice, one that demands structural transformation. What might research become if ethics were made with-in its world?

Stouten, Elien; Idrees, Syeda Sidra; Jacobs, Antje; Hannes, Karin

doi: 10.1177/10778004251334057pmid: N/A

Institutional review boards (IRBs) set ethical standards for research conduct, thereby contributing to a coherent framework for responsible research practice. However, their current focus on risk reduction has proven to be challenging for many researchers working in co-creative research where participants become co-researchers and play an active role in shaping, challenging, or controlling the research process. In this article, we identify challenges that risk-averse ethics pose for co-creative research. In response to these challenges, we illustrate how co-creative practices provide “workarounds” to ill-fitted, risk-averse-focused IRB questions received while remaining sensitive to the specific ethical concerns of co-creative research. We suggest ethical principles for co-creative research that are grounded in opportunity-based ethics, inspired by feminist new materialisms and critical theory. Instead of predetermining harms and instigating precaution, we argue for an ethics in co-creative research that recognizes ethical risks and opportunities as collaboratively emergent.

Germinaro, Kaleb

doi: 10.1177/10778004251319462pmid: N/A

Components of place and sites of where we know from are pertinent to positionality, particularly in its importance for education research with and for communities. However, conversations discussing the relations of place a researcher brings to their work are limited. In this conceptual paper, I center and build with the contributions of Black geographies as both a theoretical and methodological shift to consider spatial orientations and the spatial knowledge we bring to qualitative inquiry, connecting our prior time in spaces to our current approaches. Relations to space through Black spatial knowledge, imagination, futures, and carceralities are core features that frame how we come to understand “where we know from.” Boveda and Annamma provide an approach to positioning attending to “(1) the onto-epistemic that recognizes how embodied experiences shape understandings of intersectional oppressions, (2) the sociohistorical that engages historicity, and (3) the sociocultural that concedes whiteness and ability as property” (p. 310). My experience is framed through these theories by adding an explicit spatial dimension to detail curricular inquiry guided by Blackness, decoloniality, and disability justice. This piece aims to provide insight and approach to learning from our bodies and their interactions with places we have been to as a process to engage our positionality. Black geographies coupled with disability justice approaches to curriculum design and inquiry allows us to reshape and reorganize geographies through pedagogies that position us to learn the world anew. This approach also provides a perspective that centers Blackness as a means of disrupting coloniality through identifying the role of place (and spatial beliefs) in pedagogy and learning. This promotes the remembering of carrying places across time as we come to teach, build, cultivate, and research. I argue cultivating spatial relations and knowledge—core to community research and qualitative inquiry—provides new possibilities for disrupting geographical power dynamics and emplacing knowledge of place in our research process.

Dahl, Olivia

doi: 10.1177/10778004241308187pmid: N/A

This article proposes a methodology centered on collective, creative engagement to explore marginalized and silenced perspectives on disability. Focusing on collective poetry writing as a qualitative research tool, the article examines the collaborative poetry writings of 16 disabled people, specifically people living with cerebral palsy (CP). Drawing on Gary Alan Fine’s (2012) “Group Life” theory, the article analyzes the social dynamics involved in establishing a shared history through collective poetry writing. It analyzes the emotional bonding among participants and the collective energy that emerged throughthis engagement. These group dynamics served as a resource for re-evaluating and advancing frameworks for writing about, reflecting on, and understanding disability, and for giving people with disability the opputunity to collectively shape knowledge about their own lives. This article discusses how collective poetry writing can be a tool for amplifying often marginalized voices as well as the emerging challenges and methodological dilemmas inherent in the use of this method.

Pithouse-Morgan, Kathleen; Le, Nguyen Phuong

doi: 10.1177/10778004251346739pmid: N/A

This think piece contributes to qualitative inquiry and higher education by introducing collaborative feedback poetry as a theoretically and pedagogically grounded approach to literature reviewing. Co-authored by an education professor and a graduate student, this article explores how composing poetry in response to academic texts—specifically poetic inquiries by professors and graduate students—enriched their learning and fostered mutual understanding, intercultural exchange, and creative academic engagement. By shifting from summary and critique to affective, polyvocal engagement, this approach extends comprehension and connection with complex personal and social issues such as identity, exclusion, and belonging. The authors position collaborative feedback poetry as a developmental and educational tool that promotes epistemological diversity and subjective knowing as vital to vigorous qualitative research. Their conclusions suggest that integrating poetry can reshape how literature is read, interpreted, and taught—inviting researchers, educators, and students to experience emotionally resonant, polyvocal, and imaginative academic knowledge and practices.

Taylor, Carol A.; Benozzo, Angelo; Fairchild, Nikki; Pihkala, Suvi; Cranham, Joy

doi: 10.1177/10778004251337410pmid: N/A

This article opens a space of possibility for thinking-doing-making-creating Academic Writing Otherwise. Based on a series of activity-activations we explore what academic writing might become when loosed from conventional prescriptions to explain, exemplify, demonstrate, justify, argue, and account for. What happens if we decide to write otherwise? How can we enable writing’s perturbations to proliferate? How can writing otherwise be a mode of political praxis to imagine and co-compose collectivities? How can it be an ethical response to contest the authority, power, and rigidity of traditional modes of writing? Written in a mode of post-authorship, this article offers creative and experimental writing practices for Academic Writing Otherwise to write productively against (while recognizing that we are caught within) the performative prescriptions and normative rules of the academic-writing-machine.

Clark, Shawn; Miisamiinamska,

doi: 10.1177/10778004251343527pmid: N/A

In this article, a non-Indigenous scholar and his Indigenous cultural mentor showcase their kinship by weaving their histories together to take the reader on a cultural journey. The story challenges majoritarian tales by combining elements of critical Indigenous research methodologies with narrative portraiture. The story is a first-person accounting told through the eyes of the non-Indigenous scholar as he explores the complexities surrounding adjoining worldviews to witness and document the transfer of an Indigenous ceremonial bundle. Throughout their journey, the scholar and his mentor encounter several profound paradoxes that test the boundaries between cultures, knowledge systems, and personal identity, revealing the complexity and relational depth required to walk between different ways of knowing.

Kousalova, Michaela; Wagstaff, Christopher R. D.; Cavallerio, Francesca; Brown, Daniel J.

doi: 10.1177/10778004251346738pmid: N/A

Dear reader, if you are reading this, it means you have received my invitation for tonight’s poetic ethnodrama performed in the theater of your mind. But before we start the play, I want you to reflect on what comes to mind when you think about ‘Women’s Artistic Gymnastics.’ Please keep these thoughts in mind as you experience tonight’s performance, which will start in 10 minutes.This play, which stems from longitudinal ethnographic research, is intended to take you, the Reader, into a youth elite gymnastics club, where you will be situated alongside the cast and exposed to a poetic representation of psychological maltreatment. In this environment, the cast and I [the Primary Researcher], while wearing (happy) theatrical masks, will perform poetry to you in the form of a prologue, eight acts, one interlude, and an epilogue. The prologue provides contextual framing for the poetry acts to follow. During the interlude, the cast speaks to the audience without their theatrical masks. The epilogue includes the behind-the-scenes of psychological maltreatment, the backstage work put into this playscript, and a monologue of a gymnast asking, “What are you going to do about it?”I want to encourage you to construct your own understanding of this ethnodrama and really try to feel what the cast is going through, as if you were one of them. In this art-based work, I will share information with you in a way that combines descriptions, interpretations, and methods, like pieces of a mosaic, giving you a complete picture over the time of the play. Through this play, I hope to create an atmosphere that touches your senses and emotions, prompt dialogue, and advance the current discourse on maltreatment in youth elite sports.Now, please, come in and meet the co-authors, they will help you find your seat.