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In this paper, the author reads current debates in "postqualitative inquiry" through the lens of critical pedagogy, in particular the work of Paulo Freire. The author argues that the field should more fully embrace "inquiry" as a basic disposition. In addition, the author suggests that reading postqualitative inquiry through critical pedagogy can help us to challenge reductive approaches to "data" while also allowing us to get on with our work of thinking and acting differently in the world—our work of inquiry.

This article examines the Penn State scandal, highlighting what has been lost to contemporary universities in the rise of nonacademic administration, the managed university, and the accompanying discourse of "excellence."

In this brief essay, I take up Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964) to discuss key social and psychic energies at work across the United States today. Although they have longstanding roots in the United States, these paranoid tendencies have only intensified in recent years. I see this in two, intertwined ways–new social and psychic vulnerabilities as well as the rise of so-called "eliminationist" rhetoric.

The work of late philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre offers us a trenchant example of a morally engaged and committed thinker at hard work willing to challenge his own ideas to their core as the moment demanded. In the age of the specific intellectual, Sartre's vision of intellectual work foregrounds existential choice, human freedom, and the imaginary. It is a disposition that allowed him to think through and across a variety of social, personal, and intellectual issues with a broad range of discursive forms and tools. More than anything, Sartre offers us a strategy that forces us outward, into the problems of the world, with the goal of interrupting history.

The Right has done much of its work in the name of scientific "objectivity," wildly deploying a popular discourse around "the real world" to achieve a range of specific ends. Complicating this are the long-standing critiques of "objectivity" and "reality" itself among many on the Left. Although such critiques can help us unmask some of these agendas, they leave us little space to contest them in new ways, to offer our own counterclaims about the "the real world" and its demands. The author suggests here that progressives can usefully interrupt this Rightist discourse by revisiting "common sense" connections between research methodology and epistemological orientation- particularly those around quantitative methodology.

Originally published in 1927, Frederic Thrasher's The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago is a panoramic, multilayered, richly detailed account of youth gangs—a milestone text of the Chicago School of Sociology. The most widely available version of The Gang is a highly edited edition published in 1963, which contained an extensive new introduction by noted sociologist James Short. I argue here for a return to the original text, as well as the work of Thrasher more broadly. Rereading this classic text in full, original form, I maintain, gives us fresh perspective on contemporary research and commentary on gang life. So commonly (now) the purview of the postpositivist and highly delimited field of criminology, The Gang returns us to questions of radical context, the multiple webs of influence and association that so marked studies of the period—a move long overdue.

This article thinks through the implications of the 2004 elections and the continued erosion of the left. In particular, it argues that the left must begin to offer people compelling narratives for how to live their lives or progressive spaces will continue to shrink. Qualitative inquiry, it concludes, can be enormously useful in this project.

Rap artists, in the wake of rap's popular crossover success in the early 1980s, explicitly defined rap as a pedagogical idiom. Lyrics became more complex while epithets of poet and artist proliferated. All of this came as a parallel phenomenon to the emergence of a discourse about rap and its his tories and traditions—a discourse that would have seemed anomalous early on. Drawing on theory and research in performance studies, this arti cle critiques efforts to place rap into ready-made historical trajectories (e.g., Afrocentric or postmodern ones), and focuses on the discourse that rap artists themselves created or performed about rap music and its history at this critical juncture. In redefining notions of "the popular," rap estab lished itself as a kind of alternative curriculum, raising key questions about who needs to be educating whom, and why.