Suchergebnisse

I produce data. You produce data. She produces data. We produce data. They produce data. Data is being produced. Data produces us. Data. Data. Data. . . . But only illusions of "data." Copies of "data." ∞

We know that sexual harassment is a serious problem in academia. However, in this brief commentary I want to work against my ontological desire for simple answers to complex questions (of individual or institutional ethics, norms, power, university structures and hierarchies, bureaucracy, etc. associated with sexual harassment). I am curious what could be gained by asking questions—different, difficult, ethical, political, and personal questions. What would happen if we focused on questions instead of answers? In the following I am living the question of responsibility, especially in the context of the Penn State tragedy.

This article emphasizes the essential role of positivity, an organized field of knowledge, in qualitative research and how positivity enables and limits qualitative data, design, and research process. First, I describe some possible objects and subjects of knowing in qualitative research and discuss potential conditions of postmodernist/poststructuralist qualitative research. I then illustrate how different systems (such as language and power) within the organized field of postmodernism/poststructuralism regulate approaches to qualitative research and possible methodological functions available to researchers. Throughout the article, I make reference to my own research process focusing on the studies of academic achievement and 'scientific giftedness' to produce an article that blends subjective, empirical, and theoretical ways of knowing.

Metaphorical analysis within a poststructuralist perspective displaces the assumed meanings of metaphors, especially if one expects those metaphors to provide stable epistemological connections. The analysis presented in this article produces alternative readings of participants'metaphors and illustrates how knowledge and truth are displaced once they are detached from positivism, intended meanings, or predetermined uses. Metaphor data from the interviews of successful, international scientists are used to show the dynamics of a poststructural analysis that rethinks the narratives of progress within Academia. The article concludes that more important than the stability of any methodological labels or academic ownership of a particular method is the way in which a specific analytic technique is used as well as how an individual researcher's epistemology changes data and possible interpretations.

University similar to church is one of the oldest institutions passing and preserving cultural heritage. In addition, universities are active societal contributors and influential communal contingences in our contemporary societies. However, recently increasing numbers of these traditional and historical functions of universities have become hijacked by neoliberal practices and values. Oftentimes, alternatives to the restructured and liberated universities are considered as unwanted exceptions. Potential higher education anomalies cannot be fully materialized or practiced due to the limited resources, paralyzing normative practices, market-driven beliefs, and capitalistic values of dominant higher education systems and structures. Rather than continuing these discourses, in this article, we will take a step forward, discuss, dream, and image diverse possibilities or universities to come. Thus, we will focus on imagining, pondering alternatives, and writing notes (to be read slowly) about fragile futures of liberated, open, and becoming universities.

Qualitative inquiry can provide opportunities to utilize and work with theory in new and interesting ways. In this article we suggest that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze can change, re‐create, and infiltrate normative notions of family and innovate inquiry and scholarship. We begin by discussing research, theory, and methodology in family studies and the sameness and simulation present in the field. Then we move to briefly situate Deleuze within a historical and theoretical context, and we discuss immanence and difference as ideas that can disrupt and create potential. Specifically, we discuss Deleuze's concepts difference, rhizome, and becoming. Using these and other ideas, we offer some suggestions concerning how these concepts might be applied in qualitative family inquiry.

This study, framed by social constructionism, investigated the dialogic exchanges and co-construction of knowledge among female graduate students, who met to discuss the ways in which the differences between mentors and mentees might be negotiated in order to develop and maintain mentoring relationships that benefit both partners. Ten female graduate students, with qualitative research experience, participated in individual interviews and focus groups. Findings indicated our participants were open to the differences expressed, focusing on commonalities, rather than accentuating or suppressing stated differences. This negotiation of difference enabled our participants to co-construct more complex and legitimate understandings of mentoring. Collectively, our participants expressed a need for mentoring that addressed psychosocial, as well as career functions and mentoring relationships that supported the development of both mentor and mentee as scholars and researchers.

Qualitative researchers working within biomedicine lead a double life. Biomedical discourse silences other, interpretive, and contextually situated voices through various processes including peer review and grant agencies as reviewers demand simplified (quasi-) quantitative methods while demanding the elimination of qualitative 'jargon' and situated knowledge. However, since both of the authors of this paper have lived within medical discourse, this embedded doubleness must be pragmatically and critically examined with caution, respect, and integrity. Thus, in this paper we present three possible plateaus that explore doubleness and situatedness of those qualitative researchers conducting qualitative research in a biomedical context: (1) hierarchical nature of medicine, (2) the incongruity of the application of post-positivist or neo-positivist assumptions to qualitative research, and (3) the powerful phenomena of bias as a form of control and privilege.

In this article we suggest that strategic turns shape various contemporary uses of ethnography and reflect the exploration of ontological, epistemological, and methodological alternatives. In addition, these strategic turns are aimed to meet the current challenges influenced by changing cultures and their diverse perceptions faced by an increasing number of qualitative researchers. The goal of description that has characterized one end of ethnographical continuum such as classical ethnography is replaced by the goal of producing ideologically open texts, as exemplified in more contemporary forms of ethnography such as critical ethnography. Instead of viewing culture as descriptive object, contemporary ethnographers practice disrupted ethnographies that openly declare their ideological productions and reproductions of cultures. In this article we draw particular attention to two forms of disrupted ethnography and types of ideological approaches: critical and deconstructive. Last, we put forward a discussion of what ethnography is and how it could be epistemologically produced, suggesting that it may serve as an ambiguous, but highly legitimate label for presenting a complex variety of epistemologically and theoretically different approaches to qualitative research. In particular, we consider various influences of power when exploring the field of ethnographies, labels, and contemplating 'What is ethnography?'

Concern regarding capitalism, profiteering, and the corporatization of higher education is not new. A market focus that creates students as consumers and faculty as service providers has dominated global practices in colleges and universities for some time. Most recently, however, this more liberal market-driven focus has actually morphed away from a jurisdictional emphasis (with a potential focus on fairness) to forms of veridiction (neoliberal truth regimes) that legitimate intervention into all aspects of society, the environment, interpretations of the world around us, even into the physical individual bodies of human beings as well as the more-than-human. In higher education, this neoliberal saturation has led to changes that are of seismic proportion. The authors in this special issue describe their own research into, interpretations of, and life experiences as they attempt to survive within this neoliberal condition, and as they also generate counter conducts and ways of thinking without neoliberalism.

The purpose of this article is to explore further and through other examples what happens when a Foucauldian conception of power is remixed with "the theoretical toolbox of Deleuze" to address diverse notions of power in critical qualitative science inquiry. The article experiments with Foucauldian power/knowledge and the Deleuzian machine by using the metaphor of capoeira to argue that critical qualitative science can maintain its social justice focus as well as align conceptions of power with a postmodern framework. The authors illustrate how capoeira can function as a conceptual frame for shifting the onto-epistemologies of critical qualitative science inquiry.

This introduction to the special issue does not only introduce the content of the issue, it also generates connections among histories, traditions, theories, thinkers, thoughts, actions, and power. We propose that critical qualitative inquiry that would further expand theoretically informed, engaged activism is of greater importance than ever as we experience unprecedented technological change, violence against living beings that are not labeled human (through experimentation, industrialization, and medicine), the plundering of the Earth, and increasing gaps between the privileged and the marginalized (whether rich/poor, human/nonhuman). Critical qualitative inquiry must be continuously rethought, repurposed, reinvigorated, and envisioned as always already leading to a justice-oriented action.