Suchergebnisse

The Asian Rural Institute (ARI)—a Christian, sustainable, nonprofit farm in Tochigi, Japan—keeps a strict schedule to ensure equality in job distribution and duration. Staff, participants, and volunteers must relinquish some control over their time and be present to do this work, two conditions that illuminate the privilege that many scholars have in their daily lives. As qualitative researcher, I was aware of some privileges that I brought with me but had not considered control over my work schedule one of them, until I was volunteering and researching at ARI. Implied in scholars' work schedules are time ontologies, which are culturally and contextually specific. Time is both material and conceptual, meaning that although a day has a fixed length (a material condition), the way that we break up the day into hours and regions of the world into time zones, for example, is a product of thought and communication. With abstraction and standardization come issues of power and control. For researchers who work with communities in the field, it is worth considering time's complexities to help navigate issues, such as power, ethics, relationships, research sites, and trust.

This special issue examines intersections between qualitative and rhetorical inquiry through (re)introducing rhetorical fieldwork. We define rhetorical fieldwork as a set of approaches that integrate rhetorical and qualitative inquiry toward the examination of in situ practices and performances in a rhetorical field. This set of approaches falls within the participatory turn in rhetorical studies, in which rhetorical scholars increasingly turn to fieldwork, interviews, and other forms of participatory research to augment conventional methodological practices. The special issue highlights four original articles that employ, exemplify, and reflect on the value of rhetorical fieldwork as a form of critical/cultural inquiry. In this introduction, we not only introduce the key themes and articles in the special issue but also compile our take on the state of the art of rhetorical fieldwork in an effort to introduce this form of research practice to those who have not encountered it before.

This essay concludes the special issue on the intersections between qualitative and rhetorical inquiry by responding to each of the essays. We highlight the productive tensions between rhetorical and qualitative inquiry, examine the benefits that qualitative inquiry brings to rhetorical fieldwork while also revealing how rhetorical inquiry can contribute to qualitative inquiry. We ultimately argue that rhetorical fieldwork is form of transdisciplinary research that resists replicating rhetorical and qualitative research by subsuming one approach under the other and instead creates a new form of hybrid research that adopts and adapts both research lineages.