Qualitative Inquiry and the Conservative Challenge

Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781598740455
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315421476
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Recherche et méthodologie en psychologie

This volume is a call to qualitative researchers to respond to the political and methodological conservativism of the new millennium. Based upon the plenary papers at the first International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry, 22 scholars from five countries and many academic disciplines address how qualitative inquiry can maintain its forward-looking agenda, its emphasis on ethical practice, and its stance in favor of social justice in a world where conservatives aggressively control the political system, the university, and grant agency purse strings. Contributions by such noted scholars as Patti Lather, Janice Morse, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Ernest House, Yvonna Lincoln, and H.L. Goodall, Jr. make this an important benchmark work for all involved in qualitative inquiry.

Part One
The Politics of Evidence

Chapter 1
Chronotopes of Human Science Inquiry

George Kamberelis
University of Albany

Greg Dimitriadis
University of Buffalo

In this chapter, we hope to add to a growing "complicated conversation" (Pinar, 2004) about qualitative research methods. We argue for a language that can work across and through multiple approaches in sophisticated and nuanced ways, in ways that can open a more nuanced discussion that might enable truly inter- and multimethodological approaches. Specifically, we offer an account of what we see to be the prevalent chronotopes of inquiry that ground and inform most qualitative research (and the social sciences generally). Our task is akin to the one undertaken by Birdwhistell (1977) in response to his students' queries about whether Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson had a methodology. These queries led Birdwhistell to argue that theory-method complexes, which he termed "logics-of-inquiry," guide all research.

Our task is also similar to Strike's (1974) construct of "expressive potential." Strike argued that all research endeavors are governed by an expressive potential that delimits the objects worthy of investigation, the research questions that may be asked, the units of analysis that are relevant, the analyses that may be conducted, the claims that may be made about the objects of investigation, and the forms of explanation that may be invoked. We argue here for a new language that can be used to talk across a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches, from ethnography to genealogy and rhizomatics. In working toward such a language, we highlight both the possibilities and dangers of this moment of meta-disciplinary coalescence. Informed by this, we close by offering a new metaphor for the qualitative researcher—that of the genealogist.

Why Chronotopes?

Although similar to "logics-of-inquiry" or "expressive potentials," the construct of chronotopes of inquiry also extends these constructs in important ways. To the best of our knowledge, Bakhtin (1981) borrowed the term "chronotope," which literally means "time-space," from Einstein and applied it to the study of language and literature For Bakhtin, chronotopes do not simply link particular times and spaces with specific cultural events. Instead, they delineate or construct sedimentations of concrete, motivated social situations or figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) replete with typified plots, themes, agents, forms of agency, scenes, objects, affective dispositions, kinds of intentionality, ideologies, value orientations, and so on. In this regard, chronotopes are like "x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring" (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 425–426).

Chronotopes are normalizing frames that render the world as "just the way things are" by celebrating the prosaic regularities that make any given world, day after day, recognizable and predictable for the people who live in it (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 87). They connote specific ways to understand context and the actions, agents, events, and practices that constitute those contexts. Bakhtin was clear about the fact that chronotopes are not a priori structures but durable structuring structures (e.g., Bourdieu, 1990; Giddens, 1979) constituted within concrete histories of human activity across time and space. Among the ways in which he illustrated this idea was to show how the public square in ancient Greece or the family at the height of the Roman Empire were constitutively related to specific modes of rhetorical and literary activity common to those time-spaces.

Chronotopes are a lot like what cultural studies scholars (e.g., Grossberg, 1992; Hall, 1992; Hebdidge, 1979; Willis, 1977) refer to as cultural formations—historically formed/informed and socially distributed modes of engagement with particular sets of practices for particular reasons. Chronotopes describe the lines of force that locate, distribute, and connect specific sets of practices, effects, goals, and groups of actors. Such articulations not only involve selections and configurations from among the available practices, but also a distribution of the chronotopes themselves within and across social time and space. To understand and describe a chronotope requires a reconstruction of its context—the dispersed yet structured field of objects, practices, agents, and so on by which the specific articulation reproduces itself across time and space. Chronotopic assertions are thus "strategems" of genealogy. All chronotopes have their own "common cultural sense," "sensibilities," "tastes," "logics," and so on. These dimensions of being become embodied in the people who work within a chronotope such that they become part of the chronotope itself. What seems natural, proper, and obvious to individuals becomes aligned with what is the "common cultural sense" within the chronotope. For our purposes, then, chronotopes of qualitative inquiry index durable historical realities that constitute what is common, natural, and expected by collectives of social scientists who conduct particular kinds of qualitative research.

Although other scholars might argue for slightly fewer or slightly more, we focus on four primary chronotopes of inquiry currently operating in powerful and pervasive ways within the contemporary scene of educational research, especially in relation to literacy studies. We settled on the following "names" for the chronotopes that we believe most commonly ground qualitative inquiry within education and literacy studies:

• (1) Objectivism and Representation
• (2) Reading and Interpretation
• (3) Skepticism, Conscientization, and Praxis
• (4) Power/Knowledge and Defamiliarization

All four chronotopes engage with the Enlightenment project, but in different ways—some more resonantly and some more dissonantly. Each chronotope embodies a different set of assumptions about the world, knowledge, the human subject, language, and meaning. Each also embodies or indexes a particular set of approaches/methods for framing and conducting research. Finally, in different ways and to different degrees, each has exerted considerable power in sustaining and reproducing particular logics of inquiry within our field and within the larger world of the social sciences. We propose this loosely coupled taxonomy simply as a heuristic for understanding some of the different ways in which qualitative inquiry is typically framed and how different frameworks predispose researchers to embrace different epistemologies, theories, approaches, and strategies.

Chronotope I: Objectivism and Representation

Perhaps the roots of this chronotope extend back to early critiques of "correspondence theories of truth" and a "logics of verification" that inhabited representational approaches to research in anthropology and philosophy (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Rorty, 1979). "Correspondence theories of truth" posit the possibility of directly and unproblematically mapping symbolic representations onto the facts in the world in a one-to-one fashion. Approaches driven by "correspondence theories of truth" derive from Descartes's dualism of mind and body and have become all but synonymous with the scientific method. This dualism renders the individual human subject as radically separate from the external world but able to know this world through reflection and thought. A variety of methods and research tools have been developed within the chronotope of objectivism and representation. These methods and tools are predicated on the inviolability of the mind-body binary. Language is construed as a neutral medium for accurately representing observed relations in the external world.

A considerable amount of the qualitative research that is conducted in the field of language and literacy, for example, fits comfortably within the chronotope of objectivism and representation. E. D. Hirsch's (1987) work on cultural literacy is one example. Within a cultural literacy framework, it is assumed that there is a neutral canon of key cultural knowledge that all students should know. It is also assumed that this body of knowledge exists outside of the individual subject and can be learned, usually through direct instruction and study. This neutral body of knowledge is transmitted to individual subjects through the neutral medium of Standard English. Finally, Hirsch asserts that if students lack a particular and prescribed set of cultural knowledge, they will be unable to read and write adequately and to function productively in society. The cultural knowledge that Hirsch has in mind is presumed to be "common culture," not elite culture, even though it derives primarily from canonical works within a white, European American, middle- to upper-class heterosexist tradition.

Knowledge here is considered to be entirely separate from power relations or any other dimensions of context. A radical separation of subject and object is assumed. Language and literacy practices are assumed to be neutral vehicles for representing equally neutral facts. The real world and talking or writing about the real world are held radically separate. The idea that language and literacy might be able to shape and constitute thought, practice, or circulation of power is eclipsed. Such a construal renders language and literacy practices as little more than conduits or vehicles for preexistent thoughts or conditions, and it occludes the idea that such practices have ontological substance and constitutive power themselves. Questions about whether our relations with and within the world are at least partially constituted by language and literacy practices become unimportant. Little, if any, conceptual room is allocated for political praxis or social change through language and literacy practices because fact and value are believed to be independent of each other. Instead, language and literacy practices are evaluated according to their relative effectiveness in representing a priori cognitive or communicative entities or events. Positing effectiveness as a primary (or sole) evaluative criterion galvanizes the tendency to view language and literacy as little more than simple conduits for communicating established perspectives or existing sets of conditions, and it eclipses processes of imagining the constitutive roles that these practices might play in the construction of knowledges, identities, and fields of social practice.

Accepting the separation of subject and object or language and world as "given" or "natural" positions the field of language and literacy studies as a second-order field of inquiry that is de facto subservient to more legitimate fields and dependent on their theories and methods for its existence. It is not surprising, then, that many of the constructs and methods deployed within research on language and literacy conducted within the chronotope of objectivism and representation derive from other disciplines such as psychology (e.g., schema, motivation), sociology (e.g., symbolic interactionism, conversation analysis), anthropology (e.g., speech event, participant observation) or literary studies (e.g., reader response, genre studies). By drawing heavily on conceptual frameworks developed in other fields (especially psychology), research agendas often focus not on actual language and literacy practices but on internal or hidden variables such as readers' motivations (e.g., Turner, 1995) or writers' intentions (e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1981). When language and literacy research are located within the chronotope of objectivism and representation, one wonders exactly what language and literacy practices are involved and where they can be found. Are the reasons for practices always to be found outside of the practices themselves—in some hidden or deep structures or an Oz behind the curtain? Is nothing important evident in the surface of things? As we move through the discussions of all four chronotopes, we will show how actual, observable practices have become increasingly important as legitimate resources for explaining the nature and functions of language and literacy activities. And their increasing legitimation as both data and interpretive/explanatory resources has presented serious challenges to canonical ways of thinking about qualitative research practice.

Chronotype II: Reading and Interpretation

Not all approaches to research conducted within a modernist framework adhere to positivist epistemologies and their attendant assumptions. One framework that is modernist but not positivist is what we call the chronotope of reading and interpretation. Grounded in social constructionist epistemologies, this chronotope is not predicated on a complete rejection of Enlightenment perspectives on knowledge, rationality, and truth, but it does rearticulate these perspectives to render knowledge, truth, and rationality as relative (or perspectival) rather than absolute. Such a move rescues these constructs from the hegemonic clutches of scientism and instrumental reasoning without jettisoning these perspectives altogether. Knowledge, reason, and truth are no longer conceived as the representational mirroring (through language and other semiotic media) of an already existing world. Instead, knowledge, reason, and truth are believed to be constructed through the symbolic acts of human beings in relation to the world and to others (e.g., Heidegger, 1962; Rorty, 1979). Concomitantly, science is no longer about verification within a correspondence theory of truth but about human interaction, communication, dialogue, and reasoned argument.

Modernism, then, embraces not only scientistic modes of reason grounded in objectivist epistemologies but also modes of reason that are linguistically (or semiotically) mediated and grounded in the experience of "being-in-the-world." As we noted earlier, chronotopes are fluid, leaky, and flexible, and it is possible to have both objectivist-modernist articulations as well as interpretive-modernist ones. From this perspective, the existence of a real world external to human subjects is assumed, but faith in the timeless, universal nature of the world-knowledge relation and thus the possibility of generating representations that map that world in absolute or foundational terms is rejected.

This shift from "brute facts" to semiotically mediated facts is far from trivial. Among other things, it marks the need to replace a correspondence theory of truth with a consensus theory of truth, which implies a human discourse community as the arbiter of knowledge and truth claims. Gadamer's (1972) work is instructive here. Gadamer argued that truth does not emerge through the application of technical tools or methods but within and through embodied engagement within a "horizon" of experience within a human community. He went even further to claim that truth will always elude capture by technical methods because knowledge is always semiotically and dialogically constructed. Truth is never an act of reproduction but always an act of production within the limited horizon of a community's texts and meanings. Because knowledge (and thus truth) always emerges out of the embodied, rich, and messy process of being-in-the-world, it is always perspectival and conditional.

Within the chronotope of reading and interpretation, the subject-object dualism of the Enlightenment project is also assumed, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Qualitative Inquiry and the Conservative Challenge
• Part One: The Politics of Evidence
• Part Two: Decolonizing Methodologies
• Part Three: Contesting Regulation
• About the Authors
• Index