Qualitative Inquiry—Past, Present, and Future
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Qualitative Inquiry—Past, Present, and Future

A Critical Reader

Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina, Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina

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eBook - ePub

Qualitative Inquiry—Past, Present, and Future

A Critical Reader

Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina, Norman K Denzin, Michael D Giardina

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About This Book

In this critical reader, the best writing of two dozen key figures in qualitative research is gathered together to help students to identify emerging themes in the field and the latest thinking of the leaders in qualitative inquiry. These groundbreaking articles are pulled from a decade of social justice-focused plenary volumes emanating from the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. These are the ideas that have helped shape the landscape of the field over the past decade. This work-brings together the latest work of 25 leading figures in qualitative research from 4 continents;-addresses the central themes of the field over the past decade in theory, methodology, politics, and interventions;-includes contextualizing essays by the volume editors, who direct the Congress.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781315421230

Chapter 1
Introduction

Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina
Educators need to defend what they do as political, support the university as a place to think, and create programs that nurture a culture of questioning. But there is even more at stake here. It needs to be recognized on a broad scale that the very way in which knowledge is selected, pedagogies are defined, social relations are organized, and futures imagined is always political, though these processes do not have to be politicized in a vulgar or authoritarian way.
— Henry Giroux, 2009

Proem

Ten years ago (2005), we founded and hosted the first International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry at our home university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.1 The theme for that very first Congress—qualitative inquiry and the conservative challenge—was positioned as a response to the political and methodological conservatism of the new millennium (circa 2005). The politics of evidence. Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs). Scientism. Scientifically-based research (SBR). The No Child Left Behind Act and the Reading Excellence Act. The National Research Council’s (NRC) “Scientific Research in Education” report (Shavelson & Towne, 2002). Indigenous struggles. Social justice. A radical, progressive democracy. These were the topics within and against which that first Congress struggled, undergirded by a political climate—inaugurated in large measure during the George W. Bush presidency (2001–2009)—filled with Patriot Acts, Faith-Based Initiatives, Homeland Security Administrations, conservative regimes of science and truth, the demonization of public servants and teachers, and unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ten years on, the more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same: We still have our (seemingly) unending military engagements in the Middle East. The corporate dictates of the neoliberal university continue to run wild, whether we are talking about tenure and promotion cases, academic freedom, the slashing of research budgets, or the commercialization of knowledge and education (see Giroux, this volume). In the United States, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology wages war on the National Science Foundation (NSF) over the ‘value’ of what projects the NSF has funded (see Mervis, 2014). Academics are under fire for what they say or do, both in terms of their research agendas and their extramural political speech (see, for example, the case of Steven Salaita). The ‘gold standard’ of positivism remains intact, yet challenged from all sides.
Qualitative Inquiry—Past, Present, and Future: A Critical Reader sits within this context. More philosophical reflection on the state of the field than how-to handbook, our volume revisits the developments, debates, challenges, and changes that have taken place in qualitative inquiry over the last decade. Before starting on our journey, however, we feel it necessary to revisit the history of the last ten years so as to better understand our methodologically contested present. The qualitative research community, such that we can speak of it as a community, can best be defined as a wide-ranging collection of loosely affiliated, globally dispersed persons who are working within and against different paradigms and who are attempting to implement a critical interpretive approach that will help them (and others) make sense of the terrifying conditions that define daily life in the second decade of this new century. The open-ended nature of the qualitative research project leads to a perpetual resistance against attempts to impose a single, umbrella-like paradigm over the entire project. There are multiple interpretive projects at play, including the decolonizing methodological project of Indigenous scholars; theories of critical pedagogy; performance (auto)ethnographies; standpoint epistemologies; critical race theory; critical, public, poetic, queer, materialist, feminist, reflexive ethnographies; projects connected to Frankfurt School and the British cultural studies traditions; grounded theorists of several varieties; multiple strands of ethnomethodology; and transnational cultural studies projects. The generic focus of each of these versions of qualitative research involves a politics of the local, and a utopian politics of possibility (see Madison, 2010) that redresses social injustices and imagines a radical democracy that is not yet (Weems, 2002). Which is to say, although constant breaks and ruptures define the field of qualitative research, there is a shifting center to the project: the avowed humanistic and social justice commitment to study the social world from the perspective of the interacting individual. From this principle flow the liberal and radical politics of action that are held by its practitioners.
The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry was launched in 2005 in an attempt to bring this global community closer together, to offer a venue in which critical scholarship, divergent viewpoints, and political engagement could take place.2 From 2005 forward, those gathering at the Congress have explored global political, ethical, and methodological challenges to qualitative inquiry. They have resisted calls for the predominance of scientifically-based research (SBR), and contested the over-regulation of human subject research by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs; see Koro-Ljungberg, 2010; Maxwell, this volume). Participants have created spaces for critical action research; indigenous inquiry discourse; post-qualitative, post-humanist, and materialist-feminist theory; new writing strategies; performance autoethnography; and the use of social media and multimedia methods in art-based inquiries.
Over these last ten years of the Congress, however, one overarching goal has taken precedence: a focus on the role of critical qualitative research in a historical present when the need for social justice has never been greater. Each Congress volume that we have edited has privileged a particular facet of that goal, from ethics (2007) and evidence (2008) to advocacy (2012) and global crises (2011).3 But regardless of any singular topical focus, these nine volumes similarly highlighted the interconnected themes as we come to another punctuation point in the history of qualitative inquiry and qualitative methods in Qualitative Inquiry—Past, Present, & Future: philosophy of inquiry; politics of evidence/politics of research; new directions in methodology; and Indigenous and decolonizing interventions.
We are, to put it bluntly, at a pivotal crossroads: We live in a historical present that cries out for emancipatory visions, for visions that inspire transformative inquiries, and for inquiries that can provide the moral authority to move people to struggle and resist oppression.

History, Politics, and Paradigms

To better understand where we are today in our methodologically contested present, to better grasp these current criticisms, it is helpful to revisit the so-called paradigm wars of the 1980s, which resulted in the serious crippling of quantitative research in education. Critical pedagogy, critical theorists, and feminist analyses fostered struggles for power and cultural capital for the poor, non-Whites, women, and the LGBTQ community (Gage, 1989).4
Teddlie and Tashakkori’s (2003a and b, 2011) history is helpful here. They expand the time frame of the 1980s war. For them, there have been at least three paradigm wars, or periods of conflict: the postpositivist–constructivist war against positivism (1970–1990); the conflict between competing postpositivist, constructivist, and critical theory paradigms (1990–2005); and the current conflict between evidence-based methodologists and the mixed methods, interpretive, and critical theory schools (2005– present). Guba’s Paradigm Dialog (1990a) signaled an end to the 1980s wars. Postpositivists, constructivists, and critical theorists talked to one another, working through issues connected to ethics, field studies, praxis, criteria, knowledge accumulation, truth, significance, graduate training, values, and politics. By the early 1990s, there was an explosion of published works on qualitative research, and handbooks and new journals appeared. Special interest groups committed to particular paradigms appeared, and some had their own journals.
The second paradigm conflict occurred within the mixed-methods community and involved disputes “between individuals convinced of the ‘paradigm purity’ of their own position” (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003b, p. 7). Purists extended and repeated the argument that quantitative and qualitative methods cannot be combined because of the differences between their underlying paradigm assumptions. On the methodological front, this incompatibility thesis was challenged by those who invoked triangulation as a way of combining multiple methods to study the same phenomenon (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003b). Thus was ushered in a new round of arguments and debates over paradigm incompatibility and incommensurability.
A soft, apolitical pragmatic paradigm emerged in the post-1990 period. Suddenly, quantitative and qualitative methods became compatible and researchers could use both in their empirical inquiries (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003a). Proponents made appeals to a “what works” pragmatic argument, contending that “no incompatibility between quantitative and qualitative methods exists at either the level of practice or that of epistemology . . . there are thus no good reasons for educational researchers to fear forging ahead with ‘what works’” (Howe, 1988, p. 16). Of course, what works is more than an empirical question. It involves the politics of evidence.
This is the space that evidence-based research entered. This is the battleground of war number three, “the current upheaval and argument about ‘scientific’ research in the scholarly world of education” (Clark & Scheurich, 2008; Scheurich & Clark, 2006, p. 401), which was amplified during the first decade of the 2000s. Enter Teddlie and Tashakkori’s third moment, where mixed methods and evidence-based inquiry meet one another in a soft center. Mills (1959) would say this is a space for abstracted empiricism. Inquiry is cut off from politics. Biography and history recede into the background. Technological rationality prevails.

Another Discursive Formation

The field is on the edge of New Paradigm Dialog, a fourth formation existing alongside mixed-methods discourses. This is the space primarily filled by post-qualitative, post-humanist, postmodernist, poststructuralist, critical constructionist, feminist materialists, critical pedagogy, and performance studies (see Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lather, 2007; MacLure, 2009; St. Pierre, 2011). These scholars are in a different space altogether. They seldom trouble terms like validity or reliability. Inquiry is put under erasure; theory produces different readings. A disruptive politics of representation is the focus, crafting works that move persons and communities to action.
The pursuit of social justice within a transformative paradigm challenges prevailing forms of inequality, poverty, human oppression, and injustice.5 This paradigm is firmly rooted in a human rights agenda. It requires an ethical framework that is rights- and social justice-based. It requires an awareness of “the need to redress inequalities by giving precedence … to the voices of the least advantaged groups in society” (Mertens, Holmes, & Harris, 2009, p. 89). It encourages the use of qualitative research for social justice purposes, including making such research accessible for public education, social policy-making, and community transformation.
This is a vision that is open to myriad ways of doing social justice work: social workers handling individual clients compassionately; graduate students serving as language translators for non-English-speaking migrant workers and their children; health researchers collaborating with communities to improve health care delivery systems; qualitative researchers engaging their students in public interest visions of society; Indigenous scholars being trained to work for their own nations using their own values; and teachers fostering the ethical practices of qualitative research through publications and presentations and teaching in both traditional classroom and professional development settings, nationally and internationally (Bloom, 2009, p. 253).
Thus are qualitative inquiry scholars united in the commitment to expose and critique the forms of inequality and discrimination that operate in daily life (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008). Together, they seek morally informed disciplines and interventions that will help people transcend and overcome the psychological despair fostered by wars, economic disaster, and divisive sexual and cultural politics. As global citizens, we are no longer called to just interpret the world, which was the mandate of traditional qualitative inquiry. Today, we are called to change the world and to change it in ways that resist injustice while celebrating freedom and full, inclusive, participatory democracy. Such has been the mandate of the Congress; such is the mandate of this volume.
It is here that we find the global community of qualitative researchers midway between two extremes, searching for a new middle and moving in several different directions at the same time. Mixed methodologies and calls for scientifically-based research, on the one hand, and renewed calls for social justice inquiry from the critical social science tradition, on the other, pull from opposite poles. Poststructuralism took away positivism’s claim to a God’s eye view of the world, that view which said objective observers could turn the world and its happenings into things that could be turned into data (Richardson, 2000, p. 928; St. Pierre, 2011, p. 620). The argument was straightforward (if not radical for the time): things, words, “become data only when theory acknowledges them as data” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 621). In a single gesture, doubt replaces certainty—no theory, method, discourse, genre, or tradition has “a universal and general claim ...

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