Getting By or Getting In? Grappling With Access and Affect in Qualitative Research Projects Involving Vulnerable Human Subjects

Abstract

This article sketches out a terrain for the concept “access” to expand beyond its more familiar iterations in the discourses surrounding qualitative projects. In parts, there are opacious accounts of the author’s qualitative project’s inception and varied intellectual and personal inspirations and struggles. In other sections, a splintered narrative account of pursuits of and everyday encounters with access come into the fray. The article meanders through the search for access to a protected population and through more philosophic ruminations on “access” as a concept—one that suggests that deep learning becomes possible in conditions of anxiety and disconcertion.