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Abstract

Nowadays, multivocality has been discussed as if it were a criterion for evaluating the quality of qualitative research, as well as if it were the practice, style, or format of narrative research itself. Grounded in Bakhtin’s legacy, the need to incorporate multivocality as a key element of critical qualitative inquiry as a whole is raised. Thus, multivocal critical qualitative inquiry (MCQI) is proposed as an opportunity to build democratic possibilities for a practice that operates on the threshold of new realities that emerge through the conjunction of alternative interpretive methodologies and emerging social movements of protest. MCQI is then outlined as an avenue for the gestation of public policies despite the fact that the real links between citizen actions of protest and government responsiveness have hardly been rigorously explored. Sympoiesis and pluriversal politics are the theoretical and epistemological perspectives of such conjunction nourished by inquiry practices such as creative subversion, creative activism, and militant research. To exemplify the ways in which MCQI practices can be thought, seven projects were selected from a worldwide production: two projects on ecological issues and environmental care, three in the area of urban planning and democratization, and two around the sensitive problems of refugees, exiles, and migrants. MCQI may constitute a crossroad for the best and most committed inquiry practices nurtured by the interpretive traditions of the social sciences in its ties to struggles for the destruction of all kinds of epistemic, social, political, racial, economic, ecological, cognitive, and legal injustice.

Keywords

public policy activism sympoiesis multivoicedness Bakhtin pluriverse MCQI becomings-with

Critical qualitative inquiry (CQI) has been developing over the last few decades with great momentum from different locations. However, calling inquiry critical is neither a guarantee of a democratic vocation nor of representing a methodological alternative to the old and dominant schemes of doing research. Therefore, careful examination of these approaches or avenues is necessary.

What does it mean to be critical in qualitative inquiry? It could mean that researchers practice poststructuralist perspectives (Davies & Davies, 2007), or sustain emancipatory visions and transformative inquiry (Denzin, 2008), or see the social realities through posthuman visions (St. Pierre, 2021) that acknowledge privilege for certain groups of so-called human beings. It could also mean that indigenous (Lewis, 2017) and/or autochthonous knowledge is used to analyze any current event around the world. Certainly, the notion of a universal globalized knowledge is also challenged (Ryen & Gobo, 2011) to explore novel and alternative forms that overcome any methodological colonialism and to facilitate a more equitable world.

In any sense, the definition and conceptualization of CQI have been in scientific discussions for some years (Cannella et al., 2015; Denzin & Giardina, 2016; Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994; Steinberg & Cannella, 2012) and will continue. As Denzin (2017) proposed, CQI scholars are united by: “the commitment to expose and critique the forms of inequality and discrimination that operate in daily life” (p. 9). We can assert that CQI has a face; has stories, methodologies, and authors; and has even organized a Coalition for Critical Qualitative Inquiry (CCQI) formed inside the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry (IAQI).

Here, I am proposing multivocal critical qualitative inquiry (MCQI) as a specific way to think, reflect, and practice: multivocal qualitative inquiry is characterized by numerous and varied voices but not as simply surreal “exquisite corpse” writing as layers of individual voices. Yet, MCQI is not just a simple collection of different voices gathered for allegedly democratic reasons, nor a sample of layered multiplicity of meaning, nor just gathering multilingual voices in social research. Neither is it just the result of a bricoleur’s eclectic research. MCQI goes beyond the simple by embodying the immanent, the unthought, the as-yet unformed relations that can lead to increased equity, justice, and possibilities.

To go beyond the simple, the purpose of this paper is to examine MCQI as methodology that offers democratic possibilities for research that operates on the threshold of new realities while fighting against various forms of injustice and generating heuristically productive strategies for transforming styles of thought and political action. To do this, and grounded in Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984, 1986) legacy, I briefly examine how the multivocal currently appears in qualitative inquiry exploring two different and basic forms: (a) as an avenue for evaluation and rigor, and (b) as rethought multiplicities like multivocal narrative. Second, I acknowledge and discuss the need for a political focus to multivocal qualitative inquiry that would move toward the always and already critical purposes of justice and equity. Third, I reflect on the use of MCQI as an avenue for democratic public policies using traditionally marginalized political perspectives, expansions of researcher activisms, and contemporary example studies.

Bakhtin’s Legacy and Proposing Multivocality as Criterion for Qualitative Inquiry

In their discussion of paradigmatic controversies and contradictions between different approaches in qualitative inquiry, Guba and Lincoln (2005) called attention to multivocality, new and creative textual forms, paradigmatic controversies, and disputed meanings. Furthermore, paradigms and perspectives are in contention:

We occupy a historical moment marked by multivocality, contested meanings, paradigmatic controversies, and new textual forms. This is an age of emancipation, freedom from the confines of a single regime of truth, emancipation from seeing the world in one color. (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, p. 210)

As a clear theoretical component of the so-called linguistic turn in the 1980s, multivocality has been present in diverse fieldwork in the social sciences and humanities. Undoubtedly, contemporary discussions around the meaning and application of the notion of multivocality goes back to the pioneering work of Bakhtin along with the concept of polyphony. According to Morris (2003), Bakhtin’s innovative and dynamic perception of language has influenced a diversity of fields and a range of disciplines including, but not limited to, philosophy, semiotics, cultural studies, anthropology, feminist and postcolonial studies, Marxism, and ethics. Without doubt, along with other Russian thinkers like Voloshinov and Vygotsky, he has brought to the forefront the contemporary emphasis on the conceptualization and role of dialogue in language and communication (Collington, 2001; Eun, 2019).

Linking multivocality and polyphony, Bakhtin (1984) acknowledged the influence of Lunacharsky in his own analysis of the works of Dostoevsky by proposing a definition of multivocality as, “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices. . .” (p. 6). Multivoicedness combines as individual independence is maintained (a polyphony), yet goes beyond any individual, group, culture, or history in its whole integrity. In other words:

The essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony. If one is to talk about individual will, then it is precisely in polyphony that a combination of several individual wills takes place, that the boundaries of the individual will can be in principle exceeded. One could put it this way: the artistic will of polyphony is a will to combine many wills, a will to the event. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 21)

Considering the unlimited worlds of meanings possible within this conceptualization of multivoicedness, it generates intellectual, sociological, even physical, imaginations far from, and counter to, any reductionism or hierarchical dominance. Recognizing this diversity is what Aveling et al. (2015) have proposed as a qualitative research method to analyze multivoicedness in empirical data. Moreover, the current interest in multivocality and polyphony arises in a world in which the political projects of a single hegemonic language that controls all the possible meanings of human action have been dismantled. In addition, Bakhtin’s pioneering ideas have been analyzed and compared with Freire’s thinking about dialogue and dialectics (Rule, 2011). These multiplicities lead our discussion to the consideration of multivoicedness as method for qualitative inquiry. Here, a general conceptualization (Cho & Trent, 2014), as well as the coming together in multivocal narrative (Denzin, 2003, 2006) are used as illustrations: first, as a criterion to evaluate the quality of the research, and second, as a narrative practice cultivated in the inquiry itself.

Multivocality as Standard for Qualitative Research

According to Cho and Trent (2014), just as with qualitative research, multivocality requires: thick description and verstehen practices of seeing social actions, emphatic understanding of many different meanings, awareness of cultural differences, intense collaboration with participants, and the sharing of various diverse applications. These components are also included as a characteristic among the eight “big-tent” quality criteria proposed by Tracy (2010) to conceptualize qualitative research. Accordingly, multivocal qualitative research becomes an avenue for rigor, validity, and reliability along with data construction and evaluation of the quality of the research itself (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018). This focus on multivocality as aligned with, and even akin to, well done qualitative research, has resulted in avenues for the expansion of qualitative inquiry itself. Adding multivocality to the already widely discussed criteria formulated by Lincoln and Guba (1985), Guba and Lincoln (1989), Seale (1999), and Flick (2018) for qualitative research quality’s evaluation. The construction and emergence of immanent multivocal narratives demonstrates this expansion.

Multivocal Narratives

The emergence of the multivocality in qualitative research is reflected in new writing practices. As Denzin (2006) has written defining them:

These new writing practices include autoethnography, fiction-stories, poetry, performance texts, polyvocal texts, reader’s theatre, responsive readings, aphorisms, comedy and satire, visual presentations, allegory, conversation, layered accounts, writing stories, and mixed genres. Creative nonfiction, performance writing, mysteries, memoirs, personal histories, and cultural criticism can be added to this list of narrative forms that can be used by the creative analytic ethnographer. (p. 420)

In this way, multivocality has become present in collaborative writing, performative autoethnography, participatory action research, collaborative multivoicedness, arts-based methods, experimental and postexperimental writing, militant ethnography, social and invisible theater, collective memories and sites of conscience studies, performative inquiry, among other research practices. There are many examples of this kind of production of multiple voices coming together or multivocal narratives engaging in a qualitative writing or inquiry processes. I hope not to be unfair, but I will mention just a few: Spry (2001); Akkerman et al. (2006); Wyatt et al. (2011); Cisneros-Puebla et al. (2016); Wells et al (2021); Flores et al. (2021) and Gale and Wyatt (2022).

Is This Use of Multivocality a Critical Practice?

Demonstrations of multivocality with/in/for qualitative research thus far have been valuable as forms of knowledge production and contributions that enhance the current methodological discussion. Most have been designed and framed to overcome some unequal and unfair status quo–no doubt. However, a political component is missing: a political component outside simple academic activism, outside scientific journals, and books, outside of conferences and scholarly arenas, outside of the pure blood and flesh of the qualitative researchers sitting comfortably at their desk. As will be pointed out later, most of the searches to build democratic public policies are based on innovative scientific strategies and broad social movements of various kinds and profiles. Our qualitative research communities committed to the emancipation of the oppressed and enthusiastically engaged in long-term struggles to eliminate the ever-present epistemic, social, political, racial, economic, ecological, cognitive, and legal injustices around the world cannot lose the opportunity to build that indispensable political element.

The following is an attempt to illustrate the need for, and use of, politics as an avenue for the construction of a multivocal critical qualitative form of inquiry (MCQI).

Always/Already Acknowledging the Political: Making MCQI

What needs to be added or improved to finally form an MCQI project, a research project that is directly applicable to public policy? I am not questioning the scope, nor the validity, nor the rigor, nor the methodology achieved in all these previously mentioned efforts to integrate the multivocal into qualitative research. Nothing of that. But, if we hope to use multivocality as a critical method toward more democratic public policy, the major missing component must always and already be acknowledged. This component is the political along with necessary research actions that are directly political.

I contend that we, as human beings, all know of our connectedness to the world, and that we all are feeling the impacts of social changes and reflecting on the cruelty of some economic regimes (Geiselberger, 2017). I believe that we all want to change the dynamics of social injustices and the dynamics of iron institutions that prevent transforming the world into a better one. Nevertheless, not all of us participate in peaceful/non-violent or violent social or political multivocal movements that arise spontaneously or continuously in our respective societies. I further believe that it is not enough to engage in only academic activism on university campuses, or in congresses and school arenas, or in books and journals. Social and politically active citizen participation that can be transformed into public policy is required. The public sphere is now demanding the acknowledgment of what we must do in our immediate space. Acknowledging that public policy activism cannot be described or classified with sets of procedures, strategies, actions, methodologies, or models that would result in success (Birkland, 2016; Gerston, 2015), MCQI is an avenue, and potentially a necessary component, for the introduction of political activism as a collective effort to put social sciences at the service of democracy and social justice.

Although the link between political and/or social protest and government responsiveness has not been extensively studied as Gillion (2013) has demonstrated, collective minorities belonging to a large diversity of racial, ethnic, stigmatized, disciplinary, fragmented, and excluded identities are still struggling to gain recognition in the public sphere. Around the world, different relations between some dissenting academics and a few oppositional social movements have emerged in recent decades as a response to increased conditions of injustice. To think politically in any given policy situation, it has always been and still is essential to ask the question: what is the most effective government instrument in public policies to generate the changes strived by social activists and/or protest and resistance movements? MCQI can contribute to collective discussions about scientifically-based policy that is essentially linked to public policies emanating from civil aspirations toward emancipation, justice, and equity. Furthermore, it is relevant that MCQI is intrinsically and immanently linked to transformative, militant, activist, rebellious, and creative practices of inquiry, as (a) creative subversion (Cisneros-Puebla, 2021), (b) creative activism (Harrebye, 2016), and (c) collective theorization (Shukaitis et al., 2007).

On one hand, creative subversion is a politically oriented methodological approach that is allied with the subaltern classes and aims to destroy the current social and ideological hegemonies that hinder the generation of new social harmonies. Multivocality in practice vividly makes possible the inquiry findings as emancipatory visions through transformative compositions in literature, poetry, theater, performances, painting, comedy, music, and so on. In the same direction, creative activism should be understood:

as a kind of meta-activism that tries to facilitate critical and creative dialogue in-between traditional divides and actors, and as such functions as a priming pump for the political imagination if and when it manages to push the boundaries of the known repertoire of contention in its attempt to get the individual citizen to reflect on her responsibility in moving humanity forward. (Harrebye, 2016, p. 220)

Creative activism is an immanent form of critique but is more than a mere critique, functioning as a driver for the political imagination: creative activism includes different kinds of pranks, protests, urban insurrection, or participations on happenings, subvertisement, tactical media, social utopian experiments, viral campaigns, street art, and invisible theater. Furthermore, interaction tactics and interventions such as flash mobs, infiltrating media-jacking, hacktivism, urban guerilla gardening, and so on, can be included. The collective theorization invited by Shukaitis et al. (2007) is an effort to build a constituent imagination based on militant research that expresses the possibility of bringing together communities of/in resistance, circuits of struggle and genealogies of new social, ethical and justice projects. Although, ultimately, “achieving changes in public policies in the face of determined opposition of the powerholders takes time, often decades” as Moyer (1987, p. 21) has stated long ago.

One must, however, also remember relevant and precise precautions regarding methodological conservatism and governmental regimes of truth (Lincoln & Cannella, 2004). Although Lincoln and Cannella are referring to the analysis of United States and scientific policies of the National Research Council, the description of the four ways in which conservatism appropriates thought is central to reflect globally: dominant disciplinary practices, monoculture perspectives, shifting and repositioning of discourses, and along with multiple redeployments of power and resources. It is also time to recall the need to reconceptualize the ethical and institutional regulation of research (Cannella & Lincoln, 2004) with special reference to the generation and evaluation of public policies; we cannot allow our innovative and creative research practices to become instruments of domination.

MCQI is one of those ethically responsible activist research approaches that CQI has been fostering for some time according to Denzin (2017) in his calls for multivocality. I can assert that MCQI is an activist form of research as it uncovers sites and processes that place oppressed voices at the center. Thus, the researcher who performs MCQI must politically influence public policies by (a) actively participating in policymaking, and/or (b) increasing the likelihood that policymakers listen to criticism and put critique into practice in ways that increase justice.

It is precisely with the recognition of the missing political and the multiplicity of components that leads to another possibility for, and use of, multivocality. This possibility for MCQI can construct understanding as the horizontal production of multiple voices, meanings, and perspectives essential for thinking and conceptualizing the diversity of injustices that humankind has regrettably produced: whether epistemic, social, political, racial, economic, ecological, cognitive, or legal, just to mention a few. Furthermore, this horizontal consideration exemplifies multivocality as politically present in the implementation of social change strategies.

MCQI and Democratic Public Policy Studies: Illustrations

Examining how what I am proposing as MCQI can be integrated into the activistic, democratic, militant, and creative reflection on power, justice and inequality is fundamental. There are ways of thinking that can facilitate the construction of MCQI because of their embeddedness in multiplicity as well as immanent possibilities for the unanticipated and the unthought. Examples of these perspectives include (a) Haraway’s (2016) concept of sympoiesis, or becoming with, which serves as an ontological framework to interpret our human presence and action on the earth as immanent relations, along with (b) the notion of pluriversal politics (Escobar, 2018a, 2018b), “a world in which many worlds might fit” (Escobar, 2020, p. 26), put forward by the Zapatistas.

Sympoiesis: Becomings-With the Other(s)

One cannot think multiplicity or multivoicedness without considering Haraway’s (2016) notion of becoming-with, labeled sympoiesis and understood as a previously unthought constitution of one with the other, of partners, of many, companions (alive or not), and so on, through unanticipated relations. Bodies, relations, and events are entangled through intra- and interactions. Haraway uses notions like oddkin, critters, making-with, and becomingwith to demonstrate these unthought relations, immanent, emergent, and constantly changing. This perspective on reality, multiplicity, and criticality is important because of the potential political effects on the construction of responsible public policies on the lives of human beings, on nonhuman life, and on the environment. Over and above that, it can become a method for the construction of MCQI. It is essential to remember that:

Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer “world game,” earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. (Haraway, 2016, p. 58)

“Making-with” or “becoming-with” as horizons of possibilities are to actively transform what is real and what is not. In addition, Cannella (2019) proposes the use of the concept(s) in the plural as becomings-with because of continued combinations and collaborations, nurturing relations that loop around and through along with critical histories and transformations that are both past and present. She states:

. . . all people, histories, oddkin, critters, ideas, and actions are involved in multiplicities and unpredictabilities. Further, the construct can embody both naming (perhaps representationally and otherwise) and actions (difference and movement from a variety of locations and views) simultaneously. (pp. 138–139)

Haraway’s perspective is tremendously powerful, moving and touching: it allows us to see intensely the emergence of multiple worlds, multiple realities, and multiple minds, all of them peacefully coexisting in the concert of a pluriverse.

Pluriversal Politics

Thinking from the pluriversal perspective (Reiter, 2018), Escobar (2018a) reflected on bridges to rebuild the “relational intensities” between society and nature, “an ecology of collaborative encounters” to facilitate society becoming “a laboratory for new ways of being and doing” (p. 162). In addition, diverse zones of contact are increasingly important. Escobar (2020) describes a pluriverse as a “tool, first, for making alternatives to the one world plausible to one-worlders; and second, for providing resonance to those other worlds that interrupt the one-world story” (p. 75). He proposes three layers of/for political strategies and design that are applicable to MCQI and public policy conceptualizations and research: progressive purposes to improve life conditions; designs and actions that would facilitate social justice and environmental sustainability; and political designs with the purpose of constructing and supporting pluriversality. Dominant, unthought, and marginalized perspectives and actions are considered useful in various combinations as related to the pluriverse. Pluriversal research constructions have been recently explored and presented by Koro et al. (2022).

By sympoetically participating with others—in others—loving others—respecting others, we create a different materialism for a different desired and loved pluriverse. By stating that CQI must be polyphonic and multivocal, it is assumed that it is not possible to deny the irreducible multicentric or polyphony of human life in a new form of coexistence with nature itself and the nonhuman. Therefore, by rejecting any form of injustice, whether epistemic, social, political, racial, economic, ecological, cognitive, or legal, and by becomings-with various worlds, we assume that it is possible to live together and perform conditions of equality without dominance, nor hierarchies nor imposed hegemonies.

These two illustrative ways of thinking are very consistent with notions of multivocality as they are multidirectional and become avenues for criticality, unthought multiplicities, and immanent possibilities. Therefore, they become with each other, as well as multiple voices, ways of being, locations, and forms of interpretation as Haraway (2016) has written “. . . We become-with each other or not at all . . .” (p. 4). The following are examples of these becomings with the unthought and creations of pluriversal political public policies through MCQI.

Example MCQI Projects

In research conducted by Meulemans (2020), an MCQI project is conceptualized regarding the sympoetic relationship between earthworms and human beings. Teams of ecological engineers collaborate to implement public policies that compensate for the degradation of productive soils. The researcher describes “processes in which life forms are always ‘making-with,’ or ‘worlding-with, in company,’ rather than ‘making themselves’ (as in autopoiesis)” (p. 101). Calling for a political activation of relationality proposed by Escobar (2018a), I assume that MCQI can make-with in a variety of complex ways to integrate not just the multiplicity of human experiences but also other life forms. As Lakitsch (2021) discusses, striving to foster a construction of political subjectivity in relation to the human and also along with the nonhuman, is to “participate in processes of becoming with (sympoiesis) others in the ‘multispecies muddle . . .’ yet maintain the ability to articulate one’s perspective as such” (p. 10). This is definitely a multivocal perspective.

Reflecting on defining MCQI as a “making-with” form of political research is an indispensable methodology for creating collective imagination and organizational structures to work toward public policies that integrate sympoiesis and multiversality as basic. Gebara et al. (2020), for instance, conducted a qualitative analysis of data produced over a decade around different meanings, that is, MCQI as to how political actors (government, private sector, influential politicians, national and international NGOs, research institutions, foreign government agencies and hybrid/multi-stakeholder groups) perceived the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) plan employed in Brazil. Examples like this one show how an MCQI is complex, multi-layered and entangled political intervention. Furthermore, even if no intervention has been implemented, the MCQI challenge is to face potential policy changes in a multi-actor governance context.

Another real and urgent challenge is to maintain sociological imagination and inspiration to satisfy our longings for transformative participation in such a way that our minds, always inspired, rebellious, creative, poetic, performative and subversive, can also continue to play a role in the critique of public policies. For instance, Van Marrewijk (2017), in a rigorous 20-years longitudinal qualitative study, evaluates the multivocality of symbolic interpretations of diverse political, social, and economic actors during the design and implementation of a High-Speed Train Megaproject to connect Netherland to the European Union. With clear awareness of changes to research questions during such a long period, Van Marrewijk recommends keeping a comprehensive understanding of the exegetical meaning dynamics of each one of the diverse participating voices. Based on this case, I can assert that studying or participating in social crisis or political debates or stakeholders’ conflicts in megaprojects are good examples of the need to integrate multivocal methodological reflection into public policies. The Interoceanic Highway between Peru and Brazil 2005, the Panama Canal Expansion Project (PCEP) 2006, or Mayan Train Project in Mexico 2020 were, or still are, scenarios of diverse voices from citizens, politicians, public or private organizations, clients, and other actors.

In what I label urban democratization, Rodman (1992) has proposed that the concept of place be reconceptualized in the same way that the concept of voice has been. In this way, she establishes that multilocality, as well as multivocality, is useful to reflexively understand the complex social construction of thought, narration, dialogue, identity, and its spatial meanings. She asserts that:

Multivocality often involves multilocality. Polysemic places bespeak people’s practices, their history, their conflicts, their accomplishments. Narratives of places are not just told with words; they can be told and heard with senses other than speech and hearing. (p. 649)

Inspired by the Foucauldian concept of heterotopias (Foucault, 1970), Rodman proposes then that by joining multilocality to multivocality, it becomes possible to overcome the pitfall of thinking about spaces only as settings for social action. Methodologically, it is pertinent to use her approach to think about urban design and urban democratization. Akoka et al. (2021) illustrate the fruitful merging between voice and space when studying a main street of multicultural Cyprus. They demonstrate the micro-geography of power enacted at the local level. In Cyprus, Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Maronites, Armenians, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Turks, Greeks from Turkey, as well as Greeks from Egypt and migrants from Romania, Bulgaria, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Russia live together. Studying the crowded Cypriot Trikoupi Street as a “spatial interstice” with shared and contested stories, diverse meanings and feelings allowed them to situate multivocality in the context of migration and multiculturalism.

Studying exiled or refugee lives using MCQI can be very transformative for public policies on migration. For instance, Bergset and Ulvik (2021) have use multivoicedness as analytic tools to deeply understand the narratives of refugee parents from Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia who have been living in Norway for about 10 years. They found how traditional, modern, or hybrid ways of thinking generate prejudices toward parents’ practices because parenting in exile is culturally very complex. While from another part of the world, Uttal and Frausto (2021) working with Spanish-speaking undocumented immigrants used casual conversations, “pláticas” (in Spanish), a dialogical facilitation method that actively reveals the challenges to living biculturally. Furthermore, the conversations counter forms of acculturation that are monocultural, representing voices from domination. Migration public policies based on MCQI “make-with” political research that is multiple—multivoiced, multivocal, and multicultural—and avoid acculturation strategies that marginalize.

For now, I would like to think that the set of example projects described above around sympoietic thinking and pluriversality illustrates the range of possibilities for MCQI. These examples range from policies related to human and environmental relations, to urban design, to human migration embedded in crisis and cruelty. MCQI is an avenue for generating public policies politically motivated and grounded in emancipatory, transformative, militant, activist, rebellious, and creative practices of inquiry that go beyond simplicity to generate the unthought. MCQI is a scientific way to resist and fight against all the epistemic, social, political, racial, economic, ecological, cognitive, and legal injustices throughout the world. At the end, our actual and urgent challenge is to maintain sociological, environmental, and policy imagination and inspiration to satisfy our longings for transformative participation. Research must function in such a way that our minds, always inspired, rebellious, creative, poetic, performative, and subversive, can also continue to play a role in the critique of public policies. MCQI can “make-with” the political to build our “becomings-with” as, and at, the highest level of personal involvement in intra- and interactions with public policy activism.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

César A. Cisneros-Puebla

Author Biography

César A. Cisneros Puebla, currently is researching and teaching at University of Tarapaca, Chile and former professor at the Sociology Department of the Autonomous Metropolitan University-Iztapalapa, Mexico for more than thirty years. He teaches Qualitative Methods and Social Sciences Epistemology. He has been a visiting professor at the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, University of Alberta, Canada (2001-2003), in the CAQDAS Networking Project at University of Surrey, UK (2008) and Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences in the University of Augsburg, Germany (2015-2016). He received in 2016 the Special Career Award in Qualitative Inquiry for dedication and contributions to qualitative research, teaching, and practice given by the International Association for Qualitative Inquiry in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, US.

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Multivocal Critical Qualitative Inquiry as an Avenue for Public Policy

Abstract

Keywords

Bakhtin’s Legacy and Proposing Multivocality as Criterion for Qualitative Inquiry

Multivocality as Standard for Qualitative Research

Multivocal Narratives

Is This Use of Multivocality a Critical Practice?

Always/Already Acknowledging the Political: Making MCQI

MCQI and Democratic Public Policy Studies: Illustrations

Sympoiesis: Becomings-With the Other(s)

Pluriversal Politics

Example MCQI Projects

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Author Biography

References