Critical Qualitative Inquiry as an Avenue for Critical Public Policy Knowledge and Change

Abstract

The broad goal of this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry is to demonstrate how critical qualitative inquiry (CQI) can facilitate the performance of justice-oriented public policy by conceptualizing movement beyond the logic of policy as prescription. The articles demonstrate the multiple possibilities generated through CQI for rethinking ethical perspectives, discourse practices, and forms of inclusion and policymaking processes, as well as research methods. Furthermore, authors in this special issue illustrate ways that CQI can lead to reconceptualizations of conventional research practices, knowledge and perspectives that dominate fields of study, and forms of communication and activism with policymakers. Finally, some of the authors literally use recent pandemic and environmental disaster circumstances to call for rethinking the ethics and actions that ground CQI.

The broad goal of this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry is to demonstrate how critical qualitative inquiry (CQI) can facilitate the performance of justice-oriented public policy by conceptualizing movement beyond the logic of policy as prescription. CQI can acknowledge and address power and hegemony within societies, along with the ways these power orientations are played out/challenged/countered by/through policy decisions and practices. The immanent multiplicities made possible through CQI can offer pathways that support communities, public institutions, and the environment generally, toward more just forms of survival as well as equitable transformations. CQI can literally become a conduit for the conceptualization of critical public policy.

As the world has just experienced the COVID-19 pandemic, one major example used by some of the authors in this issue is the notion of CQI as an avenue for public policy within and following conditions of disaster, whether environmental, health, or otherwise. With circumstances in which lives are literally on the line (human, but potentially other forms of life also), scholars need to study differently, to become-with (Haraway, 2016) research ethics, conceptualizations, and practices differently. Furthermore, all CQI involves studying differently, yes using sets of common, even so-called conventional, critical questions but also diverse problematizations from various critical perspectives and critical genealogies, explorations, reconceptualizations, and actions from within various fields. Example conventional questions from within CQI in times of disaster and pandemic might include the following: Is research appropriate during these times? How can research be fast tracked in ways that provide support and care without resulting in damage? What are thought and unthought additional participant or environmental burdens? What are the specific ethical entanglements that ground a particular disaster or circumstance? How are current policies benefiting or further harming various communities in present times of disaster? And, is it possible to critically address harmful entanglements to avoid future disasters or injustices?

However, critical health policy researcher Carol Bacchi (2016) reminds scholars that critical work explores how problems themselves are constituted, asking questions related to how the problem is conceptualized and how meaning is represented. Critical work problematizes the territory of the “real,” asking questions like the following: How does the policy itself contain within it an implicit construction (and therefore representation) of the problem? From this poststructural perspective, one starts by analyzing the proposed solution for how the problem has been invented. Questions become genealogical (Foucault, 1981/1994), also requiring reflection on their political implications. The goal for research is to construct space for critical reflection on all forms of change and to minimize domination while increasing possibilities for justice and equity.

In the field of education, Michael Apple (2019) contends that it is essential for critical scholars to investigate the relations of power that exist between institutions while repositioning researcher self to see the world through the eyes of the dispossessed. Furthermore, from within a context in which education is the site for “crucial struggles over authority and identity,” CQI can examine the “complex connections between education and the relations of dominance and subordination in the larger society-and the movements that are trying to interrupt these relations” (Apple, 2019, pp. 276–277). Apple reminds us of the multitude of critical purposes, practices, and projects that are possible, and needed, through CQI. The problematizations and new critical conceptualizations of research can include education and possibilities for societal change (whether positive, negative, or multidirectional)—investigating who is privileged by dominant educational knowledge and how the knowledge becomes “official” (p. 277); exploring how to determine hidden relations, complexities, and contradictions; inquiring into the full range of tactics that can change power relations; or constructing research that thinks and acts relationally, perhaps through the posthuman, just to name a few. Furthermore, whether in health care policy, education policy studies, or other fields, CQI can also facilitate the inclusion of various critical perspectives, for example, the feminist call for a politics of recognition, representation, and redistribution (Fraser, 1997).

Considering all these multidirectional needs and possibilities, contributors to this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry were encouraged to discuss how CQI can become a perspective(s) from which policy knowledges and change can be reconceptualized in ways that break the problematic framing of policy as a process of identification, formulation, implementation, and evaluation. As critical scholars, contributors were encouraged to draw on different critical theoretical perspectives and critical methodological orientations and traditions. Furthermore, authors were asked to represent and employ justice-oriented and transformative qualitative research across a range of fields (e.g., education policy, public health policy, environmental policy), groups (e.g., childhood/youth services, refugee/immigration discourses/policy/services), and circumstances (e.g., environment change, policy for/during disaster, pandemics, crises), as well as reconceptualizations of qualitative practices/methodologies/possibilities related to public policy. Finally, authors consider the ways that CQI can generate policy knowledge to expand and reconceptualize our understanding of the policy process, acknowledge lives and materialities that have been traditionally ignored or disqualified, and directly engage with living beings and the environment both locally and globally in ways that produce justice-oriented transformation.

The articles in this issue use CQI to become-with more justice-oriented public policy practices through the use of diverse perspectives, rethinking discourses in a range of fields, multiplicity, engaged pedagogical practices, critical field work, and an affirmative ethics of care. These becomings-with involve everyday concern for equity, justice, and support, along with life-threatening circumstances like disaster, pandemic, and displacement. We invite you to join in making the just (Kuntz, this issue) through CQI and in fostering an academic lifeworld that allows such work to flourish (Brown, this issue).

Reconceptualizing Public Policy Perspectives Through CQI

Power, hegemony, and particular value orientations are privileged and played out in societies through policy decisions and practices. However, critical research perspectives can generate an environment in which a multitude of perspectives that address unequal distributions of power become resources for conceptualization and movements toward more just transformations. The following articles in this special issue use these diverse critical orientations to propose policy research reconceptualizations that include the opening of alternatives based on rethinking notions of public, critique, and actions related to language and those who are served by public policy, examinations of hidden messages regarding particular groups, and acknowledgements of the role of multiplicity in both critical and policy research. These articles represent broad-based critical work that could be considered in a range of situations and fields.

In “Making the Just: Ethical Enactments through Inquiry,” Aaron Kuntz offers ultimate and unthought reconceptualizations of both the public and policy. Part of the work of critical inquiry is proposed as constructing alternative communities, contingent communities that represent a different since of the public. To illustrate, the author begins by questioning the notion of grieving within pandemic, locating grieving and crisis as functions of biopower (Braidotti, 2022; Foucault, 2003). Questions are asked like the following: What makes a life grievable/livable? Grieving is thus explained as a relational endeavor. Alternative publics and policy are then understood as unstable affective assemblages (Golder, 2011). Conventional inquiry work often seeks procedural mechanisms to call upon practices of capture and closure. Such presumptions operate upon select ethical claims that remain steeped in principles of liberal humanism, privileging individualism and particular formations of knowledge. Within such circumstances, justice often articulates as resistance. Kuntz offers CQI as an interventional making that short-circuits the status quo such that open-ended alternatives are newly present, an alignment of critical inquiry work with Foucault’s notion of “making the just”— an enacted ethical policy process grounded in relational materialism.

Just as critical perspectives have historically been concerned with the dangers of power distributions embedded in differing discourses and discourse practices (Foucault, 1969), Karamjeet K. Dhillon and Jasmine B. Ulmer problematize public labeling in the article “The Ethics of Naming in Forced Displacement Research: Critical Work and Policy Labels.” In a range of public policy research and action situations, but especially in disaster circumstances, those affected may be labeled in ways that stigmatize individuals and groups for the rest of their lives. The authors investigate several of the terms used by international policy agencies to demonstrate the diverse interpretations used depending on context. While policy terminology can stigmatize, damaging labels can be especially problematic under emergency situations like pandemics, conditions of war and violence, and environmental displacement. The authors caution against fixed identity labels in research and policy circumstances.

In “Lifting the Veil: Utilizing Critical Qualitative Inquiry to Demystify the Public Policymaking Process,” Sosanya M. Jones demonstrates how CQI can be used to examine components of the policymaking process that facilitate power and privilege for particular groups and disqualifications for others. The author’s specific focus is how researchers interested in advancing knowledge, justice, and empowerment for communities of color can use CQI to both unmask unquestioned power orientations and rethink policy research questions. Jones uses Diem et al.’s (2014) review of critical educational policy literature to generate reconceptualist CQI related to public policy focusing on policy rhetoric and reality, reification of power, distribution of power, policy as reproducing inequality and privilege, and resistance and activism. Extensive lists of reconceptualized questions along with critical methods are provided. Examples include questions like “How is the problem being formed and by whom?” and “What groups are burdened by this policy?” and critical research methods like coalition building, ways to traverse dominant policy domains, and CQI as an unlimited avenue for reconceptualization. CQI is conceptualized as a site from which public thinking about issues can be examined and changed.

Furthermore, critical perspectives remind researchers of the multiple absences of marginalized ways of being, knowledges, and voices in research conceptualization, practices, and even data construction. In “Multivocal Critical Qualitative Inquiry as an Avenue for Public Policy,” Cesar A. Cisneros-Puebla focuses on multivocality as a key element of critical inquiry and as an illustration of the incorporation of multiplicities. Grounded in Bakhtin’s (1984) legacy, the author proposes a multivocal CQI (MCQI) as an opportunity to expand democratic possibilities for public policy. In addition, sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016) and pluriversal politics (Escobar, 2018, 2020) are the theoretical and epistemological perspectives suggested for making-with inquiry practices that would always and already acknowledge multiplicity. Finally, creative subversion, creative activism, and militant research are put forward as reconceptualized methodologies. To demonstrate the ways MCQI practices can be taught, seven worldwide research projects are discussed: 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.

Using CQI to Rethink Public Policy Conceptualizations and Practices Across Fields

To some extent already discussed related to the fields of health care and education as examples, a range of academic and knowledge fields are either conceptualized through public policy perspectives and actions or impacted by policy practices that privilege and/or harm individuals and groups of human beings, nonhuman life forms, and even the environment all around us. CQI is needed across all fields to analyze the dominant knowledge that constructs a field broadly, to investigate narrow components, and to reconceptualize the dominant knowledges that may be harmful, unjust, and inequitable.

Critical work can be used to transform both the assumptions and biases within a particular field, as well as policy conceptualizations and practices. In “Beyond Good Intentions in Special Education Policy: Engaging with Critical Disability Intersectional Research,” Adai Abebe Tefera and Gustavo Fishman focus on the shortfalls of treating race and disability as separate characteristics in the field of special education. Using a case study in a suburban high school, the intersectional nature of disability is demonstrated. In addition to challenging the identity biases in the field, the authors discuss the need for intersectional approaches (Crenshaw, 1991) that could result in the generation of more adequate questions and understandings that address injustices.

Using mainly quantitative research and ignoring the language and cognitive accomplishments of young children before entering a school environment, policymakers and a range of educational researchers claim that for those who are younger, entering school ready to learn (most often referred to as school readiness) results in improved academic achievement and can be attained through appropriate policy conceptualizations and related interventions. In “Policy Justice Through Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Examining the Issue of School Readiness,” Christopher P. Brown uses CQI to examine this logic. The author first frames an ontological and epistemological understanding of what can be called critical qualitative policy research (CQPR) and discusses why this type of work must be an action component of policy discussions surrounding schooling. The dominant political and empirical discussions within the United States and abroad that frame school readiness are discussed along with the negative impacts on children and their families. Then, he proposes that critical qualitative researchers seek to produce policy knowledge about “educational inputs, processes and practices, non-cognitive phenomena, out-of-school factors, and facilitating meaningful human experiences in schools and the communities they serve” (Dumas & Anderson, 2014, p. 5). Serving as a point for reconceptualization, this policy knowledge would challenge and restructure the politics and policies of school readiness so that all children and their families could actively live, learn, and participate in a democratic society.

Critical Field Work: Research and Engaging With Policymakers

Critical field work involves the range of research conceptualizations and practices through which scholars impose, and hopefully explore and challenge, their own ethics and power orientations along with ways to become-with policy issues, stakeholders, and political circumstances, as well as publics both specifically and broadly. Ultimately, these becomings are played out in diverse forms of support—or, interventions—or, further silencing and disqualification—or, increased privilege for some—or, increased forms of justice and equity for greater numbers—and, on and on, depending on the policy conceptualizations and forms of implementation and support. Critical policy field work includes initial pedagogical aims through which researchers learn about, and explore, ways to conduct CQI; these pedagogical aims are challenging for most of us whose purposes are to both expand justice and equity through CQI and support the student researchers with whom we work. Furthermore, understanding and researching the always political and changing environment in which policymakers function and how to influence those environments represent forms of field work that are needed and often neglected. To focus on critical qualitative research in the field related to public policy, the following articles demonstrate initial pedagogical actions, concerns related to critical discourse and research practices directly in the field, and research on the presence of diverse bodies in the policy arena.

In “Conducting Case Study Research to Address Continued Crisis: A Process of Leaning to Employ Decolonial Perspectives,” Christopher P. Brown examines the challenges that exist in conducting as well as in teaching novice scholars in how to conduct critical case study research that employs decolonial perspectives (e.g., Mita, 2012; Santos, 2014) in an era of never-ending crises. The author walks through the process of working with graduate students in recognizing the onto-epistemological, axiological, and practical challenges they or any critical researcher will face when moving forward with their own critical work in and outside the academy. Furthermore, Brown makes the point that doing such work will lead to unresolved issues and tensions within a researcher’s field of inquiry as well as larger governing structures, but he also notes such investigations also produce interruptions and changes that move the conversation forward. In doing so, he contends that it is crucial for critical qualitative scholars to engage in such work because otherwise the global neoliberal systems of capital and governance that generate and depend on these crises to further their ability to accumulate wealth and power will remain unchanged.

Critical qualitative scholars often hope that their research influences policy decisions along with the ways policies are implemented. Attaining this influence requires direct communication and interaction with policymakers, opportunities, and proficiencies that may not be common to most qualitative researchers. Robert Donmoyer addresses researcher engagement with policymakers in “Policy Pragmatics: What’s a Qualitative Researcher—Especially a Critical Qualitative Researcher—to Do?” The author points out that in addition to being suspicious of qualitative research itself, policymakers tend to distrust inquiry that challenges privilege and the status quo. First, using an autoethnographic methodology, he illustrates how qualitative researchers can influence policy. Second, he describes a research process designed to promote dialogue across difference. Furthermore, Donmoyer stresses the importance of a critical sensibility that is insightful related to power orientations, acknowledges diverse meanings, and is sympathetic regarding the use of language and dialogue when directly dealing with policymakers and the various citizenry who may influence them.

As the ethnic demographics of policymaking has shifted in the United States over the past 20 years, Magdalena Martinez illustrates the many ways critical praxis is employed to create change in the article “Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Examining the Influence of Changing Voices and Bodies on Legislative Spaces.” By examining emergent policymaking spaces and the new actors that occupy these spaces, the author reveals critical theories and actions in changing policymaking locations. She also demonstrates how critical scholars can use research methodologies to illustrate how progressive policymakers face political battles, resist domination, and succeed in these changing spaces.

Openings: CQI, Public Policy, and Our Interconnected Relations of Care

Obviously, our research perspectives and practices are ultimately embedded within an ethical stance, and certainly CQI and public policy research, as well as the papers included in this special issue either imply or directly include the recognition of the researcher’s ethical perspectives. However, research ethics as situational, always interconnected relations, and continuously requiring acknowledgements of care are often lost within our political maneuverings and negotiations.

From within the context of the COVID-19 crisis, Allison Jeffry and Holly Thorpe introduce us to radically different understandings and relations of care. In “Relational Ethics of Care in Pandemic Research: Vulnerabilities, Intimacies and Becoming Together-Apart,” the authors use their feminist research on women’s embodied experiences of sport, fitness, and well-being to demonstrate creative and communal solutions for supporting the health of families and communities along with ways to navigate a tense political and social climate. Although most recently written related to work in pandemic times, the authors employ Braidotti’s (2020) ethical stance that calls for radical understandings of interconnections and collectivity and is entirely applicable to our public policy research perspectives, forms of decision-making, and continued actions toward more just and equitable possibilities. An affirmative ethics is called for that acknowledges the potential for both similarity and difference (a becoming together apart), that serves as a public witness, and that continuously adjusts research practices as acts of care. Relational ethical notions for research and public policy are generated like the following: How do present conditions represent both opportunity and threat to ethical conduct, justice, and equitable forms of survival? How/when does radical social, political, economic, environmental, medical, and emotional change require work, and immediate action, by qualitative researchers? How do we care for others? In what ways are we all connected, whether human or nonhuman? And, how can we ethically care for all within those connections? This culminating manuscript reminds us to challenge our perspectives for research and policy related to all lives, communities, and circumstances that are impacted by our conceptualizations and public actions. CQI becomes a political opening for ethics, multiplicity, and increased justice and equity.