Towards a dialogical methodology for single case studies

Abstract

This special issue has explored a range of means of ‘generalising’ or ‘re-situating knowledge’ through the intensive, dialogical, examination of single cases. The papers elaborate aspects of the methodology of dialogical case studies without asking the traditional question: ‘of what is this a case?’ In this concluding article, we look across the papers to draw out methodological considerations for dialogical single case studies, comparing how the papers deal with four key dialogically informed methodological concerns: the primacy of self-other interdependencies; dynamics; ethics; and modes of writing. We then turn to the question of generalising, or re-situating, knowledge. Across the papers, three different, but overlapping, approaches to re-situating knowledge are taken, implying alternative possible questions: (i) How does the case participate in epistemic or narrative genres? (ii) How does the case contribute to a genealogy? (iii) In what ways is the case generative? We offer these concepts and questions as methodological prompts for case study researchers to conceptualise their knowledge-making as a dialogical endeavour.

Introduction: Generalising, from a dialogical perspective

Having collected together six original papers on dialogical single case studies, and a theoretical introduction, we are now in a position to create ‘knowledge encounters’ (Jovchelovitch, 2007) between these studies, putting them in dialogue to develop some general considerations about the methodology characteristic of dialogical single case studies.

A large case study literature has already given much attention to the question of how to ‘generalise’ from case studies. Indeed, the intensity of attention to this question derives partly, defensively, against the charge that case studies are ‘small n’ or ‘biased’, and thus ‘do not generalise’. Thus, considerable effort has been spent elaborating rationales for the transfer of knowledge from one context to another. This literature has produced well-reasoned typologies of the different ways in which case studies may be understood to ‘generalise’. For instance, Morgan (2014) uses the metaphors of ladders (from the particular to the general), bridges (from one particular case directly to another particular case) and exemplars (from one instance of a type to other instances of that type). Others (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Polit & Beck, 2010; Yin, 2013) distinguish statistical generalisation (from a sample to a population), analytical generalisation (from a case to a general theory) and case-to-case transfer (directly from one case to another). Such typologies identify some of the possible moves of generalisation – the kind of knowledge we start with, and where we move to, in generalising. They do so usually against the ill-fitting assumption that scientific knowledge comes in the form of abstract propositions that work across contexts. Some approaches to case studies take up the goal of generating decontextualized abstractions (e.g. Gerring, 2017). Others, in contrast, privilege the concrete, claiming that the concrete situation is intrinsic to knowledge, and that the aim is not to transcend the concrete, but to understand how the nature of the particular case – its tensions or changes or stability or dynamics – is produced precisely through its particular details (Flyvbjerg, 2001). Dialogues are concrete, meaningful and contextual, they are inescapably about matters of concern to people, and thus this Special Issue aligns with the latter approach, valuing the concrete, the particulars.

In this Special Issue, we have started from a dialogical set of assumptions to consider how single case studies build knowledge that has value beyond the immediate setting of their production. We came to question whether ‘generalising’ is a helpful term, given its origin in a statistical language that privileges abstraction from the particularity of people in contexts (Marková, Zadeh, & Zittoun, 2020). It is difficult to make the term mean something other than abstracting. Instead, we have proposed to consider how to ‘re-situate knowledge’ generated through dialogical single case studies in ways that are consistent with dialogical assumptions, the most fundamental of which is the primacy of self-other interdependencies. From the foundation of self-other interdependencies, we develop key commitments to understanding dynamics and ethics, and eventually a mode of writing that respects the humanity and particularity of the participants in the case. To concretise these dialogical commitments, the following section explores how the papers in this special issue manifest those commitments. We then turn to examining alternatives to ‘generalisation’ for dialogical single case studies, posing three alternative questions about genre, genealogy and generativity. We finally suggest that these concepts and questions make a contribution to the methodology of case study more generally.

Contrasting the papers on four dimensions

The introduction to this Special Issue (Marková et al., 2020) sets out three concerns that are intrinsic to dialogical single case studies: the interdependence of self and other, the dynamic nature of dialogically conceptualised cases and ethics. After having written, read and discussed the papers, we add a fourth: the mode of writing, having observed a particularly personal and engaged character of authorship across these texts.

There is no single way of doing a dialogical single case study – but multiple ways of realising the theoretical and ethical commitments of dialogism (Linell, 2009; Marková, 2016). This section reviews and discusses the different ways in which the papers address each of these four dimensions, to illuminate the concrete meaning of a dialogical single case study methodology and to give examples of some of the multiple options.

Founded in self-other interdependencies

As we argued in the introduction to this special issue (Marková et al., 2020), a dialogical case study takes self-other interdependencies to be the primary ontological unit at the heart of the case. Doing so ensures that a case is understood in terms of multiple perspectives, with the tensions and dynamics that flow from such multiplicity. So, for instance, Zittoun’s (2020) ‘regional case study’ is not a study of ‘the Říp community’ (as if there was a singular community) and Coultas’ (2020) study of the process of monitoring in global health is not a study of ‘the Mabadiliko sexuality education project’ (as if the project itself has a nature that could be described without considering the multiple self-other relations through which the project is realised).

Instead, Zittoun elaborates the multiple significances of the hill in a range of self-other relations, where people express their relation to the place by distinguishing themselves from others in various ways (the ‘old and conservative’, the ‘self-interested’, the ‘arrogant city people’), and by connecting their own personal sense of the hill to wider shared stories of the hill and its magnetic attraction, or using its shape to identify their businesses or homes, while for others, the hill is a functional space whose mythical elements are unimportant.

Coultas (2020) explores how the construction of knowledge about the Mabadiliko project through practices of monitoring and evaluation takes place in highly asymmetrical self-other relations which privilege a view of the world required by the donor. The donor ‘view’ is embodied in an inflexible programme design and reporting format, incapable of responding to the experiences of local people that are marked by changeability and which highlight ‘the mess’, multiplicities and complexities of empowering out-of-school girls. Furthermore, the various relationships through which evidence was made were found to erase realities which diverged from the way the intervention designers supposed the world to be.

Writing about the notion of identity projects (Harré, 2012), Marková and Novaes (2020) emphasise how different versions of identity are foregrounded, as a person engages with different others, over time. Cornish (2020) explores how a statement about a case can mean different things to different audiences and can create contrasting self-other relations. A non-resident scholar describing a residential area as deprived and neglected may create an observational or objectifying self-other relation with local residents, but a self-other relation of mutual interest and common reference points with other sociological scholars. Zadeh and Cabra (2020) explore how gender is enacted and thus redefined in different ways through different self-other relations (child–child; child–teacher; child–researcher).

Each of these examples builds up multi-voiced and complex accounts of their cases, rather than ‘flat’, single-perspective accounts of a case with a fixed identity as a ‘case of something’. They do so with the epistemic commitment to understanding the case as a product of and a producer of self-other relations. Such multivoicedness is sought after, not only in a hermeneutic sense, in trying to understand the cases – but also in an ethical sense, in trying to constitute multivoiced situations.

In a context of widespread dissatisfaction with ‘New Public Management’ of the education system in Denmark, Hviid (2020) initiated a series of dialogical experiments with a range of stakeholders, with the explicit goal of facilitating a more multivoiced, responsive and context-sensitive way of organising the day-care system. In the interest of respecting the importance of an ongoing disaster response to local residents, Cornish (2020) advocates engaging multiple audiences and multiple speakers in the construction of the story of a case. And Coultas’ (2020) critical analysis of the colonial violence of misrecognition of lived realities on the part of aid systems stems from a dialogical ethical commitment to recognition and mutuality, against which the dominating nature of the aid system becomes so evident.

‘Complexity’ is widely agreed to be a feature of cases and case studies (e.g. Flyvbjerg, 2001; Morgan, 2014), usually referring to the attention given to the multiple interacting elements of a case and their dependence on a multiple-layered environment. Dialogical case studies prioritise the role of human agency in this complexity, insisting that a case is not composed of multiple physical elements, but composed by humans actively making sense of embodied, interested, socially positioned, agentic self-other dialogues. This starting point, in turn implies our second and third principles, the dynamic and ethical nature of such case studies.

Dynamics

Dialogue necessarily has a temporality inflected with human agency. Given that a dialogue entails a back and forth of response and counter-response, a dialogical study is never a static study of phenomena at a single point in time, but a study of movement and change. Treating temporality at a more macro scale, dialogue is also always situated in a historical context. These temporal dimensions – and importantly, their constitutive role in producing human phenomena – distinguish dialogical case studies from other types of case study.

Temporality is engaged in different ways across the papers of this special issue. Zittoun (2020) and Coultas (2020) both give an important role to the macro-historical context (in their cases, national myths and colonialism, respectively), considering how social-historical ways of knowing are intertwined with people’s contemporary and personal life stories. A more micro-historical perspective, tracking people or issues through different relationships is suggested when Marková and Novaes (2020) draw on Harré’s (2012) conceptualisation of identity projects, in which different identities come to the fore when engaging with different audiences over time. Likewise, Cornish (2020) follows the unfolding of a disaster response over time, as its effects are produced in the interactions between affected residents and responding authority. And Hviid (2020) considers how her research participants act differently as they move out of their workplaces, into her dialogical experiments, and back again.

There is more to dialogical temporality than passive reproduction of history or passive change over time. The mutual interdependence of self-other relations means that dialogical interactions are themselves productive of change. The chain of responses and counter-responses in dialogue is not linear, predictable or controllable, but contingent and dynamic. Dialogue entails difference, and thus tensions, controversies, and counter-positions (Marková, 2020), which are productive of change. Hviid (2020) enacts this approach forcefully, by creating situations designed to allow dialogical engagements, in the interest of provoking self-reflection, authentic interactions, and new ways of being, seeing and acting at work. Taking a different approach, Zadeh and Cabra (2020) put their two cases, located in different times and places, into dialogue, thus using the movement back and forth between the cases to provoke a ‘re-reading’ of each case, and discovery of a common potential in the cases for the role of play. Dialogical single case studies are unlikely to present a single, stable ‘case’, but a case in motion, being crafted by the engagements and tensions produced through asymmetrical self-other relations – within the construction of the case itself, and then in the written case’s journey in a world of readers.

Ethics

If, instead of starting with an isolated or independent individual, who might be separable from ethical relations with other people, a dialogical theory starts with self-other relations, then ethical considerations must also be central to the investigations (Marková, 2016). The primary presence of others calls us as researchers into an ethical engagement with those others, and thus a duty to respect their personhood and their perspectives (Marková et al., 2020). The concreteness of the case demands ethical attention, in the way that, say, a focus on an abstract concept, like ‘mental processes’ or ‘social identity’, does not. For the papers in this special issue, ‘research ethics’ is not a procedure to minimally comply with, or an isolated sub-heading of one’s discussion of ‘methods’, but a concern that is integral to and generative of the whole study.

Writing about chronotopic thinking, Marková and Novaes (2020) give ethical concerns a central role. When our object of study is human sense-making, we cannot avoid questions of ethics, because, in making sense, people evaluate their own and others’ actions, and take and avoid responsibility. In the example cited by Marková and Novaes (2020) of the neonatal intensive care unit, the clinicians’ work is deeply shaped by the ethical requirements of treating a human being as a human being, rather than as a bundle of biological systems, and in the context of multiple ethics-infused self-other relationships between doctors of different statuses and career stages, parents and doctors, and doctors and babies (Brown & Middleton, 2005; Marková & Novaes, 2020).

Both Coultas (2020) and Hviid (2020) concern themselves with I-It relations and I-Thou relations between groups of actors in their fields of study (Buber, 1953; Marková et al., 2020). Coultas (2020) critiques the ways in which organisational communication in the global aid and development sector produces I-It relations between an international nongovernmental organization, and its ‘local’ workers and beneficiaries, as the required reporting formats fail to recognise the concrete specificities of the lives of the Tanzanian people it claimed to help. This misrecognition constitutes I-It instead of I-Thou relations. Hviid’s (2020) case is based on a similar condition of misrecognition in the Danish children’s day-care system, in which pedagogues and managers felt that the management system had gone wrong. Hviid’s analysis of what was wrong identified the dominance of ‘I-It’ attitudes, with children and pedagogues becoming treated as objects of management rather than as subjects. Simple interventions such as wearing a photo of oneself as a child, and speaking and listening from the role of the other were intended to aid a move from I-It relations, to the more ethical I-Thou relations.

All papers in this issue strive to respect the uniqueness and alterity of the people engaged through the case. Zittoun’s (2020) account brings to life the worlds of specific people living under the hill, with their different life stories and personal values and priorities. Cornish (2020) aims to facilitate and hear people’s authorship of their own stories. Zadeh and Cabra (2020) enter the worlds of children through following their moves through the world and playing with them, where the children lead the play and define the play world in their terms. To acknowledge the other as a unique person, one has to acknowledge one’s own personhood. To be active participants in the play, Zadeh and Cabra must bring their own authentic ‘I’ to bear. This presence of ourselves as authors also manifests in the writing styles we have taken up.

Modes of writing

Without having planned for it, or having prescribed a particular writing style for this special issue, across the papers, we have noted a distinctive mode of writing a dialogical single case study, with features that are faithful to dialogical ethical and epistemic assumptions. Four common features of our case study narrative style are evident: situating the researcher as an actor in the field; situating the case in its context; founding the knowledge in concrete, empirical detail; and accepting uncertainties and ambiguities.

Firstly, from a dialogical perspective, each speaker speaks from a situated, embodied point of view, and engages with another situated, concrete interlocutor. There is no ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel, 1986). In writing the cases presented in this special issue, the authors situate themselves very explicitly as actors in the field, among the other actors, exemplified in the use of the authorial ‘I’ rather than claiming a passive or third person position. Using the authorial ‘I’ and identifying the researcher as a part of the knowledge production situation is not unique to dialogical theoretical perspectives, but it is consistent with a dialogical perspective.

Secondly, the cases are all meaningfully situated and contextualised. It matters that Hviid’s study took place in Denmark, in the context of kindergarten education, for example. Her arguments about the dehumanisation of New Public Management in Denmark resonate with those of Coultas about the dehumanisation wrought by logframes in international development in Tanzania – but the specific national and professional contexts matter and work their ways into the practices and discourses of the individual cases. In the wider case studies literature, authors commonly claim that ‘context matters’ and indeed that one of the features of case studies is that often the boundary between a case and its context is not clear (e.g. Yin, 2014). On the other hand, for those uses of case studies which insist that their value, their generalisability, lie in their capacity to speak to an abstract theoretical claim, ‘context’ is a confounder, to be eventually ‘transcended’ by a universalising theoretical statement. For dialogical single case studies, the location of the study in a particular time and place is an intrinsic part of the study.

Thirdly, and relatedly, the case studies are all concrete. It is through the qualitative detail of, for example, a child’s negotiation of a dress with other children and a teacher (Zadeh & Cabra, 2020), or the way a resident designs her home décor to frame an important hill (Zittoun, 2020), that scholarly interests in concepts like gender or myth are made meaningful. It is only in the concrete (not the abstract) that we can work out what objects mean to people or which is the right and ethical course of action (Bakhtin, 1993; Marková & Novaes, 2020; Bakhtin, 1993). The cases matter to the participants, and thus engage their emotions, values and concerns. How they matter to people is a crucial part of the meaning of the case, as the case is animated by the passions and interests of the actors concerned.

Fourthly, it is noteworthy that the studies compiled here allow ambiguities and uncertainties space to exist without a demand to resolve a single answer or finalise what remains uncertain. These papers establish strong arguments, backed up by rich empirical material, but they do so without making grand universal claims or flattening diversity. The premise of Hviid’s (2020) practice research was precisely to disrupt the ‘there is no other way’ assumptions (Koromporos-Athanasiou, Renedo, & McKevitt, 2019) of New Public Management, and to do so required participants to approach uncertainty willingly. In keeping with her assumptions, Hviid does not finish her paper with grand claims about the efficacy of her experiments in disruption, but allows that those disruptions may have produced some small shifts whose significance is an open question. Cornish (2020) allows for multiple interpretations of the problem of community recovery after a catastrophic fire, rather than seeking to offer a singular answer to the problem.

With this discussion of four dimensions, we have sought to identify and concretise what is common to the papers collected here, to draw out the particularities of dialogical case studies, amidst a wider literature of case studies in general.

Towards new questions for re-situating knowledge

While always being situated in a specific context, the case studies presented here also speak to knowledge beyond those specific contexts; they create knowledge which is capable of being re-situated. Yet they do so without creating decontextualized or depersonalised abstractions. If the question is not the traditional one ‘Of what is this a case?’ (Lund, 2014), what is the generalisation question for dialogical single case studies?

Marková and Novaes (2020) draw our attention to alternatives to ‘generalisation’ as means of thinking about what things have in common, by extending in other ways from the root ‘gen’ (meaning family, kind or race). We discuss here the ways that the papers make themselves speak to knowledge more general than their specific case, by (i) engaging with genres, (ii) producing a genealogy or (iii) being generative. Thus, we explore three alternatives to the question ‘of what is this a case?’

These questions are not exhaustive of the ways in which knowledge produced by dialogical case studies may be re-situated, but indicate some of the possibilities. Nor need all dialogical single case studies respond to all of these questions. For each case study, just one of these questions might be particularly pertinent. We illustrate each question with some examples from this Special Issue.

How does the case participate in epistemic or narrative genres?

Genres refer to recognisable patterns of relationships and actions, narrated with a distinct style, with a network of conceptual foci and concerns, for example, a Bildungsroman style of personal development and responsibility, or an account of dynamics of routines versus change (Marková & Novaes, 2020). One starting point for analysis of a case is to ask what its repeating patterns are: is this a story of trust/distrust dynamics, or a story of misrecognition and recognition, or one of routines and changes? Marková and Novaes (2020) elaborate this way of thinking about generalisation, through the discussion of chronotope. A chronotope is a particular kind of time-space dynamic characterising the human relations and interactions that occur in a particular situation. Chronotopic thinking links individual cases to related cases through considering how dialogical concepts (used in other cases told through the same chronotope) take on specific forms in new situations. By participating in a particular genre, a dialogical case study gives a specific concrete form (caseness) to more widely used dialogical concepts, and thus becomes networked with a genre of other studies that use those concepts and offer explanations of a particular kind. The case communicates to other scholars by participating in genres in which they also participate (Cornish, 2020).

This kind of re-situation of case knowledge – in relation to a genre – is analogous to the ‘analytical generalisation’ or ‘generalising to theory’ (Yin, 2014) that is well established in case study research, often led by the question ‘of what is this a case?’ (Lund, 2014). However, from a dialogical point of view, the implementation of ‘analytical generalisation’ in practice tends to privilege the abstract concept (e.g. a mental process or a social identity or a political trend), treating it almost as a Platonic genus or category of things, of which the focal case is a mere imperfect instance. A dialogical perspective gives more agency to the case and privileges the concrete. As Zittoun (2017) articulates it, dialogical treatment of a case study assembles a background of elements, against which some trouble, or surprise, for a theory may arise. The theoretical genre is common (e.g. a story of institutional inertia or of interpersonal distrust), so readers can recognise and engage with that story, but the specificities are just as important as what is common, and those specificities provoke a new articulation. Another way is to ask what the case teaches us about dialogical concepts through their examination in a specific context?

Using a specific case of people making sense of living under a historic hill, Zittoun (2020) develops a methodology for doing ‘regional case studies’. This methodology constitutes the case as a participant in a genre of studies of personal sense-making in socio-historical context, referring to shared concepts such as proximal and distal spheres of experience, and ontogenesis/sociogenesis.

Coultas (2020) identifies communicative patterns in the monitoring of international aid, which are characterised by asymmetrical power relations and thus systematic misrecognition of the situated constraints and agency of local-level actors. By exploring how such misrecognition entails both self-silencing on the part of the local actors, and the erasure of possible disruptions on the part of managers or donors, this paper participates in shared discussions of the dynamics of non-listening and the endurance of colonial relations in aid.

Finally, Hviid (2020) investigates ways in which prompting dialogues may lead to personal development and change among pedagogues and managers who have been stuck in a bureaucratic relation. She discovers importance of the experience of uncertainty about ‘who I am’ and ‘what I should do’. This experience was both a deep challenge, but also a route to change.

How does the case contribute to a genealogy?

The second and third ways of generalising focus on the temporal location of the case in a developing history and future and its contribution to that history or that future. A genealogy is an account unpicking the history of how a situation arrived at its current formation, accounting for the present with reference to the evolving process which led here. Cases can be used dialogically to explore transmission, stasis, and change over time, as a bundle of events within a longer history. Cases can be networked historically in a chain of events and gain a wider significance through their role in understanding that unfolding chain of events.

Zittoun explores how personal life-stories (of a hill) are entwined with geological, political and social history. To understand the contemporary meaning of a hill requires knowledge of its representation in history books and family stories. By historicising the present, the case of the hill becomes a part of a genealogy of the hill.

Coultas situates the specific details of contemporary knowledge practices in international aid in the historical context of colonialism, drawing out continuities over time and embedding her case in a long and distinctive history of violent misrecognition.

And Cornish tracks the evolving meaning of a disaster to local residents over time, to make sense of levels of residents’ anger and authorities’ abjection which might seem puzzling taken out of historical context. Situating the present both in a long history of authority–community relations, and evolving post-disaster responses and counter-responses, allows a genealogy of the local sense of outrage, abandonment, accusation, opposition, and of the psychological sense of time unfolding in the aftermath, in fits and starts, in periods of intense activity and periods of inaction.

In what ways is the case generative?

The term ‘generalisation’ often implies that a finding will be replicated in another setting. Instead of looking for more of the same, this third question about generativity asks about how the case stimulates or generates something new (see also Zittoun, 2017). From a dialogical point of view, we would not expect knowledge to ‘generalise’, unaltered, from one place to another. A new case is a part of an evolving dialogue, it is a new answer to a call from the past, and it calls out new responses in the next reader (Cornish, 2020; Zadeh & Cabra, 2020).

Hviid’s (2020) paper is an example of a form of research intended to be generative. Her practice-research generates experience of some dialogical experiments and their potential in producing relational and cultural changes to pedagogical organisation and practice. This experience shows that ‘this can be done’, ‘this could be done elsewhere, with sensitive adaptation to context’, not ‘this is a general process that can be replicated’. The practice-research does not make a general claim about whether such dialogical experiments ‘work’ in general or not. It offers practices, rooted in theoretical and practical knowledge, with potential to generate new applications in new contexts.

A well-written case, illuminating self-other relations in a historical context, and addressing its audiences by connecting the case with common concerns, Cornish (2020) argues, generates practical wisdom in its readers. Reading Hviid’s case carefully, in the light of one’s own theoretical and experiential knowledge, builds one’s fluid expertise in how interpersonal interactions unfold under different institutional conditions and how change is resisted or permitted. The growth of that expertise generates new adaptive responses to new situations.

Within their paper, Zadeh and Cabra (2020) show this potential generativity between cases, by putting two studies from different places and times into dialogue with each other, thereby generating new insights and observations for both studies, and potential insights for methods. Both studies address gender in children’s development and explore common processes of how its enactment takes place through social interaction. Cabra’s study of gender differentiation enables the authors to question the focus on ‘gender social identities’ and their relation to sexuality – characteristic of the time Lloyd and Duveen’s (1992) earlier research was produced. The movement to thinking about gender in terms of differentiation and ‘doing’ gender allows the authors to identify play as a profoundly ethical way of engaging with young children in both cases. Zadeh and Cabra (2020) show that a new case is a new answer to a call from the past (Cornish, 2020) but also poses new questions to past answers.

Towards a (dialogical) methodology for single case studies

The papers collected in this special issue employ distinctively dialogical methodological positions towards single case studies and in this concluding paper, we have sought to make explicit that developing methodology. We suggest that the concepts and questions outlined here make contributions to the concerns of case study researchers more broadly, not only those who take up theoretical positions specifically labelled as ‘dialogical’. Critiques of the concrete-abstract and particular-general dualisms (e.g. Flyvbjerg, 2001) and of the restrictive nature of the demand for ‘generalisation’ (e.g. Morgan, 2014) are consistent themes in the case study literature. In this Special Issue, we have sought to offer a positive, dialogically informed response to those critiques. What is distinct about this Special Issue is that a dialogical perspective enlivens the case with attention to the mutuality of self-other interdependencies – and the communicative relations, human agency, intentions, motives, desires, dynamics and ethics that follow from those interdependencies. This approach then is compatible with other sociocultural, psychosocial, and biographical traditions which recognise meaningful mutual orientation as a core principle in their case studies. We intend that the four dimensions of the primacy of self-other interdependencies, dynamics, ethics, and modes of writing may provide starting points for future dialogical case study researchers to prepare, reflect on, and describe the nature of their case study.

Turning to the issue of re-situating knowledge, we then explored alternatives to the traditional question ‘of what is this a case?’ We posed three alternative questions, about genre, genealogy, and generativity, which are different ways of making case studies matter. They are not mutually exclusive but inter-related. Cases may speak to all of those questions at once. Nor are they exhaustive – there may be other ways in which dialogical case studies make themselves matter. The choice of which question to use depends on the character of a particular case and the kinds of claims to which it lends itself. We do not claim universality for the methodology proposed in this paper, but we hope it might be generative.