Silence as a Source of Information in Qualitative Research

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities of silence as a methodologically useful tool. Employing a feminist perspective to qualitative research as its starting point and its relationship with ‘voice’ this paper explores the potential of capturing meaning beyond words, moving beyond the rigid categories of traditional practices in qualitative research, and becoming attentive to presence in absence. It discusses the complexity of silence, presenting it as a continuum rather than an opposite of speech. This paper emanates from two separate research studies: one which explored the professional lives of a cohort of Irish male primary teachers and the other that examined relationship and sexuality education (RSE) in Irish primary schools. Along with a lingering historical silence that surrounds sexualities and gender in the Irish curriculum, silence was pervasive in both research studies, revealing itself in different ways. Drawing upon feminist theories that advance the belief that language creates the world rather than mirrors it, and that dominant agendas can be disrupted by documenting untold stories, this paper illustrates how alternative ways of meaning-making and knowing can be opened up. This paper explores the disruptions and irruptions to meaning-making triggered by silence using a framework that conceptualises silence. Theories of power are also employed to aid the exploration of two types of silence: acquiescent and defensive. It is not the intention of this paper to uncover hidden meanings, as cultural and material practices are already impressions. Instead, this paper highlights silence as a transgressive source of information and seeks to uncover how certain knowledge and practices become legitimised and normalised through silence. This paper aims to examine an ontological shift from what silence is to what silence is achieving, and to reinforce the significant link between knowledge, power and methodology.

Exploring Silence in Qualitative Research

Voice, and the art of active listening, have long been fundamental to feminist practices of consciousness-raising and theory building (DeVault & Gross, 2007; Jackson & Mazzei, 2009; Luke, 1994). The privileging of voice in traditional qualitative research assumes that voice reflects meaning that can be recorded and categorised as data. Presenting overlooked voices was, and remains, a feminist response to the rigid categories of humanisms voiceless, statistical and assumed ‘neutral’ stance. This has led to efforts in feminist and other critical research frameworks to ‘give’ voice to others, particularly those who have been marginalised, and to valorise the authenticity of voice in qualitative research. Representing others has not been straightforward, however, with some noting that in the hope of ‘giving voice’ to those who have been voiceless, researchers are ‘implicated in the process of speaking for others’ even ‘potentially silencing them’ (Kirsch, 1999, p. 46). Disrupting traditional ways of knowing and the way in which power operates highlights the significant link between knowledge, power and methodology. Inspired by critical feminist researchers who call for an ontological shift from what silence is to what silence is doing (see, for example, Jackson & Mazzei, 2009; Lather, 1991; Luke, 1994; MacLure, 2009; St. Pierre, 2009), this paper considers methodological practices that capture meaning beyond words and advances the potential of silence in research.

The epistemological, ontological and methodological concerns of feminist research are rooted in struggle. Within research, this struggle manifests in challenging knowledge that appears to include through exclusion. An example of this is in assuming that when we speak of the generic term men, we also mean women for what must be true for dominant groups must also be true for all others (Hesse-Biber & Piatelli, 2007). In assuming that when we speak of language, we include all that is not said, for what must be true in all that is ‘said’ must also be true for all that is unsaid. To apply this thinking to methodology requires being attentive to presence within an absence. Asking new questions of theory and praxis is also significant for research fields beyond feminism and narrative research. For instance, in visual research, the message of a picture is determined by its frame, and consequently also by what it is not showing or keeping silent (Schweiger & Tomiak, 2022). As many scholars agree and as Hesse-Biber and Piatelli (2007) point out, ‘…there is not one way, but many ways of knowing’ (p. 503). This is further supported by Code (2008) who states that ways of knowing within qualitative research ‘do not hold uniformly across the epistemic terrain’ (p. 295). Many feminist scholars have focused on silence as an integral part of meaning making. Whilst one of the most ambiguous of linguistic forms, silence is where power enters a narrative. As part of a broader discussion on listening, voice and representation, silence has been considered to be at the boundary of speech; a speech act that does not easily reflect meaning nor can easily be recorded or categorised as data. Against this backdrop, there has been no attempt to interrogate silences within the context of relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in Ireland. Silence within RSE has yet to be considered as an entry point for multiple forms of power to play out. As noted by Mason and Sayner (2018), considering multiple silences in motion is particularly useful for delineating different elements of silence: silence at an individual level and at an institutional level; silence as a form of prosocial behaviour, as resignation, and as fear. This paper seeks to explore silence as socially constructed and as offering rich new insights in knowledge building that may explain lingering silences in sexuality education in Ireland.

The Complexity of Silence

Understanding silence is nuanced. Silences can be understood as beneficial and a welcome relief from a busy day. In poetry, silences can be eloquent and impactful. Similar in style, silences can have theatrical power, as evidenced in silent vigils and minutes of silence (Schweiger & Tomiak, 2022) and in John Cage’s famous 4 minutes and 33 seconds piano composition (1952) (see, for instance, Cooke & Dingli, 2019). Scholars in the academic discipline of communication have long understood silence to be on a continuum of speech. Jaworski (1992) explains how one can decide to remain meaningfully silent, which allows those listening to come up with an interpretation of this silence. Others consider silence to be the opposite of speaking out and has traditionally been understood as a sign of avoidance, powerlessness, weakness or shame. Speaking out, by contrast, is commonly accepted as a powerful political move. Equally, silence, too, has a power that is clearly evidenced when someone who is expected to speak remains silent. The power of silence can further be utilised as a form of resistance that enables exclusionary and inexcusable practices. Houston and Kramarae (1991) note that silencing is used ‘to isolate people disempowered by their gender, race, and class…’ (p. 388). For instance, the real and symbolic silencing of women is evident across philosophical, literary, legal, popular cultural, and social science discourses (Luke, 1994). Adrienne Rich (1978, p. 18) has named some of the tragic and destructive forms of silencing that women experience such as denial and omissions. These forms of silence have occurred through institutionalised and legislated processes. Marriage Bars, a legal requirement for women working in certain occupations to leave that job upon marriage, were not unusual internationally. As noted by English legal theorist Sir William Blackstone, and cited in Gottfried (2013, p. 49), ‘…the very being and legal existence’ of women was ‘suspended during marriage’. Women were not considered speaking subjects; were silenced in the public sphere and exiled to the private sphere. In a research context, silence is not obvious and regularly runs the risk of not being heard. For this reason, feminist researchers are keenly aware that listening to silence is a skill that requires a shift in thinking. This is particularly true of the features of speech that reside ‘at the boundary’ of language such as silence, as MacLure (2009) notes. A pivot is required as researchers tend to be bound up by the language of humanism (Butler, 1995) and deeply entrenched in the metaphysical of presence (St. Pierre, 2009). Simply put, seeing is believing and we come to know the world and ourselves under a description. This leads to understandings of silence as a void. From this perspective, silence is everything that voice is not and is often erased from the meaning-making process. This paper understands silence as a speech act that speaks, as Ehrenhaus (1988) phrases it, that should be understood as ‘a complex and rich social space’ (Vinitzky-Seroussi & Teeger, 2010, p. 1104). This paper continues with an exploration of how the researcher’s positionality and silences inform the research process from design through to representation.

Researcher Positionality and Silence

Researcher positionality, the worldview and position that a researcher adopts about research and its context, is a core aspect of inquiry (Reich, 2021). The researcher’s beliefs, values, frames of reference and interests involve ‘a complex relationship between us as individuals, our communities and the cultures of which we are a part.’ (Weiner, 1994, p. 10). Lather (1991: xvii) draws attention to this when stating that researcher positionality ‘shapes our rhetoric and practice’. Haraway (1988) famously stated that there is no view from nowhere, which further underscores the researcher as a variable in the research and meaning-making process. Researcher positioning includes characteristics such as age, bias, beliefs, gender, race, personal experiences (Berger, 2013) and are informed by culture, history, patriarchy and society, among others. It manifests as an entanglement that facilitates the researcher in silencing themselves and their participants in subtle and unique ways. As a white Irish female researcher, I was silenced by a stigma, whether real or perceived, that accompanies researching sex and sexuality (Ryan-Flood & Gill, 2010). A strong sense of moral etiquette governs issues of sex and sexuality in general (Moore, 2010), and particularly in Ireland where education is heavily influenced by denominational ethics and ideals (Fahie, 2017). Collectively, this informed how I designed the research studies from the choice of questions asked to data analyses and to representation decisions I made. There is an additional complex interplay of expectations, and of sexual and gender ideologies in education (Clancy & O’Sullivan, 2020) that lay out a limited range of appropriate and legitimate feminine and masculine sexual behaviours, contexts and goals (Grose et al., 2013). I felt this strongly when asking male teachers questions related to sex and sexuality. I omitted questions I would have liked to have asked teachers in both studies but declined. This may be due to the broader social context of patriarchy that unfolds, through traditional sexual scripts and gender ideology, as masculine superiority and agency and feminine passivity (Grose et al., 2013). Building on this point, my positionality was as an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’ in both research studies. This is relevant, as noted by many feminist methodologists including Ribbens and Edwards (1998), Harding (1991), Hesse-Biber (2014), Lather and Smithies (1997) and Jackson and Mazzei (2012), as it plays a pivotal role in informing the research design. I was ‘within’ as I am part of the same academic world as the teachers in the study. Yet we inhabit distinct roles in that world: Administrative Principals, Assistant Principal, substitute teacher, a retired teacher, and a third-level education researcher. We differ from one another in terms of age, gender, and sexualities that collectively place me as an outsider of that world. The interplay of gender, moral etiquette, and dominant sexual ideologies in education impact who is heard and who is silenced through research design, questions posed, analysis and representation.

The researchers’ positionality, the researcher-researched relationship, the complexity of voice and the politics of representation have long been central issues in feminist inquiry and theorised by feminist researchers such as DeVault and Gross (2007); Haraway (1988); Hesse-Biber (2014); and Lather (1991). On the one hand, we are never just researchers just doing research (Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2023). On the other hand, all researchers, not only those who research sex and sexualities, enter the field as sexual as well as gendered beings. Sanchez Taylor and O’Connell Davidson (2010) note that dwelling on the ultimately unknowable effects of a researcher’s social identity seems to somewhat downplay the skills involved in conducting research. Butler (1995) observes that we do not know all the reasons that operate on us. Similarly, Harding (2007) believes that we are never able to understand what we are doing since we lack the historical long view and the source of our collective fears, interests, preferences and desires. Butler (1995, p. 116) speaks of ‘a subject with a history’. Truth is not something the researcher has but is something that is based upon the researcher’s history and relationship with the world. These entanglements and conundrums are worthy of continued interrogation as they inform researcher positionality, prompting researchers to be more reflective, self-critical, and sensitive in interactions with participants and in considering what gets heard and what remains silenced.

Research Design Overview

This paper draws on the silences that emerged from two separate research studies carried out in different years with different research questions and objectives. The first study explored the professional lives of a cohort of male primary school teachers in Ireland (O’Keeffe, 2022; 2018). The second study spoke with teachers and sought to support teachers’ professional learning in the curricular subject called Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) in order to enhance overall pedagogy in that subject area (O'Keeffe & Kennon, 2024). Both research designs employed a feminist episteme-ontological approach and a Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodological approach. Both studies were analysed separately. Themes surfaced separately in each study. The overlap of silence then emerged. A voice-centred relational method of data analysis (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998) was used when analysing both studies. This method of data analysis is based on The Listening Guide, or Listening Method, developed by Carol Gilligan (1982). This approach to analysis places an emphasis on listening, reading the data four times, each time with a different focus. This disallows a focus on macro coding. It recognises the centrality of relationships, and that natural and cultural experiences are bound up in larger relational dynamics. Overall, this method of data analysis is concerned with the processes of reflection and decision making. A feminist episteme-ontological orientation was takento disrupt traditional ways of knowing through its commitment to studying the ‘lived experiences’ of gender (Pillow & Mayo, 2007, p. 161). Feminism places the personal being at the centre of one’s enquiry, creating rich new meanings and highlighting concerns of boundaries, identities, tensions and omissions in stories that are recalled and retold. Taking a feminist approach means that research studies do not seek to uncover generalizable characteristics to draw conclusions about the larger population. Instead, the most information-rich cases are selected to enable further investigation. Ethical approval was obtained from two separate university ethic committees as the research took place separately and in different years. Informed consent was requested and obtained from all participants. No overtly identifying information was requested of participants, strict confidentiality was observed throughout each discussion and the limits of confidentiality were also explained. Each study will be briefly explained in more detail below. They are presented in the chronological order that they took place.

Research with Male Primary Teachers

This study sought to explore the lived experience of male primary teachers (O’Keeffe, 2022). It was implemented through a contextual and interactive approach to knowledge-building. The research design was qualitative in nature and incorporated many sources of data collection such as interviews, field notes and post interview researcher reflections. This study consisted of three interconnected yet distinct rounds of interviews. The categorizing of data collection into three phases enabled methodological self-reflection and interactive relationships to develop between researcher and researched (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011; Rapley, 2011). As research approaches inherently reflect ‘our beliefs about the world we live in and want to live in’ (Lather, 1991, p. 51), an important feature of the research design was the participants’ response to preliminary descriptions of the data.

Research with Teachers

This study was a collaborative project between academics and primary teachers in an urban Irish primary school (O'Keeffe & Kennon, 2024). It involved the co-construction of a new school framework in Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) and aimed to support, through dialogue and the co-construction of knowledge, teachers’ confidence and competence in the provision of Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE). A survey was given to all staff members. A number of staff members self-selected to take part in two rounds of focus group discussions. Those who partook in the focus group discussions were diverse in age, gender, and years of teaching experience. They also varied in terms of the class or grade that they taught. The focus groups were asked questions such as, are there any particular areas in RSE that you have decided not to address with your class? Do you think that the school has any weakness and/or gaps in teaching RSE? Do you have any suggestions for how to enhance the school’s teaching of RSE? Findings were presented to all staff and later informed policy updates in relation to RSE provision in that school.

Conceptual Framework

Van Dyne et al.’s (2003) conceptual framework emanates from an exploration into the dynamics of voice and silence in organisations that acknowledges and supports the multidimensional nature of both. Van Dyne et al.’s (2003) framework explores silence using three distinct sub-categories that distinguish the different dimensions of silence. They are acquiescent, defensive, and prosocial silence. The uniqueness of this conceptual framework lies in its focus on the motives behind each silence. The framework illustrates that intentionally withholding information, opinions and ideas are not necessarily the absence of voice but may indicate resignation, fear, or cooperation. The framework describes three forms of silence: acquiescent, defensive and prosocial. Acquiescent silence is understood as purposeful inactive behaviour as an employee believes that speaking up is pointless or they may consider themselves incapable of speaking up due to low self-efficacy assessments. Silence here is the result of resignation. Defensive silence is underscored by personal fear that, in this case, acts as a form of self-protection. Prosocial silence is motivated by concern for others and is understood to be the withholding of ideas, thoughts, information and/or opinions with the primary intention of benefiting someone or something, be that a co-worker or an organisation. Acquiescent and Defensive silence are discussed in further detail in the Findings section.

Encountering Silence

Primary teaching has traditionally been framed by commonly held assumptions about gender. These assumptions have ‘sometimes been articulated but more often left silent’ (Bryson, 2014, p. 123; Weiler & Middleton, 1999, p. 2), rendering them even more difficult to address. Exploring the lives of a cohort of Irish male primary school teachers illustrated how silent assumptions have had a strong impact on male primary teachers’ daily lives and those considering teaching as a career. Silent assumptions include, among others, the correlations between men and bodies; men and care; men and children, and men and work. An association between the feminine environment and the male body indicates something unusual or strange in our mind’s eye. This is largely due to a taken-for-granted relationship between male bodies and masculinities. If we consider men’s bodies and destructive work to be ‘proof of the toughness of the work and the worker’ (Connell, 1995, p. 36) then feminine conduct combined with a male body ‘is felt to be anomalous or transgressive’ (Connell, 2000, p. 12). Nevertheless, discussions about men, sexuality and children remain ‘cloaked in silence’ (King, 1998, p. 119). Silencing certain perspectives or unwanted elements of sex and sexuality facilitates shame in operating as a regulating emotion that serves to conceal and expel (Gray, 2006). Shame is a public emotion, an affective reaction, that follows public disapproval of a perceived shortcoming.

Silence also emerged when exploring the area of relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in Irish primary schools. Along with the lingering historical silence that surrounds sexualities in the Irish curriculum, silence hung in the air when I spoke with teachers. Teachers noted feeling silenced when teaching RSE and in answering pupils’ related questions. Teachers noted the absence or ‘silence’ in the curriculum in relation to inclusivity. Silence was disrupting and irrupting the process of knowledge production as I knew it. Coming up against a metaphorical brick wall was frustrating and tiring, for them as practitioners and for me as a researcher. At first, I understood silence as a failure on my part, an oversight in the research design and a burden that I had no solution to. Language has been accepted as ‘the stuff of reality’ and the ‘mediating function between knower and known’ (Barad, 2007, p. 133) and so I was tempted to abandon the ‘thin’ data this research area was yielding. Yet, I knew that this absence, as I understood it then, conveyed a powerful message. Lather (2010, p. 94) considers the merger of knower and known to be the ‘grok’, an informal verb meaning intuitive understanding, that makes ‘an entangled understanding’ that goes ‘beyond language’. I was intrigued as to how best to capture the complexities of the unspoken within the limits of qualitative research. Because of the significance of listening to and hearing the perspectives of those who have traditionally been ignored, marginalised and silenced in research, feminist researchers are attentive to gaps, to focusing on moments when speech seems to faulter and on catching unspoken meanings in exchanges (For more, see DeVault & Gross, 2007). Conceptualising silence as having functional value is consistent with Van Dyne et al.’s (2003) framework that suggests that silence and voice should not be viewed as polar opposites.

Findings

The findings presented here explore what silence is saying and doing from two vantage points: acquiescent and defensive silences. It draws on the conversations that took place during individual interviews with Irish male primary teachers in one study, and with teacher focus group discussions in the second separate research study with teachers about Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) provision. The findings are merged thematically and presented using Van Dyne et al.’s (2003) framework. This paper explores silence using two types of silence from this framework: acquiescent and defensive. Foucault’s theories (1977; 2006) coupled with Deleuze and Guattri (1992) are used as aids to think about what was not being said, and to uncover power at play. Foucault’s description of power (1977) and ‘microprocess’, which are understood here as the everyday details of normal working life that appear neutral and taken for-granted (Martin & Meyerson, 1998), are referred to throughout the findings section. In doing so, this troubles the enduring presence of silence and reveals how it infiltrates ways of being and doing, in human and non-human entities. A Deleuzian lens assists in understanding how silence operates, who it operates for, and how it is maintained. A pivotal message throughout the findings discussion is that silence is not located within any one place. It emerges in many forms from many places and is socially constructed and maintained through social interactions.

Theme 1

Acquiescent Silence: Resignation and the Feeling of Being Unable to Make a Difference

Research with Teachers

It is generally accepted that access to quality sexuality education is a basic right for children and young people and that sexuality education supports the fulfilment of a wide range of children’s rights, from health and wellbeing, to protection, participation, identity and equality (Bourke et al., 2022). Yet, it remains frustratingly common for inconsistent and inadequate approaches to sexuality education to continue from initial teacher education institutes (Maunsell et al., 2021; O’Brien et al., 2020) to provision in schools (NCCA, 2019). Curvino and Fischer (2014) put forward an interesting theory that the right to sexuality education does not exist as neither treaty nor custom, which are the two means by which human rights are created. This silence means an agreed meaning of comprehensive sexuality education does not exist. Harden (2014) reminds us that sexuality is viewed as morally wrong, and within a ‘risk framework, adolescent sex is considered ‘inherently deviant behavior’ (p. 455), ‘morally wrong’ and ‘socially problematic’ (p. 456). From a risk perspective, sex is put forward from a traditional sexual ethic, in which sex is inextricably linked to procreation. In this study, teachers highlighted the fact that the ‘S’, which represents sexuality in the acronym RSE, is absent in RSE provision and pedagogy. The following excerpt from a focus group discussion brings this to life.

Teacher C: It's interesting you say sexuality. And I'm like, what? What does that even mean? Because in terms of what we teach …it’s not sexuality… its reproduction. How babies are made. Full stop. So, in terms of sexuality…

Teacher A: It doesn't go any further [than reproduction].

Teacher A: There’s no consent.

Teacher C: Consent. There's no, like pleasure. There's no, none of that.

The teachers detailed the limits and constraints on them when teaching content on sex and sexuality in Irish primary schools. Reflecting on this, one teacher wondered how you can teach an absence. Silencing sexuality through omission and invisibility in the Irish RSE curriculum can be understood using Foucault’s (1977) theory on discourse. Discourse, Foucault (1977, p. 112) states is ‘the vehicle of the law: the constant principle of universal recoding’. Foucault employed the term ‘discourse’ to convey a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. He notes that discourse is distinctly material in effect, and in reference to sexuality he noted that the discursive practice of sexuality is ‘invested … in a system of prohibitions and values’ (Foucault, 2006, p. 213). Power is inherent in the institutional practices and language we expect and accept as neutral. The dispersion of power that operates in a widespread and continuous way, ‘down to the finest grain of the social body’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 80) is the universal recoding that Foucault refers to. It is rendered invisible due to its seemingly natural occurrence. Power gets its force precisely because it is dispersed, its working is made invisible by the taken for-granted and neutral. Children’s access to sexuality education is required to build competency and resilience skills as well as to understand one’s own sexual subjectivity. Yet, sex and sexuality have been silenced in the Irish RSE curriculum and teachers feel powerless and unable to assist children in making informed choices.

Teacher D: Our hands, I would feel, are quite tied.

Teacher B: Our hands are completely tied. Especially at the senior end.

Teachers know that they are not meeting the needs of all students with some teachers believing that all needs cannot be met in any subject area. Without wanting to pin down what silence might mean, as Jackson and Mazzei (2012, p. 95) point out or suggesting that all silences are desiring silences (p. 95), it is useful to question the data in relation to what are the silences producing? What power relations are they expressing? How are they doing this? Deleuze and the concept of desire is a useful philosophical stance to consider how desire functions to maintain sameness and advantage through the production of silence. Desire, according to Deleuze and Guattri (1992), is a force and a becoming, rather than a characteristic of someone. Deleuze and the concept of desire adds layers of possibility in theorising the relationship between silence and productivity. Desire, in this instance, can be seen to be producing an effect, privileging certain possibilities and worldviews. Language (Deleuze & Guattri, 1992) is ‘not to be believed but to be obeyed’ and to ‘compel obedience’ (p. 76). The silence of teachers is, in this case, a form of obedience, which runs parallel to Donnelly’s (2019) interpretation of power as flowing culturally, historically and institutionally demanding obedience among its participants. The conformity among teachers that allows shortcomings to prevail under the guise of ‘the way things are’, as one teacher pointed out, is what Foucault (1977) termed the perfection of power, which is to make the actual exercise of power unnecessary. Power is effective due to its distribution in bodies, surfaces, lights and gazes combining to form an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produces homogeneous effects of power (p. 202).

Theme 2

Defensive Silence: Fear and the Feeling of Risk

Research with Male Primary Teachers

Gender relations involve the ‘structuring of social practice around sex and sexuality’ (Connell, 1987, p. 245). This is clearly illustrated when adult behaviours, such as patting and hugging, are deemed feminine until they are performed by men. Then they are marked as ‘conspicuous’ (King, 1998, p. 137). ‘There is something about the combination of children and men and a caring environment which is seen … as outlandish to the point of being a risk’ (Cameron et al., 1999, p. 132, as cited in Skelton, 2001, p. 158). As a result, part of the construction of male teacher identities is an awareness of how others perceive male teachers and care (King, 1998, p. 139). In the study that explored male teachers’ daily lives, male teachers expressed their fears of feeling at risk. Both teachers refer to feelings of risk that make them ‘conscious’ of how others perceive them. They revealed that they often felt like they were being ‘watched’, by everyone and by no one, at once. Employing Foucault’s understanding of power (1977), whereby power transcends human and non-human bodies, could be useful to describe this distant all-seeing gaze that is without a definite source.

Teacher D: ‘What I would always be conscious of is being left with one or two [pupils] in the evenings at home time. I try to leave all the doors open that I can.’

Teacher N: ‘Sometimes when the sun comes in, I am very slow to put down the blinds. I feel you have to make sure that the place is visible at all times and that people can see in, you know?’

The complicated ways in which gender is constructed and embedded in work norms and practices have taught male teachers to silently monitor and check their behaviour. When men work within an environment of care and exhibit caring and emotional attributes, ‘these qualities are not consonant with dominant definitions of masculinities’ (Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2003, p. 27). Consequently, men appear out of place when performing work contradicting gender-stereotypical expectations. This induces a ‘state of conscious and permanent visibility’ that ensures an ‘automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 201). When men do not correspond to the perceptions of occupational masculinities, silent cultural assumptions regarding heterosexuality are informed by ‘ordinary and academic discourses on sexuality’ (Butler, 1999, p. xxi). It is further produced and reinforced in the history of care and children, whereby attributions of care have tended to shape or have been shaped by public perceptions of care. In this way, silence codes and recodes collective memory.

Research with Teachers

Teachers in this study expressed their fears of feeling at risk when describing the silence that surrounds sexualities in the Irish curriculum. Teachers feel unprotected and exposed if a child asks a question that is not referenced in the curriculum, which silences the teacher and leaves the child’s question unanswered.

Teacher C: It’s difficult as a teacher because there are certain things that aren’t in the curriculum. And then when the children ask us questions … because it’s not on the curriculum you don’t know how protected you [the teacher] are to answer some questions.

Teacher B: You just have to be very careful.

Teacher A: Really careful, yeah, and you don’t want to open yourself up to, ‘Why did you bring up that conversation when it’s not on the curriculum?’

These accounts bring teacher agency into question. A Foucauldian reading of agency (Foucault, 1977) considers the individual to be a social construction rather than an autonomous agent. An autonomous person would be able to, in principle, reason, act and adopt beliefs all outside social contexts (Bevir, 1999). Society, Bevir (1999) states, defines the subject, ‘conceived in terms of both the norms by which we try to live and the techniques by which we try to ensure we do so.’ (p. 66). This is the efficiency of power, meaning that it is so cunning it renders itself unnecessary. It is important to consider organisational climate here and how that affects employee decision making (Edwards et al., 2009). In a strong climate of silence, decisions may involve feelings of guilt and anger whereby employees are ‘more concerned about protecting themselves and minimising the possibility of becoming a target of retaliation.’ (p. 101). When considered as a speech act, silence joins psyche and culture. Given this fuller understanding of silence allows it to act as a prerequisite for dialogue and community cohesion. This allows silence to be unveiled in a research narrative, to pave a path forward, and to be put to work in uncovering new directions, new discussions and new possibilities for change.

Discussion

Silence and the Politics of Knowledge

Given that the spoken word is the primary currency of social interactions (Brinsfield et al., 2009), and that credibility issues are built upon questions about who is speaking, language has been accepted as ‘the stuff of reality’ and the ‘mediating function between knower and known’ (Barad, 2007, p. 133). Classic modes of creating and conceptualising knowledge in the social sciences have emerged from a positivist epistemological perspective. This is because the social sciences, being more subjective and ‘soft’, followed the natural science model, considered objective and ‘hard’, to gain credibility (Hesse-Biber et al., 2004). The fundamental belief system, or epistemology, guiding positivism follows a deductive model whereby hypotheses are formulated and then tested, and assumes that knowledge must be acquired in an objective and value-free manner. Positivism believes that there is one objective reality, or truth, lying out there to be discovered through scientific method (Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2007). The social world is believed to be made up of ‘social facts’ that could be studied in the same way as ‘natural’ facts. In this manner, positivism relied almost exclusively on quantitative methods until the 1960s (Letherby, 2003). In an effort to move from a focus on found worlds to constructed worlds, emphasis was placed on the role of language in the construction of this knowledge (Rorty, 1967, as cited in Lather, 2004, p. 207). Running parallel to this is the belief that language and knowledge are social constructions that women (Belenky et al., 1986) and other marginalised groups (Goldberg et al., 1996) have different relations to. From this perspective, language is a figuration of the world rather than a medium of it (Barad, 2007); language does not mirror the world, it creates it. This allows for alternative ways of meaning-making and knowing to be opened up. Documenting what issues and stories are not spoken is vital when working within and against hegemonic power structures ensuring the disruption of prevailing voices and dominant agendas. Power is mediated through representation (Goodchild, 1996), which renders silence a transgressive source of information once restricted notions of data was removed (Mazzei, 2003, p. 357). Interrupting ‘sameness’ and cutting into the centre to see what newness might be triggered (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 86) means considering silence as a mechanism to maintain privilege, power and the status quo. Capturing silence in this way suggests producing knowledge differently. To do this requires thinkingmethodologically and philosophically so that research, data and theory can be pushed ‘to its exhaustion’ in order to expand and distort previous ways of knowing (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 7).

Silence is one of the features of speech that reside at the boundaries, along with laughter, pauses, and hesitations, that have been understood to be too messy to produce a clear linear narrative in research writing. Hence, silence often remains an unexamined and overlooked concept in research (Schweiger & Tomiak, 2022). When not taken seriously and removed from the writing process, silence leads to misrepresentations (Kirsch, 1999). Hearing silence as meaning-less, as a non-value or a non-existence means a loss in research authenticity. Many feminist scholars have focused on silence as an integral part of meaning-making. While not a speech act, silence is a social space between presence and absence. Pivoting from an understanding of silence as an absence to considering it as a productive force that maintains and holds space for something and/or someone is key to avoiding the ‘representational trap’ of a tidy, linear narrative that is confident in producing the ‘truth’ about what participants ‘mean’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). If silence continues to be considered as everything voice is not then it will always be compared to ‘an impossibly full, yet strangely empty, idealised form of speech’ (St. Pierre, 2009) that runs the risk of never being heard or understood.

Conclusion

Socially, politically, economically, and technologically turbulent environments insist on methodologies that reflect the cultural and social world as mobile (Büscher, Urry & Witchger, 2010), changing and open-ended (Lury & Wakeford, 2012, as cited in Coleman & Ringrose, 2013, p. 1) and messy (Law, 2004, as cited in Coleman & Ringrose, 2013, p. 1). Lather (1991, p. xvi) states that we live in ‘worlds full of paradox and uncertainty’ where ‘close inspection turns unities into multiplicities … univocal simplicities into polyvocal complexities’. Just as there are ‘many passions in a passion’ and ‘all manner of voices in a voice’ (Deleuze & Guattri, 1992, p. 77), the responsibility is on qualitative researchers to reconsider their vantage point as researchers, to question allegiances to tried and tested ways of presenting data, to challenge previous ways of knowing, and to consider processes rather than products. Exploring silence is rich in opportunities for future qualitative research to shine a light on the motives, decision-making processes and power underlying silence as a choice and as a productive force. Doing so through a philosophical lens extends future possibilities even further.