Qualitative Inquiry

The event of a family crisis calls for crucial reactions with kin in response to intense uncertainty. In this autoethnographic reflection, the author narrates her family’s struggle for meaning after learning that her brother suffered a near-fatal fall from a mountain peak of the Grand Tetons. In this article, the author depicts various perspectives she witnessed as her family dealt with multiple ambiguities surrounding her brother’s accident. The author then explores how crisis awakens an individual’s attention to present time and summons him or her to reorient his or her temporal self to focus on immediate moments. Moreover, the author demonstrates how dialogue and narrative interweave to shape family members’ interpretations of unprecedented circumstances and new relational meanings.

From High Skill to High School details the experiences of immigrant professionals in an adult education employment program. This research reveals that immigrants with graduate degrees and years of international work experience are put through curriculum designed for adolescents with limited work experience, and collectively perform more than 1.92 million hours of unpaid work annually in both community-based organizations and for-profit companies. In this mixed-method research project combining institutional ethnography with Reader’s Theatre, the Reader’s Theatre serves as a powerful medium to detail the process of deskilling. While Reader’s Theatre complements the institutional ethnographic analysis by vividly bringing the data to life, representational issues emerge in combining the two approaches. For the playwright, the Reader’s Theatre may seem overly detailed and less aesthetically pleasing. These details, however, are necessary to the analysis as they are vital clues to the social organization of power for the institutional ethnographer.

The following two poems were formed from transcribed interview text from an unpublished doctoral thesis (Lambert, 2006) which explores some of the ways in which identities and places could be considered mutually constitutive. Specifically, it examines the ways in which five “lesbian” identified women talk about their experiences and identities with, in and through “queer” places and events. The original words were spoken by two participants as part of their own narratives of self when asked to share critical moments in their lives when they noticed or felt themselves to be in some way “different” to and/or differentiated from “others.” There words are presented here as two thematically similar stand alone “found poems,” (see for example, Butler-Kisber, 2002; Glesne, 1997; Lahman et al., 2009) without theoretical analysis. This is done in order to both draw in and implicate the reader in the everyday social readings of nonnormatively gendered bodies. The poems thus raise critical questions about re-presentational issues in research as well as highlighting the imperative to do justice to the speakers of such words, and the complexities associated with such a task.

This article seeks to explore a politics of becoming. Emphasizing the dynamics of both time and the affects produced with it, we engage by following the questions that are taken up, which bubble through the middle and which niggle at the margins of our thoughts. In sensing out the imperatives that seek to tie emotions to subjects, we argue that there is also an imperative for researchers and scholars to inquire into their own and we do so with a specific project in mind—that of reconstituting the conditions of hope that we want to argue are key for any educative role. Deleuze’s three syntheses of time have enabled us to consider both retrospective and prospective trajectories in ways that prevent any simple linear, mechanistic, or deterministic patterning. As we reevaluate and explore emotion’s reliance on subjectivity, we also search for the impersonal affects that connect.

This performance text examines complexities of personal and maternal identity in family life. Speaking in first, second, and third person voices, the author offers autoethnographic accounts of the tensions between separateness and connectedness, normative and subjective motherhood, and novice and seasoned perspectives. The piece functions as a text of resistance that pushes against normative expectations about maternal emotion and child-centered maternal dialogue and gives voice to evolutions in mother wit and lifeworlds.

This article uses poetic representation to describe 7 participants’ experiences living in Israel, where political violence is ongoing. The poems are derived from the participants’ spoken and written accounts of their daily lives in Israel during a 5-month period of the Al Aqsa Intifada of 2000-2004. Poetic representation of data allows the voices of participants to be heard on their own terms and provides an alternative to conventional social science research in which the perspective of the researcher is often privileged over that of the participants. Additionally, the perpetrators of terrorism and their acts are frequently made the object of media and public attention, but the voices of those whose lives are affected the most are typically unheard.

This article offers “streams of bereavement” narratives across time. The author seeks to present a multilayered voiced account through vignettes and poems about the loss of her father who died 20 years ago. This aims to address the complex and traumatizing nature of living with grief and the shifting and multifaceted ways a young bereaved daughter might try and make sense of such a loss. This article is in response to reading “Fathers and Sons: Bits and Pieces” and the call for more in-depth qualitative inquiries into parentally bereaved young people. These narratives are offered in the hope that humane connections are discovered that facilitate others to make sense of a similar life event.

This article uses a tripartite layered text to explore narrative inheritance, the storied experience of self and family. The author produces an autoethnography that places together partial memories, the stories told by parents, and half-remembered dreams. She queries taken-for-granted meanings by positioning uncertain scripts of and for the self in ways that leave invitational lacunae within and between the textual layers. In honoring the interplay between what is kept secret and what is shared the author seeks to explore the ways in which narrative inheritance fashions how people create stories of self and others by accommodating their forebears’ incomplete tales and living with mystery.

How do articles get written in ways that lead them to keep getting cited decades later—even when they are bad or mediocre articles that do not merit re-reading? The question may seem trivial, but answering it requires us to rethink research practice and methods: Instead of particular projects and studies, or the work of individual researchers (how one conducts interviews, writes, etc.), methodology becomes a problem of assembling textlines, hooking up with viable ones, connecting some, cutting others, enfolding or highlighting particular threads, redirecting others across disciplines, and eventually putting texts in the stream, sending them downline into an afterlife in other researchers’ textwork. The present article, based on archival research, uses a detailed case study of the production and subsequent transformation and citation of an article on “teachers’ beliefs” to develop these ideas and consider the methodological implications of attending to textlines and textual afterlives.