Qualitative Inquiry

In this article, the authors look at the theoretical and methodological implications of the autobiographical writings of James Baldwin for doing qualitative research in the related areas of youth identity formation and the production and circulation of meanings in popular culture. They argue that Baldwin’s use of autobiography provides one very useful way to register important contradictions and tensions in the circulation of contemporary fashion styles. Specifically, the Hilfiger and Timberland lines of clothing deploy signs and symbols that are up for grabs, discursive resources that can be coded and recoded in multiple and complex ways by young people defining a sense of racial identity for themselves in the face of massive social, cultural, and material uncertainty. Yet, these resources circulate in a historical landscape that radically circumscribes their mobility. The contradictions have not been adequately addressed in contemporary approaches to popular culture, especially in the field of cultural studies. The authors call for more autobiographical work on popular culture, the kind exemplified by Baldwin’s collection on film, The Devil Finds Work. This article is offered as one—albeit partial—effort in this direction.

Beginning with the author’s subjective and imaginative dream experience, the article explores an unfolding itinerary through historical accounts, colonial literary texts, and postcolonial and sociological theory to examine the dream’s putative central object—a malnourished child living in Mali, West Africa. The layered contexts of the focal ethnography provide a reflective compass enabling writer and audience to examine subjective and objective significations that crowd, then expand to illuminate the experience. Oral and written narratives, as they absorb and elaborate human imagination, are envisioned as pivotal to the demarcation and disruption of categorical boundaries that shape and liberate sociological inquiry and social lives.

This article is based on fieldwork conducted in southern Chad on the recent adoption of female circumcision. In Myabé, a village with a population of about 1,000, girls were first circumcised around 1980. Residents describe female circumcision and their experiences of it in ways that contrast sharply with popular notions of what female circumcision means and how it is practiced, and with the descriptions and interpretations available in the medical, public health, and anthropological literatures. In making sense of these findings, the author questions the reasons for the hegemony of the “standard tale” and argues for the need to allow a plurality of stories and experiences of female circumcision to emerge.

This is a performative writing essay that reflects on Peggy Phelan’s thesis from Mourning Sex that theatre is a rehearsal for death. Using the Freudian frame of da (there) and fort (gone), the essay moves between presence and absence, between aesthetic performances and everyday performances, and between life and death.

In qualitative research, considerable emphasis has been placed on the representation of identity, but this discussion has occurred largely within the context of the Self-Other dichotomy. Here, an alternative perspective on identity is presented. It is emphasized that exploring a participant’s “same-ness” is a critically important aperture to human experience that may be neglected in the furor over whose voice is being presented in text. In this article, narratives of the researcher’s experience during a descriptive phenomenological study of older widows’ experience of home care are interspersed with excerpts from interviews with one older widow. There is evidence that the participant and researcher share the goal of revealing the participant’s same-ness. This shared aim can supercede the focus on interpersonal differences that is at the heart of the Self-Other identity furor.

With full awareness that criteria are mutable, the author argues that ethnography needs to be evaluated through two lenses: science and arts. The author suggests five criteria: substantive contribution, aesthetic merit, reflexivity, impact, and expression of a reality.

This article proposes that qualitative, interpretive writing be assessed in terms of its ability to advance the promises of radical democractic racial justice embodied in the post-civil rights, Chicana/Chicano and Black Arts Aesthetic movements. A set of interpretive practices connected to an aesthetics of color is presented.

In the social sciences, we usually think of criteria as culture-free standards that stand apart from human subjectivity and value. The author argues in this article, however, that conflicts over which criteria to apply usually boil down to differences in values that are contingent on humanchoices.Thedemandforcriteriareflectsthedesiretocontainfreedom, limit possibilities, and resist change. Ultimately, all standards of evaluation rest on a research community’s agreement to comply with their own humanly developed conventions. The author ends by considering the personal standards that he applies to works that fall under the new rubric of poetic social science.

In this work, the author introspects about the steps she takes when evaluating narrative ethnographies. Her story shows how she thinks about and reacts to alternative genres of writing. Optimally, she tries to feel and think with the story, moving back and forth as the two processes merge. She tries to immerse herself in the flow of the story, until she is unable to stop thinking about or feeling the experience. Along the way, she asks questions about what she has learned from the story, and she evaluates the writer’s literary strategies, ethical concerns, and the degree to which the goals of the work have been achieved. When she reviews, she attempts to offer helpful feedback yet protect the writer’s sense of self.

In response to a call for discussion of criteria for judging ethnographic experimental writing, the author felt it necessary to address the relationship of politics and experimental writing. Given that recent experimental writing was initiated with the critique of traditional ethnographic writing in sociology and anthropology that was part of the larger criticism of the authority of Western discourse, she wanted to speculate on the future to which experimental writing points and for which it prepares ethnographers to think politically. For her, this is the primary value of experimental writing: It links ethnographers to the future of politics and to the politics of the future. It is in terms of this two-way link that experimental writing might be judged.