Qualitative research is multiply multiple. Because of this, researchers must navigate many possibilities in designing, doing, and defending a qualitative study. While these navigations can be challenging for all qualitative inquirers, they may be especially so for graduate students. Guided by the difficult necessities in answering the doubled questions “What is (your) methodology?”, I offer two concepts as resources for these navigations: numerousness and multiplicity . Because I am particularly interested in variations in what we understand methodology itself to be, I focus on multiplicity. Accordingly, after theorizing the term with Deleuze and Guattari, I demonstrate that methodology is a multiplicity by highlighting two patterns of difference within the literature: methodology as design (influence) and methodology as being and/or becoming . Ultimately, I argue that methodology’s varieties are valuable and emphasize the importance of developing ways to navigate them on purpose.
This autoethnographic poem explores the complementarity of two approaches to comprehending and rendering experience. Each approach seeks to illuminate the worlds in which the researcher is immersed as well as the changes wrought in the researcher by prolonged engagements with others. Anthropology provides the opportunity for and analysis of intimate encounters with self and other. Poetry provides a language for deepening those encounters and depicting them in an authentic and evocative manner. The approaches are synergists that promote a more holistic interpretation of research phenomena. Together, they animate our understanding.
This poem explores the epistemic wound that arises when social research abandons its ethical and affective dimensions. Using poetic inquiry, it critiques the cult of objectivity within conventional qualitative methods. “Tears” serve as a metaphor for empathy and moral awareness—elements often erased from academic writing. By positioning the researcher as both observer and witness, the poem enacts reflexivity and suggests that authentic knowing emerges from human vulnerability. As a decolonial gesture, this work seeks to restore humanity to knowledge production, reminding us that every theory carries unrecorded traces of grief.
Dedicated to the people of Minnesota, this article examines one teacher educator’s perspectives on teaching others to teach during a federal occupation of the Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA, and surrounding communities. This autoethnographic poetic reflection questions how he—and anyone—can focus on a future, when the present is in turmoil. Highlighting average citizens and the pushback against an unwanted, considered by many to be unlawful, invasion of federal officers, under the guise of immigration reform, the poet’s response questions the ability of citizens to move forward, grow, and create during unprecedented crises.
Recent debates on generative artificial intelligence (AI) in qualitative research have been framed in increasingly polarized terms, positioning researchers as uncritical adopters or principled refusers. Drawing on recent position statements and editorial guidance, this article argues that such binary framing is unhelpful. While endorsing core concerns about meaning-making, reflexivity, bias, and environmental harm, it suggests that these concerns do not justify categorical rejection of all AI use. Instead, the article proposes refocusing debate on epistemic authority, distinguishing AI-led analysis from human-led practices, and developing governance-oriented responses to ethical and environmental risks. Moving beyond moral binaries is essential to preserving reflexive qualitative inquiry.
This paper explores the discomforting forces that emerged through unconventional research activations on/with/in/through university spaces. Through sketching, string figuring, and dancing, we examine the embodied sensations and relational tensions that surfaced within collaborative inquiry encounters. Drawing on posthumanist feminist philosophies, we conceptualise (dis)comfort as a relational force emerging within research assemblages and entangled university spaces. Rather than seeking to resolve unsettlements, we learn how to ‘stay with’ discomfortings through speculative processes of ravelling and unravelling. We conceptualise these ongoing entanglements as (dis)comfortings-so-far: unfinished relational processes that deepen collaborative research pedagogies.
Qualitative research in health equity contexts relies on trust, authenticity, and careful interpretation of lived experiences. Yet underrepresented communities, racialized individuals, people with disabilities, and those experiencing socioeconomic marginalization have often been excluded or superficially engaged, reinforcing structural inequities. Participant misrepresentation, including inaccurate demographics or inconsistent narratives, often reflects systemic forces such as racism, economic precarity, and historical mistrust rather than individual deceit. Using intersectionality and community-based participatory research, we illustrate how recruitment, screening, and data collection intersect with participants’ lived experiences. We offer recommendations, including co-developed eligibility, community verification, reflexivity, and culturally responsive engagement, to uphold rigor, trust, and participant well-being.
This article develops a methodological framework for leveraging the entanglement of practices and things in interviews. Our praxeological approach offers a processual heuristic for activating things as research participants. Adapting Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things, we analyze this activation through the triad of candidates, context, and phase. Drawing on posthumanist inquiry, we demonstrate how objects and interviewees momentarily fuse into a hybrid, collective informant. This approach operationalizes the methodological imperative to “follow the updates,” treating technological change as a primary guide to past social and cultural practices. The framework allows researchers to critically engage with the material agency of technical disruptions while foregrounding the researcher’s ethical responsibility and the necessity of ethnographic “aftercare.” Our findings illustrate how things in interviews function not merely as mnemonic devices, but as active directors of the research encounter.
People’s stories about recovery include interactions with professionals. What happened in these situations? Seven situations were analysed using an abductive approach. Enabling situations seem to be characterised by their fuzziness regarding the place they occur, the time spent, the role of doings and the reciprocal interaction between the participants, resulting in a loss of balance, challenging their sense of self, professional settings and knowledge. A dominant view is that mental illnesses are caused by deviations from the body’s normal functioning. Illnesses should be treated accordingly through biochemical interventions. Unexpected fuzzing situations are presented as central in a person’s recovery process.
This paper offers a reflexive account of a decade of critical visual encounters at and with the border, conducted by researchers and artists with lived experience of forced displacement. It demonstrates the value of creative visual methodologies across sites and borders through long-term, interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing on participatory photo-projects and research-arts initiatives, the paper centres migrants’ underrepresented perspectives on the border. Situated within critical migration and border studies, it advances a visual ethnographic practice that shifts the focus away from typical media portrayals of migrants or their personal experiences of the border to reveal how migrants themselves see, represent, and respond to the violence of borders.
What is the meaning of depth in qualitative inquiry? How does some writing penetrate beneath surface-level meanings and reveal the deep mystery of qualis, yet other writing drifts into clich & eacute; or paltry abstraction? How is it that some qualitative texts not only stay with us but also allow us to settle into them, as if the depth they offer is a space to enter, to inhabit, or even to dwell in? In this article, we draw on phenomenology as a way to contemplate these questions and to explore the experiential and transcendental dimensions of the notion of depth. Here, we find depth is not solely a matter of deepness and profundity; it also has to do with our existential position and condition, and with questions of the beyond and immeasurableness in the qualis sense of hiddenness.
This article works with the theory-methodology-praxis of lure and allure to muse on, speculate and reimagine possibilities for thinking-doing-making-creating Academic Writing Otherwise (AWO). We discuss our use of creative academic writing to materialise what happens when we embody the allure of the lure in our writing, and how we summon playfully creative academic writings into new becomings. AWO is a creative mode of theory-praxis which affords new ways to work with/in the mode of the lure. We were propelled through three writing-creating processes: ekphrastic writing, letters to past selves, and reading-writing encounters. Our article illuminates how musing with the allure of the lure - the lure of the allure - invites and incites us to experiment with what AWO might become when loosed from conventional [neoliberal] prescriptions to explain, exemplify, demonstrate, justify, argue, and account for.
There is a significant gap in the literature regarding proven interviewing techniques for qualitative interviews with football ultras and a considerable lack of comprehensive methodological guidance on enhancing validity in research involving hard-to-reach groups. In this article, we address both gaps by systematising our fieldwork experience from research on ultras in Poland and proposing refined and tested techniques that increase the validity of interview-based research on ultras and hard-to-reach groups. These techniques address the main issues associated with qualitative validity identified during our fieldwork, which we conceptualise using three themes: conspiracy of silence and lack of trust, overselling, and radical views.
This conceptual paper examines assumptions about time latent in traditional qualitative fieldwork. It draws on the work of Bergson, Campt, Kirby, Manning, and Phillips to enact a concept of fieldwork duration . Fieldwork duration is a co-constitution of seemingly disparate spacetimes that emerge in haptic (touching) relation. Fieldwork duration pushes beyond traditional ideas of “the field” being “out there” somewhere and the time of fieldwork as having a discrete beginning and ending. Because traditional qualitative inquiry generally conceives of time as a linear and static background to fieldwork, and because linear, progressive concepts of time are imbricated with systems of colonialism and raciocapitalism, the aim of conceptualizing fieldwork duration is to move toward greater possible temporal justice in qualitative inquiry. The authors also intersperse vignettes with theoretical text to draw readers’ attention to spatio-temporal and affective connectives incited and/or enacted by the writing itself.
Qualitative inquiry often positions voice as something that can be clarified or protected through reflexive practice. Feminist and post-structural critiques have challenged these assumptions, yet methodological discourse frequently returns to reflexivity as ethical reassurance. This article offers an alternative by conceptualizing voice as relational, structurally conditioned, and unsettled. Drawing on arts-based and educational research encounters, I introduce entangled voicings as a feminist methodological orientation that frames expression and silence as co-produced through shifting positionalities, institutional authority, and affective conditions beyond researcher control. The article offers methodological provocations that position discomfort, silence, and vulnerability as necessary epistemic conditions.
Encounters between scholars conducting doctrinal legal research and those using methodologies traditionally associated with the social sciences can be antagonistic. Students and researchers without the confidence to successfully navigate these tensions especially struggle from this methodological friction. It does not need to be this way. These encounters, like a river's encounters with islands, confluences and estuaries, can enrich the field. I use river ecology and experiences from a recently completed PhD thesis in a law school dominated by doctrinal legal research to make this point. Social scientists collaborating with legal scholars may benefit from an improved understanding of these tensions.
As long as there has been phenomenological empirical research, the relationship to the philosophical foundation has been a matter of dispute. One such example we find in a recent publication, where Byrne accuses us of misreading Husserl and his idea of essences. We hold that our reading of Husserl is accurate. We agree that phenomenological research is not simply about practicing phenomenological philosophical concepts, and we also argue how important it is to translate and interpret the philosophical ideas to inform empirical research. We also believe that this is what we do when we emphasize how important it is to appraise demands from the scientific community. In our response, we explain our approach to phenomenological research, with an emphasis on how to work with meaning analysis, including essential as well as individual meanings.
Reflexivity has long been central to qualitative research, supporting ethical, epistemological, and methodological rigor. However, the increasing use of AI, especially generative AI (GenAI), in qualitative inquiry both unsettles and reconfigures reflexive practice. Drawing on constructivist and posthumanist perspectives, this paper examines how GenAI generates distinct but interconnected dilemmas. For constructivism, it may undermine reflexivity through cognitive offloading, speed-driven research cultures, and reduced transparency, thereby challenging human-centered assumptions of meaning-making. For posthumanism, it complicates reflexivity by raising questions about distributed agency and accountability, even as GenAI is positioned as an interlocutor in relational and distributed forms of reflexive engagement. The paper proposes a multidimensional model of forward reflexivity in the era of AI. It argues that reflexivity under the AI condition must become forward-facing, as qualitative outputs increasingly become training data that will shape future knowledge-making, future researchers, and society.
Member checking is now seen as the "gold standard" in qualitative research; however, scholars have begun a critical discourse surrounding member checking and the harm it may unintentionally bring to participants. To address these potential harms, we posit the use of restorative justice-guided member checking strategies. The recommendations put forth in this article were first utilized in a study exploring the emotional labor experiences of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) teachers. Drawing from restorative justice principles, restorative justice-guided member checking uses relationship building, harm reparation, reflection, and researcher accountability to address concerns of epistemic injustice that permeate research.
