Qualitative Inquiry at a Crossroads

Political, Performative, and Methodological Reflections

Norman K. Denzin, Michael D. Giardina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429615085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Qualitative Inquiry at a Crossroads critically reflects on the ever-changing dynamics of qualitative research in the contemporary moment. We live at a crossroads in which the spaces for critical civic discourse are narrowing, in which traditional political ideologies are now questioned: there is no utopian vision on the horizon, only fear and doubt. The moral and ethical foundations of democracy are under assault, global inequality is on the rise, facts are derided as 'fake news'—an uncertain future stands at our door.

Premised on the belief that our troubled times call for a critical inquiry that matters—a discourse committed to a politics of resistance, a politics of possibility—leading international contributors from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, Norway, and Denmark present a range of perspectives, challenges, and opportunities for the field. In so doing, they wrestle with questions concerning the intersecting vectors of method, politics, and praxis. More specifically, contributors engage with issues ranging from indigenous and decolonizing methods, arts-based research, and intersectionality to debates over the research marketplace, accountability metrics, and emergent forays into post-qualitative inquiry.

PART I

Performative Reflections

1

BETWEEN BODIES

Queer Grief in the Anthropocene

Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer.

(Macdonald, 2014)

Writing Bodies in Relation

The sulphur-crested cockatoos squawk an echoing line through the sky of the Yarra Valley old-growth eucalyptus forest. We are gathered here on a writing retreat, making space to make something out of nothing. Words. Friendship. Community. Poetry. We make space to retreat from the world and its neoliberal demands, the disciplining machine of capitalism and the chaotic order it imposes to tend to emotional and relational landscapes. Writing bodies in relation.

I stare out the window of the 100-year old farmhouse while I write, my fingers dancing along the keyboard. Typing is a tactile and embodied practice for me. From my years of training as a pianist and ‘touch typist’ from the age of four (thanks, Mom), I can look out at the world while my fingers trace the symbols of meaning that my brain and memory produces. Today I look at the white birds with yellow head crest feathers, as they cluck and sweep through the sky in this valley.

The old gum forest offers infinite greens. On a morning walk, I recalled how the forest in New York is so different, has such a narrower palette of green, compared to the wide-ranging grey- and silver-greens of the Australian bush. The greens I didn’t notice while growing up in the woods outside of Albany. The greens that are buried, carried, somewhere deep in my formative cells when I was just learning what green was, when I was learning what it meant to go play in the woods, what it meant to find church in nature, not in a building.

When I think about home, about childhood, about that which is now past, I think mostly about place, and mostly about the outdoors, which I have written about but still don’t understand. Memories are tied up with, bounded by, and perhaps constructed in the spaces and places where they occurred, and the objects with which they were enacted. For me, the outdoors and the beautiful natural landscape of the upstate New York woods behind my house are inextricably bound up with my childhood, lost family members, dead animals. Bound up with that sense of wonder and visceral aching loss and discovery sitting together with the comfort of the familiar smells, objects and animals of the woods. It is part of both the joy and also the grief that I have when I recall or revisit my family and my childhood.

Going beyond domestic animal relations, and personal connections with nature, others have written about the links between human-centred grief and collective grief at the devastation of the planet (typifying and theorised as the Anthropocene). Some (like us) also theorise and collectivise about public grief, collective mourning, and an activist affect in which we are all caught up (Harris & Holman Jones, 2018). In this essay, we see ourselves as bodies among and in relationship with other bodies (animal-bodies, thing-bodies, plant-bodies) that help us to understand our own individual grief, suffering and mourning, as interconnected with the degradation of the planet, a continuum of alienation that has reached epic proportions.

The Beauty of Grief and Loss

We map the traces of our grief with objects, scenes. We remember the illnesses and deaths by the room, the time of day, the pillow under a mother’s hand, the smells, the light streaming through the windows.

My mother, Anna Mae Harris, died on 25 August 2007 in Evansville, Indiana, the city where she was born. She died in her hospice bed, when my brother and I went out for a smoke.

Eleven days earlier, she had one final stroke
after having one final breakfast,
and was rushed to the hospital on a Friday morning.

The family stood around her bed in the emergency room and the consulting doctor pulled back the curtain after reading her slides. He spoke directly to my mother.

‘This is a catastrophic stroke,’ he said. ‘There’s no way for us to stop the bleeding in your brain. It’s still bleeding now. Anna Mae, I’m afraid you’re going to die from this.’

Now I’m a blunt person, but this level of honesty took my own – and our collective – breath away.

I touched my mother’s legs. ‘Do you understand what the doctor’s saying?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘I’m going to die’, she said, her speech a bit slurred. These would be her last words.

My turn to nod, blinking back tears. ‘That’s right.’

Her sister Cyrilla stroked her face. ‘It’s okay honey, it’s okay. We’re all here together.’

My mother smiled a small child smile, kept nodding weakly.

We all cried except my mother, who sat there blinking from the outside and seemed to have been waiting for this moment all along.

Rebecca Solnit tells us that

Stories of suffering and destruction are endless and overwhelming these days, and you cannot respond to all of them. If you don’t shut them out entirely, you must choose which to respond to and how to respond via both affective and deliberative processes.

(2013, p. 19)

When we cut off the pain of grief both individually and culturally, we cut off its beauty and the possibility of solidarity and of sharing in its experience. Like gathering, grief can be poetry; indeed, it often leads us there. It is the cut that breaks the flow of normative life. Solnit again reminds us of the affect of grief, it’s visceral power and chaos, and yet its naturalness:

Weeping like ice melting, like winter snow turning into spring rivers, a spring that comes as grief, as waking up to suffering that is the beginning of doing something about it, weeping tears of affection and loss that are always hot and sometimes make roses grow.

(2013, p. 190)

Perhaps as a symptom of an insistently binary culture that parses gender, race, age, ability and research paradigms (among other things) into black and white, either-or structures, we also binarise joy and sorrow. Solnit, Sarah Ahmed, and others remind us that there are many creative and bountiful points of intersection in our experiences of grief – for example the happiness inside sadness, the joys of sorrowful sentiments, and the ebb and flow of emotion. For Solnit,

Sadness always contains distance, spaciousness, takes us away, while happiness at best brings us home to this very moment, this very place, so perhaps they are the sentiments of the far and the near (though rage and fear arise from the proximity of the unwanted as well as the absence or departure or threat of departure of the desired). Sadness and happiness – if those are even useful words, because as the years have gone by I have wondered if we want other language for emotion, if we would rather speak of deep and shallow, because the things that move people to tears are sometimes joyous and because the attempts to ward off sadness so often ward off depth instead – by distraction, for example.

(2013, p. 266)

And what sort of distractions do we seek, desperate to ward off sadness, depth and death?

My father had his first heart attack when he was in his forties. I’d just returned to school for my master’s. My mother called me in California from North Carolina late on a Sunday night. Her voice was thin, drained of emotion.

‘Your father had a heart attack last night’, she said. ‘He’s going to have open heart surgery on Tuesday. I know you’re busy with school. I just wanted you to know.’

‘I’m coming’, I said.

‘No’, my mother said. ‘It’s not necessary.’

I went.

On the plane I read Aristotle’s Poetics, the book assigned for the rhetoric seminar I’d miss on the day my father had surgery. I thought that Aristotle was very certain and very mathematical, just like my father. That certainty and logic calmed the knot that formed in my throat every time I thought of him. Every time I wondered what I was doing in graduate school. Every time I told people I was leaving the surety of my office job to study rhetoric and performance, most importantly when I thought of telling my father.

I read the Poetics, counting down the hours and minutes until he came out of surgery. I loved that Aristotle loved poetry and the theatre and wanted to say a thing or two to Plato and anyone else who wanted to banish emotion and drama from its important place in public life as if these things did not count. As if the relationships we make in language and in bodies gathered together to make something out of nothing are not real. Or simply are not. In these respects, my father was not like Aristotle.

I read the Poetics sitting next to my father in the recovery room, trying to block out the sounds of the monitors connected to every part of his body. I thought Aristotle was an awful heterosexist and looked over at my father, who was of the opinion that women (and certainly queer women), or at least this queer woman, were not made for certain things – mathematics, the useless study of theatre and poetry, graduate school. Still, I wondered if my father might change his opinion of me if I read aloud the hateful things Aristotle wrote about women. I asked him if he wanted me to read my first book of graduate school to him. My father shook his head no.

The Queer Objects of Grief

Not all grief – or love – is equal in the social sphere. Queer grief is a

a lesser tie, a tie that is not binding, that does not endure in matters of life and death. The power of the distinction between friends and family is legislative, as if only family counts, as if other relationships are not real, or are simply not. When queer grief is not recognized, because queer relationships are not recognized, then you become ‘nonrelatives,’ you become unrelated, you become not. You are alone in your grief. You are left waiting.

(Ahmed, 2010, p. 109)

In Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed (2013) discusses public grief, arguing that not all grief, not all public losses, are equal. Rather, the sociality of grief is measured in terms of proximity and whether ‘others’ ‘would want collective grief to be extended to them … when such a grief might “take in” what was not, in the first place, “allowed” near’ (footnote 12, p. 176).

Ahmed explores public grief and other emotions as a shared object, drawing on Max Scheler’s differentiation between communities of feeling and fellow-feeling. In communities of feeling, for example, grief is shared for the loss of a jointly beloved person: ‘fellow-feeling would be when I feel sorrow about your grief although I do not share your object of grief … your grief is what grieves me; your grief is the object of my grief’ (Ahmed, 2010, p. 57).

The sharing of grief might also help us avoid the solipsistic reduction and sanitising of queer grief into and as an object – a material thing to be passed hand to hand that absolves majoritarian society of the need to grieve queer lives as a community – for example in the form of the NAMES project AIDS Memorial Quilt (Crimp, 2002). Rather, objects made by and out of grief clear a space for sharing and grieving those we have lost without making memories and feelings of grief into objects that can be taken up or appropriated or put on display as just another memorial produced by the nation state (Plummer, 1995; Ahmed, 2014). Ahmed reminds us, ‘Queer activism has consequently been bound up with the politics of grief, with the question of what losses are counted as grievable’ (2013, p. 164). She draws on their theorisation of how AIDS transformed the notion of public grieving, and collective loss. But, importantly, she asks the question: ‘what are the political effects of contesting the failure to recognise queer loss by displaying that loss?’ (2014, p. 188).

In this way, things such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt are not so much objects as memorial as they are objects becoming memorial as they stitch together new ways of relating. As an example, Ahmed writes of George Eliot’s Silas Marner and the loss of an earthenware pot – a loved object he used to fetch water for years. When the pot breaks, its use and Silas’s way of relating with it shift; though what remains in the shattered pieces is the affection of the relation. With the breaking – and the loss – a new way of relating is created – the pot is no longer an object but a process of ‘becoming memorial, a holder of memories’ (Ahmed, 2014, p. 45).

Of the shift from the object to the relation of queer grief Ahmed writes:

a queer politics of grief needs to allow others, those whose losses are not recognised by the nation, to have the space and time to grieve, rather than grieving for those others, or even asking ‘the nation’ to grieve for them. In such a politics, recognition does still matter, not of the other’s grief, but of the other as a griever, as the subject rather than the object of grief, a subject that is not alone in its grief, since grief is both about and directed to others.

(2013, p. 44)

To be not alone in our grief. Something seemingly so fundamental and simple, so often brushed away. Though if grief is a language – and a body – doesn’t story, doesn’t song, open up space and a time to grieve?

I sat by her bed and read to her. My mother was a deep lover of words. I’d just started my PhD and the only book I had with me was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire. I tried to read it to her, but she brushed it away. It was confusing her, as her brain function lessened. I closed the book and told her stories instead. Stories from my childhood, things we had done as a family. Anything I could think of. I ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Qualitative Inquiry at a Crossroads
• PART I Performative Reflections
• PART II Methodological inflections
• PART III Political interventions
• Notes on Contributors
• Index