Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry

Jessica Nina Lester, Emily A. Nusbaum, Jessica Nina Lester, Emily A. Nusbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000414561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Investigación y metodología en psicología

Awarded the 2022 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Book Award.

Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry directly responds to the call for engaging in a new critical qualitative inquiry with consideration to issues related to power, privilege, voice, identity, and agency, while examining the hegemonic power of ableism and ableist epistemologies.

The contributing authors of this edited volume advance qualitative methods and methodological discussions to a place where disability embodiment and the lived experience of disability are potential sources of method and methodological advancement. Accordingly, this book centers disability, and, in so doing, examines methodological challenges related to normative and ableist assumptions of doing qualitative research. The range of chapters included highlights how there is no singular answer to questions about qualitative method and methodology; rather, the centering of diverse bodyminds complicates the normative desire to create method/methodology that is "standard, " versus thinking about method and methodology as fluid, emerging, and disruptive.

As an interdisciplinary text on critical qualitative research and disability studies with an international appeal, Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry is valuable for graduate level students and academics within a broad range of fields including critical qualitative research methodologies and methods, disability studies, cultural studies, discourse studies, education, sociology, and psychology. Disciplines that engage in the teaching of qualitative research methodologies and methods, particularly those that foreground critical qualitative research perspectives, will also find the book appealing.

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An introduction to Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry

Jessica Nina Lester and Emily A. Nusbaum

This edited volume, Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry, includes a collection of six chapters that function in various ways as a direct response to the call for engaging in a new critical qualitative inquiry (Flick, 2017). In 2018, we co-edited a special issue in Qualitative Inquiry that worked to center disability in critical qualitative research (Kerschbaum & Price, 2017), positioning the articles included within it as a direct response to the call for a new critical qualitative inquiry (Lester & Nusbaum, 2018). More particularly, Denzin (2017) stated that “this is a historical present that cries out for emancipatory visions, for visions that inspire transformative inquiries, and for inquiries that can provide the moral authority to move people to struggle and resist oppression” (p. 8). Building on this, this volume centers disability, as the contributing authors collectively consider methodological and theoretical issues related to power, privilege, voice, identity, and agency. In so doing, the often taken-for-granted and even normalized hegemonic power of ableism and epistemologies of ableism are critiqued and unpacked. Similar to Goodley, we note here that foregrounding disability functions as a “platform or plateau through which to think through, act, resist, relate, communicate, engage with one another against the hybridized forms of oppression and discrimination that so often do not speak singularly of disability” (Goodley, 2013, p. 641).

In this way, this volume extends conversation about disability and qualitative research practice by centering multiply marginalized knowledge production and ideas related to doing qualitative research and developing qualitative methodologies in ways that orient to disability embodiment and the lived experience of disability as potential sources of method and methodological advancement. Such an orientation stands in stark contrast to the view of “disabled people” are being primarily “research informants who have little say about the intellectual purposes their input serves which may lead to underuse of disabled people’s experiential expertise” (Mogendorff, 2017, p. np). Indeed, through centering disability, all of the contributing authors examine a range of methodological challenges related to normative and ableist assumptions of doing qualitative research. The range of chapters included highlights how there is no singular “answer” to questions about qualitative method and methodology – but rather the centering of diverse bodyminds complicates the normative desire to create method/methodology that is “standard,” versus thinking about method and methodology as fluid, emerging, and disruptive – as the disabled bodymind (Price, 2014) requires.

In this brief introductory chapter, we situate the volume and overview its contours. To do so, we first begin by offering a very abbreviated discussion of critical qualitative inquiry to better place the discussion of centering disability within it. We then move to present the structure and organization of the book, highlighting key ideas from each of the individual chapters. We conclude by pointing to how this volume might serve to reach a diverse audience – one not solely situated within the ivory tower. Rather, we emphasize how the writing within this volume functions to underscore grassroots wisdom and the often taken for granted knowledge about doing qualitative research and being qualitative researchers.

Engaging possibilities: critical qualitative inquiry and disability

Ulmer (2020) reminded scholars of the importance of knowing well the inquiry traditions that they one day might ultimately come to critique. She noted that if we do not take the necessary time to study the traditions that we ultimately pivot away from, we can “end up disturbing inquiry traditions that we may not yet grasp, as we did not first become properly acquainted” (p. 454). Informed by her ideas, we begin the chapter by offering an overview of critical qualitative inquiry, albeit brief, in an attempt to sketch out a re-imagining of critical qualitative inquiry that is drawn with care and caution. In doing so, we hope to call for a refusal to settle for doing critical qualitative inquiry as it has always been done. Here, we lean into Ulmer’s reminder that:

Proceeding with care, caution, and appreciation does not mean declining to proceed at all. Unsettling traditions can offer a thoughtful balance between conservation and revolution – between stewardship and change – between rotation and return. In removing sediments at the bottom of the riverbed, the unsettling of traditions can encourage life anew. It can replenish and regenerate while also refusing to settle.

(p. 456)

Thus, with a nod of gratitude for what has come before, we begin by unpacking some of what critical qualitative inquiry is, while pointing also to what it might become.

Critical qualitative inquiry

Critical theorists and scholars have long offered incisive critiques of the discourses, practices, and structures that reinforce and reify systemic inequities. As a social philosophy, critical theory has been shaped by Marxist ideas broadly and the Frankfurt School more particularly. From Horkheimer to Gramsci to Habermas, among many others, critical theory has been leveraged to examine and make explicit how humans operate and struggle for power, with inequalities often being visible based on race, ethnicity, socioeconomic differences, disability, gender, sexual orientation, etc. (Giroux, 1982; Kilgore, 2001). Carspecken (1996) noted that “‘criticalists’… are all concerned about social inequalities” and “share a concern with social theory and some of the basic issues it has struggled with since the nineteenth century. These include the nature of social structure, power, culture, and human agency” (p. 3). Lincoln, Lynham, and Guba (2018) noted that critical researchers generally aim to change some aspect of an existing structure, policy, or practice, with change being foregrounded. Further, they noted that the position of a researcher is often one of activist, with an eye toward “producing a fair society through social justice” (p. 125).

Similarly, Kinchloe and McLaren (1994) defined a “criticalist” in the following way:

a researcher or theorist who attempts to use her or his work as a form of social or cultural criticism and who accepts certain basic assumptions: that all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations which are socially and historically constituted; that facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from some form of ideological inscription; that the relationship between concept and object and signifier and signified is never stable or fixed and is often mediated by the social relations of capitalist production and consumption; that language is central to the formation of subjectivity (conscious and unconscious awareness); that certain groups in any society are privileged over others and, although the reasons for this privileging may vary widely, the oppression which characterizes contemporary societies is most forcefully reproduced when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary or inevitable; that oppression has many faces and that focusing on only one at the expense of others (e.g. class oppression versus racism) often elides the interconnections among them; and finally, that mainstream research practices are generally, although most often unwittingly, implicated in the reproduction of systems of class, race and gender oppression.

(emphasis added, pp. 139–140)

Here, Kinchloe and McLaren highlighted the role that non-critical research methodology and methods play in reproducing the status quo. A critical qualitative methodology, while a relatively recent development (see Carspecken, 1996, for more details related to this), is one that asks questions about what could be (Thomas, 1993), including how research paradigms, methodologies, and methods are being conceptualized and applied.

Moreover, in the historical present, the place and conceptualization of critical qualitative methodology has been revisited. For instance, in the recent Handbook of Qualitative Research, Denzin and Lincoln (2017) asked: “what is the role of critical qualitative research in a historical present when the need for social justice has never been greater?” (p. 1). They noted that “this is a historical present that cries out for emancipatory visions, for visions that inspire people to struggle and resist oppression” (p. 1). In 2017, Flick (2017) edited a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry that focused on engaging the potential challenges and urgent need for a new critical qualitative inquiry. Flick outlined a multi-level approach for engaging what he referred to as new critical qualitative inquiry – one which is relevant to society. These levels include: 1) inquiry being centered on social problems that often include “vulnerable groups” and “hard-to-reach groups” (p. 4); 2) a researcher being critical of the very methodologies and methods used for an empirical study; and 3) a commitment to continuing with qualitative research despite the challenges noted in the first and second levels. Notably, Denzin (2017), a contributor to Flick’s special issue, incisively argued that there has “never been a greater need for interpretive, critical, performative qualitative research that matters in the lives of those who daily experience social injustice” (p. 8).

Some scholars have also argued for a critiquing of the “critical” and have offered in response to this critique a postcritical ethnography (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004). While beyond the scope of this chapter, we suggest a postcritical qualitative perspective is useful to our call for the centering of disability in critical qualitative research, specifically given its explicit commitment to studying systemic inequities and power, practicing reflexivity, and critiquing static representations of culture and claims of objective truth. Like critical qualitative researchers, postcritical researchers also ask questions about what could be and reject claims of realism and objectivity, with the “post” referring to postmodern and poststructural work that “rejects a claim to objective knowledge” (Noblit et al., 2004, p. 18).

Disability and critical qualitative research

What often has been (perhaps unintentionally) omitted in much of the methodological writing around critical and postcritical qualitative inquiry is the importance and generative possibilities found in closely attending to how to design critical qualitative research that centers disabled people and communities. Historically, critical qualitative research that focused on insider experiences has frequently excluded disabled people apart from when the research itself has been about them, or even within other research focused on structural inequalities and marginalized individuals/communities. Many of these critical qualitative research studies have been built upon ableist practices and structures – many of which have implicitly and explicitly focused on “fixing” individual differences. For instance, to date, relatively few scholars have examined how the very methods described as “critical” and in some cases “emancipatory” are exclusionary and serve only some audiences. As one example, within qualitative research, the mainstay form of data collection has been interviews. Indeed, this is a taken-for-granted method that typically relies on one speaker (i.e., a researcher) posing a series of questions and most often another speaker (i.e., a research participant) verbally responding to the questions being posed. With advances in technologies, there are now a plethora of ways that interviews can be conducted (e.g., virtually, via chat, etc.; Paulus & Lester, 2022). Nonetheless, what remains the norm is a general reliance of spoken language and conceptualizations of a normative bodymind. Kerschbaum and Price (2017), two disabled scholars, offered an incisive call to center disability, specifically within qualitative interviewing. They noted that even when methodological writing points to ways to conduct interviews in nuanced ways, writers generally foreground “a normative bodymind” (p. 99). Kerchabaum and Price thus argued that the assumptions that undergird much of how qualitative research is designed and carried out are “the result of a persistent lack of attention to disability in research methodologies” (p. 99). There are some exceptions to this claim, and this volume works to build this body of work further.

Organization of the book and overview of the chapters

Beyond this introductory chapter, the book includes six chapters, with Chapter 2 serving to situate and frame the discussion and Chapter 7 designed to offer a call to the qualitative research community. More particularly, in Chapter 2, we (Nusbaum and Lester) engage with Judith Butler’s (1993) provocative question, “How, then, might one alter the very terms that constitute the ‘necessary’ domain of bodies through rendering unthinkable and unlivable another domain of bodies, those that do not matter in the same way” (p. xi)? In thinking with Butler’s question, we work to examine how ableist, normative practices in qualitative research function to privilege and center that which is legible. In doing so, we call for envisioning and pursuing a qualitative research practice that thinks with bodyminds rendered unthinkable and unlivable. We argue that to “read” disability on the body-mind of a researcher or participant, we become limited by the logic of who we imagine as present in the qualitative research community and what is possible in qualitative inquiry. Grounding this argument is our recognition that critical qualitative research communities should include

not just the easily assimilated able-disabled but our brothers and sisters who have the most to lose in becoming visible – those who are completely socially marginalized, stigmatized, and hidden away in institutions.… What they know, how they know, and why it matters is most threatening to the status quo.

(Sandahl as cited in McRuer & Johnson, 2014, p. 157)

In Chapter 3, Klar and Wolfond write a collaborative chapter that turns inside-out what conceptions of language and expression are, and in doing so engage with art, movement, and proprioception to, in Wolfond’s words, “relanguage autism.” Their piece highlights the public and social demand for “self-same movemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author biographies
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An introduction to Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry
• 2 Bodymind legibility and possibilities for qualitative research
• 3 Neurodiversity in relation: artistic intraethnographic practice
• 4 When participatory approaches are inaccessible: a movement toward research engagement through multi-sensory storytelling
• 5 Inclusion, sign language, and qualitative research interviewing
• 6 Inside/out: qualitative methods, online archives, and advocacy
• 7 (Re)framing qualitative research as a prickly artichoke: peeling back the layers of structural ableism within the institutional research process
• Index