Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research: Methodologies without Methodology

About the Book

The book problematizes taken for granted ideas about data, research design, and researcher responsibility, and in so doing challenges students' beliefs, paradigms, and methodological frameworks. The text includes numerous photographs, helpful glossary at the start of each chapter, comment boxes from real graduate students, and suggestions for how to implement the ideas presented in your own research project. The book focuses on audiences, communities, and participants in a way that no other qualitative text does. It will be a welcome addition to qualitative research courses that focus on methodological creativity, complexity, and theoretical diversity.

Table of Contents:
About the Author Random yet Necessary Appreciation Notes The (Un)Structure of This Book 1: A Proxy for a Foreword 2: Methodological Language Creates "Realities": Labels and Language Matter Why Do Labels Matter? Different Uses of Labels Qualitative Researchers’ Romance With the Meaning Labels Create, Act, Provoke, and Do Other Things Using Labels of Reflexivity and Triangulation Possibilities of Linguistic Creativity and Innovation in Research: Living With Words Without Stable Meaning Reading List of Life 3. Data-Wants and Data Entanglements: Data Matter Data Directionality The Dilemma of Data-Wants Data′s Past Data Object Interlude: Knowledge Context Analytical Interactions in the Existing Literature What Might Data Want? The Paradox of Wanting/Interacting Reading List of Life Irruption 1: Introducing Undirectionality and Uncertainty Through Images 4. Fluid Methodological Spaces: Methodologies Matter What Do Linear Methodologies Do? What Might Happen in Fluid Methodological Spaces? Conceptualizing Fluid and Incorporeal Methodological Spaces Connecting With Massumi and Deleuze Connecting With Baudrillard Connecting With Mol and Law Annemarie Mol′s Fluid Methodology Another Conceptualization Beyond Mol′s Methodological Singularity The Unexpected Lives of Methodologies Without Methodology Reading List of Life 5. Afterword: This Project (and Other Projects Alike) May Be "Failing" Productively Irruption 2: Performance, Philosophy, and Not-Knowing 6. Methodological Responsibility Outside Duty: Responsibility Matters Why Does Responsibility Matter? The Role of Research Responsibility in Forming Public Policy Return to Responsibility Imaging Responsibility as Resisting Closure and Holding a Space for the Other Imaging Responsibility as Responding to Urgency Imaging Responsibility as Rupturing Tradition, Authority, and Order Researchers’ Responsibilities To Come Reading List of Life 7. Teaching and Learning the Unteachable: Pedagogies Matter Teaching Through the Teachable Past and Transferable Experiences Dilemma 1: Qualitative Research Occurs “Here” or “There” Dilemma 2: Qualitative Research Methods as Luxury or Necessity Dilemma 3: Qualitative Research Methods May Be Personally Favored but Socially Marginalized Learning With(out) Teachable Teaching Teaching With the Past: Some Ghost Stories Curriculum Events and Erasure of a Ghost Curriculum A Series of Unthinkable and Unknowable Classroom Events Beginning Again and Again: New Projects, New Methodologies Reading List of Life 8. Productive Paradoxes in Participant-Driven Research: Communities and Audiences Matter Body Maps as Tools for Reflection on PDR PDR Exemplars from Student Researchers Working Together With the National Association on Mental Illness (NAMI): A Community-Based Classroom Project Voice, Diversity, and Literacy Leadership With Young Children at Risk: Learning From and With Child-Care Workers Another Understanding of PDR: Where To Go From Here Reading List of Life Irruption 3: Living Uncertainty References Index

About the Author :
Mirka Koro-Ljungberg (PhD, University of Helsinki) is a professor of qualitative research at the Arizona State University. Her scholarship operates in the intersection of methodology, philosophy, and sociocultural critique, and her work aims to contribute to methodological knowledge, experimentation, and theoretical development across various traditions associated with qualitative research. She has published in various qualitative and educational journals, and she is the author of Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research: Methodologies Without Methodology (2016) published by SAGE and coeditor of Disrupting Data in Qualitative inquiry: Entanglements With the Post-Critical and Post-Anthropocentric (2017) by Peter Lang.

Review :
Because of [the author’s] deep theoretical knowledge combined with years of working with young scholars and students, she articulates what we all struggle with as qualitative research. You will find yourself nodding your head with the points she is making and furiously taking notes. This is a book that will be well-worn and loved when you finish it. This book is a thinking text for new and seasoned qualitative researchers. Readers who engage ‘Methodologies without Methodology’ (because this text refuses to be passively read) will be provoked, moved, and challenged to rethink the processes and purposes of qualitative research and compelled to risk engaging in a more creative and exciting inquiry that resists conformity. This book provides a thoughtful articulation of qualitative inquiry from a post-perspective. Readers are invited to deconstruct qualitative inquiry in provocative yet productive ways. I would highly recommend this text for novice or seasoned scholars that desire an alternative to more traditional qualitative research texts and approaches. This book discusses the squishy-ness of qualitative research in a way that most books do not. It provides ample philosophical grounding and encourages the reader to think critically.