Jo Krøjer

(Re)constructing strategies: a methodological experiment on representation

The article describes an experiment in which two researchers engaged in developing poetic forms of representing qualitative empirical research switch their individually produced empirical material and work simultaneously on each others products. The intention is to investigate what we, as researchers, are adding to and extracting from the empirical material in poetical processing. It may be that the condensed, poetic texts can be seen as primarily representing the relation between the researcher and the persons she met in ‘empirical time’. Thus, poetical processing is a process in which this relation – or at least the researchers notion hereof – is added to the empirical product. By switching empirical texts and conducting poetical condensation on an unknown text, an attempt is made to qualify an understanding of what is added and the strategies being used – which might prove to be specific to each individual. Does this, then, in the end mean that the condensed poetic texts are not representing anything related to ‘empirical time’, but are to be seen as something entirely new? And if so, does it matter?

Poethical: Breaking Ground for Reconstruction.

Departing from a methodological experiment performed by the authors, this article reflects on and discusses issues of ethics and politics in poetic strategies of ‘representation’. In relation to the experiment the article questions how to conceive the notion of connectedness between empirical time and the reconstruction of it in poststructuralist research. In continued reflection the article elaborates on the meaning and status of body and emotion in poststructuralist, feminist research. The article digs further into questions of poststructuralist epistemology and validity, and asks if poetic, open‐ended ways of presenting lived experience are especially ethical. These reflections lead to a discussion of the possibility of complex and ambiguous poetic representations being politically influential, i.e. how this research can matter to others.

Moral Literacy in Technological Care Work

Many different professionals play a key role in maintaining welfare in a welfare society. These professionals engage in moral judgements when using (new) technologies. In doing so, they achieve that radical responsibility towards the other that Levinas describes as being at the very core of ethics. Also, professionals try to assess the possible consequences of the involvement of specific technologies and adjust their actions in order to ensure ethical responsibility. Thus, ethics is necessary in order to obtain and sustain ones professionalism. This presents care institutions with the challenge to design work processes and technology work in ways that include a sense of ‘the Other’ and make moral judgement an indispensable part of professional competence in technology. This article provides new understandings of the way ethics are involved in care institutions. Nurses’ moral judgements are sophisticated with regard to ethical perspectives. In hospitals, nurses combine Latours notion of symmetry in human/technology relations with an ethics implying ethical priority to human beings over other beings. This combination of ethics is not only sophisticated; it is also paradoxical, as it puts together mutually contradictory ethics. Instead of causing moral confusion, this ethical paradox is employed to produce a particularly refined notion of care situations, allowing nurses’ care to include patients and technology alike.

Introduction: The complexity and power of methods and analytical optics

10.1080/09518390701768724 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 0951398 (print)/1366-5898 (online) Original Article 2 08 Taylor & Francis 1 000Ja u ry-Febraury 2008 D J Krøje jokr@ruc.dk This special issue of QSE is dedicated to theoretical and practical development of adequate research methods. A common ground for all contributors is the notion that research in social and psychological matters needs to be sensitive to the complex, messy and quirky qualities of social relations. And that this complexity should also inhabit our methods of writing about it. In this issue, the authors attempt to connect poststructuralist theory and strategy with specific modes of empowering and collaborative research. In addition, another overall perspective in this special issue, therefore, is not only to describe a variety of methods to produce empirical material and analytical sensitivity, but to employ them and thoroughly examine where and what they lead to. All articles in this special issue deal with different aspects of connecting feminist, poststructuralist research methods and analytical strategies to their counteror complementary parts. As Patti Lather has pointed out, this is not a question of getting rid of power relations and former ways of knowing, but of building on the ruins (Lather 2001). The articles introduce a variety of elaborations on power relations involved when poststructuralist strategies and ideas blend into other ways of knowing and, hence, make messy and ambiguous optics. Whether these elaborations happen in relation to a large, private corporation, a non-governmental organization, a public school, or even a poetic experiment, they produce interesting perspectives on power, ethics and minoritized positions and may serve as a methodological platform from which one can depart or move on. In ‘Who is ready for the results’, Dorthe Staunæs and Dorte Marie Søndergaard look into the usefulness of research and how it is assessed, as university research becomes commodified to an ever greater degree. The question is addressed through analysis of ways in which the results of a particular research project, based on poststructuralist approaches, were received in a large private company which provided the main funding for a research project on gender and top management. On the basis of empirical material, the article offers a complex analysis of the many and still shifting forces involved in the recipients’ assessments of usefulness. It poses questions for researchers and university management concerning researchers’ current working conditions and the protection of research integrity. In the article ‘(Re)constructing strategies’ by Bibi Hølge-Hazelton and Jo Krøjer, readers are invited in to a writing practice, where two researchers engage in developing poetic forms of representing qualitative empirical material and work simultaneously on each other’s products. Here, the intention is to dig into the additions researchers make to poetical processing and look into the question of shifting power and positions in these processes. In their following article ‘Poethical: breaking ground for reconstruction’, Krøjer and HølgeHazelton approach the discussion of poetical processing and power from a different angle. By

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