Joe L. Kincheloe

Describing the Bricolage: Conceptualizing a New Rigor in Qualitative Research

Picking up on Norman Denzins and Yvonna Lincolns articulation of the concept of bricolage, the essay describes a critical notion of this research orientation. As an interdisciplinary approach, bricolage avoids both the superficiality of methodological breadth and the parochialism of unidisciplinary approaches. The notion of the bricolage advocated here recognizes the dialectical nature of the disciplinary and interdisciplinary relationship and promotes a synergistic interaction between the two concepts. In this context, the bricolage is concerned not only with divergent methods of inquiry but with diverse theoretical and philosophical understandings of the various elements encountered in the act of research. The insights garnered here move researchers to a better conceptual grasp of the complexity of the research act—a cognizance often missed in mainstream versions of qualitative research. In particular, critical bricoleurs employ historiographical, philosophical, and social theoretical lenses to gain a more complex understanding of the intricacies of research design.

On to the Next Level: Continuing the Conceptualization of the Bricolage

The bricolage offers insight into new forms of rigor and complexity in social research. This article explores new forms of complex, multimethodological, multilogical forms of inquiry into the social, cultural, political, psychological, and educational domains. Picking up where his previous Qualitative Inquiry article on the bricolage left off, this article examines not only the epistemological but also the ontological dimensions of multimethodological/multitheoretical research. Focusing on webs of relationships instead of simply things-in-themselves, the bricoleur constructs the object of study in a more complex framework. In this process, attention is directed toward processes, relationships, and interconnections among phenomena. Such analysis leads bricoleurs to multiple dimensions of multilogicality. In this context, the article generates a variety of important categories in which multiple perspectives may be constructed: methodology, theory, interpretation, power relations, and narratology.

Describing the Bricolage

Following Joe’s demand to humanize, politicize, and transgress through qualitative research, it was natural for him to go to create a new strand of bricolage, a completely fresh approach to qualitative work. Looking at Levi Strauss’s context of bricolage and the nods made to bricolage by Norm Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, Joe was determined to continue to criticalize and rigorize the traditional ways in which to do multi-methodological research.

On to the Next Level

Joe regarded the bricolage as his most important work in the context of critical qualitative research. He refused to label it methodology; rather he saw it as a philosophical stance in which to create interpretation. Always the hermeneutic, he expected research to be rigorous, personal, transgressive, and to contain multiple, tentative interpretations. Like Hermes, he expected the message of research to be flexed, stretched, negated, and reinforced, and indeed, he saw the teacher/researcher/scholar to be a trickster of interpretation, a shapeshifter of scholarship.