Kate McCoy

Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research

This editorial introduces a special issue of Environmental Education Research titled ‘Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research.’ The editorial begins with an overview of each of the nine articles in the issue and their contributions to land and environmental education, before outlining features of land education in more detail. ‘Key considerations’ of land education are discussed, including: Land and settler colonialism, Land and Indigenous cosmologies, Land and Indigenous agency and resistance, and The significance of naming. The editorial engages the question ‘Why land education?’ by drawing distinctions between land education and current forms of place-based education. It closes with a discussion of modes and methods of land education research.

Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research

This special issue that we are calling, ‘Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research’, presents writings from qualitative researchers across various disciplines and contexts who are attempting to work with these new analytics and practices made possible through their engagement with Deleuzian concepts and processes. These researchers engage epistemological questions and try out methodological practices inspired by thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research. In response to our call for proposals, contributors to this issue are using or thinking with the philosophical concepts and processes of Deleuze, not focusing on them in the abstract, but instead engaging the implications of those concepts and processes for research methodology and ethics in educational research.

The Heroin Epidemic in New York City: Current Status and Prognoses

Since 1989, heroin production worldwide has risen; in New York City, as its purity rose and prices fell, street-level markets were restructured and offered heroin in addition to cocaine and crack (which had been popular during the 1980s). While officials estimate that there are between 500,000 and one million hard-core, chronic heroin users nationwide, evidence of supplemental users heralding another heroin era includes: more overdoses and overdose deaths, greater demand for treatment, larger seizures of heroin at all levels of distribution and related arrests, and broader media coverage. In this article, the authors describe the characteristics of populations in which there may have been a percentage increase of new users, such as young middle- or upper-class European-Americans, young Puerto Ricans and recent Haitian and Russian immigrants. The abstinence of young African-Americans is also noted. The article ends with a preliminary needs assessment of the new users in the areas of health (including AIDS), housing, employment, treatment, arrest and imprisonment.

Access to and use of health care: perceptions and experiences among people who use heroin and cocaine

Objective: To examine the health care experiences of low-income drug users in order to gain insight into their health care decision-making and barriers to care. Methods: Data come principally from open-ended interviews with 71 individuals who use or used heroin and/or cocaine. Interviews focused primarily on health status, health history, and health care received; current and former drug use; and basic demographics. Supplementary data were collected through four focus group discussions with drug users and six open-ended interviews with health care providers. Results: Study participants had high morbidity and high utilization of health services. More than 80% of participants reported that their last health care visit occurred within the last six months; 56% of participants reported health care visits within the last two months. These visits were most often to address pressing medical needs including infections, illness, and injury. Health care experiences were considered most favorably when providers demonstrated concern for comfort and well-being, and most unfavorably when care appeared to be affected by prejudice or preconceptions about drug use. Negative experiences with health care served to discourage consistent utilization of needed services. Conclusions: The health care experiences described by heroin and cocaine users suggest provider ignorance and prejudice regarding this population and make evident some reasons underlying drug user avoidance of health care.

Toward a Methodology of Encounters Opening to Complexity in Qualitative Research

I consider how poststructural orientations to thinking about epistemology and ontology have been enriched by feminist materialist readings of quantum physics. In light of these developments, I suggest that greater complexity might involve opening up qualitative research to a methodology of encounters, an array of interruptive, aleatory practices, attending to encounters that are both accidental and on purpose. I show how this approach has informed my work, intervening in habitual analytics involving scholarly critique and inspiring new ways of dealing with and expanding what might be thought of as data in qualitative research. Refusing the repositivation of qualitative research, I believe that what is at stake is more than just the knowledge we make, it’s the worlds we would like to make, the kinds of people we want to be, the kind of work we want to do in the world.

A vulnerable population in a time of crisis: Drug users and the attacks on the World Trade Center

In this article, we present preliminary findings from a qualitative study focused on the impact of the World Trade Center attacks on New York City residents who are current or former users of heroin, crack, and other forms of cocaine. In it, we present data describing their responses to and feelings about the attacks, changes in drug use after the attacks, and factors affecting changes in use. Our analysis is based on 57 open-ended interviews conducted between October 2001 and February 2002. The majority of study participants reported that the attacks had a significant emotional impact on them, causing anxiety, sadness, and anger. Several described practical impacts as well, including significant reductions in income. On September 11th and the weeks and months that followed, several participants who had been actively using did increase their use of heroin, crack, and/or other forms of cocaine. Reductions in use were, however, as common over time as were increases. There was some relapse among former users, but this was limited to those who had stopped using drugs within the 6 months immediately preceding the attacks. A diverse set of factors interacted to control use. For some participants, these factors were internal, relating to their individual motivations and drug use experiences. Other participants were essentially forced to limit use by marked reductions in income. For others, access to health and social service professionals, as well as drug treatment, proved to be key.

WHITE CHICKS ON DOPE: HEROIN AND IDENTITY DYNAMICS IN NEW YORK IN THE 1990s

We examined heroin use among 15 White middle-class women using data from in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic observation between May 1996 and April 1999. These women represent a subsample of a diverse group of 550 in an ethnographic study of heroin use and dealing in New York City. Our analysis is organized into four sections: (1) a demographic sketch, (2) the first time, (3) mode of administration and patterns of use, and (4) heroin in the medicine cabinet. Heroin use among these women was not related to poverty or lack of opportunity, social disenfranchisement, defective or addictive personalities, childhood trauma, or seeking membership into deviant subcultures. While some of these discourses of adversity and thrill seeking may have surfaced in individual stories, the dominant theme that emerged from the data was that of active struggles around identity, struggles over who and how one does and does not want to be.

Into the cracks: a geology of encounters with addiction as disease and moral failing

The author is thinking with Deleuze’s ethical practice of ‘being on the lookout’ for encounters with the cracks. Drawing on research in the USA on access to health care for people who use illicit drugs, the author works with Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuze and Foucault in a geological and genealogical mode of inquiry to investigate the preoccupation over whether addiction is a disease or a moral failing, raising questions about the modes of subjectivation produced by these designations. The author works through a series of encounters, entering into the cracks, where things are already breaking up to unhinge thinking from usual habits to consider what our explanations of addiction produce and to chart different territory, creating different possibilities for insight and action.

Voice in qualitative inquiry: challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research

Jackson and Mazzei’s edited collection Voice in Qualitative Inquiry was top on my list for summer reading last year. I was not disappointed. I read it from start to finish, all the pieces in order, in two sittings in two days. It contains thoughtful and provocative work on voice in the field of qualitative research methodology. The editors’ introduction (Introduction: The limit of voice), along with the chapters by Linda Alcoff (The problem of speaking for others) and Patti Lather (Against empathy, voice and authenticity) – and, to varying degrees, most of the chapters in the collection – provide theoretical, philosophical, and ethical background for understanding feminist, critical, and poststructural takes on the problem of voice. As a reaction to the voicelessness of statistical, positivist, quantitative research in the social sciences, postpositivist feminist and critical qualitative research emerged in efforts to privilege voice, to “give” voice, to research participants, to bring voices out from the shadow of numbers, to valorize the authenticity of voice. But Lather reminds us that attachments to such empathy and the authenticity upon which it is based have been under scrutiny for quite some time. I’d go back to the Sophists, but certainly, from the Frankfurt School critical theorists to French poststructuralists to contemporary social critics, the possibility of voice, as a pure representation of truth, reality, and intent, has been troubled, even pronounced an epistemological fiction. In much the same way that positivist research creates the rhetorical illusion of objectivity, postpositivist work creates the rhetorical illusion of subjective authenticity. Alcoff argues that power relations between researcher and researched create and shut down possibilities for what voices might tell us. Lisa Mazzei and Alecia Jackson point out that researchers shape voice with their questions and interview formats. Authors of research reports pick, choose, tweak, include, and leave out voices. Despite these and other challenges to the authenticity of voice, Elizabeth St. Pierre argues in her Afterword (Decentering voice in qualitative inquiry) that a great deal of qualitative research goes on as though such challenges did not exist. Mazzei and Jackson note that some researchers have tried textual innovations to solve the problem of voice by making it more “authentic, spontaneous, or realistic” (2), but these practices do not deal with the most troubling limits of voice as described above. Included in this collection, then, are scholars from the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia who are engaging in “practices that confront and twist voice, meaning, and truth” (3), who recognize that voice is necessary as much as it is a problem. When contemplating this kind of doubled movement (see Lather 2007), I am always reminded of the words of Gayatri Spivak: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 24, No. 6, November 2011, 751–759