Patti Lather

Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to think with: teaching research in education as a wild profusion

This paper situates paradigm talk with its insistence on multiplicities and proliferations in tension with a resurgent positivism and governmental imposition of experimental design as the gold standard in research methods. Using the concept of ‘coloring epistemologies’ as an index of such tensions, the essay argues for proliferation as an ontological and historical claim. What all of this might mean in the teaching of research in education is dealt with in a delineation of five aporias that are fruitful in helping students work against technical thought and method: aporias of objectivity, complicity, difference, interpretation, and legitimization. The essay concludes with a ‘disjunctive affirmation’ of multiple ways of going about educational research in terms of finding our way into a less comfortable social science full of stuck places and difficult philosophical issues of truth, interpretation and responsibility.

Feminist perspectives on empowering research methodologies

Abstract This paper focuses on what feminist thought and practice add to the emergence of a postpositivist era in the human sciences. After delineating key assumptions regarding postpositivism, three questions are addressed: What does it mean to do feminist research? What can be learned about research as praxis and practices of self-reflexivity from looking at feminist efforts to create empowering research designs? And, finally, what are the implications of poststructuralist thought and practice for feminist empirical work?

This IS your father's paradigm: Government intrusion and the case of qualitative research in education

This talk was the Egon Guba Invited Lecture at the American Educational Research Association annual conference, April, 2003, Chicago. This article mobilizes three counterdiscourses to critique the federal government’s incursion into legislating scientific method in the realm of educational research via the “evidence-based” movement of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Foucauldian policy analysis, feminism via Luce Irigaray, and postcolonialism via Stuart Hall are used to situate such scientism as a racialized masculinist backlash against the proliferation of research approaches that characterize the past 20 years of social inquiry. Congressional disdain for educational research is addressed within a context of the Science Wars and the needs of neoliberal states, including conservative restoration.

Post-qualitative research

There are three aspects of this special issue that we as co-editors want to draw to your attention. The first is that we are, finally, “after” the decade of SRE able to ask what comes next for qualitative research. Out from under the neo-positivist upsurge, we are pleased to be able to turn to what becomes possible in the sense of “lines of flight” that open up in not having to over-attend to external pressures and developments. We are, of course, keenly aware that qualitative research is still very much “in relation” with neo-positivism in an era of “big data” and “metric mania,” but we conceived this special issue as a refusal space in order to think within and against the weight of such a context. Secondly, what might the “post-qualitative” look like in such a space? This has been our particular focus as we invited educational researchers to join us in opening the future up to possibilities. Based on our experience during the last few years of attending conferences and surveying journals, we are pleased to bring together both familiar and new voices to address such issues across an international frame. We are especially pleased that Jennifer Greene accepted our offer to respond, building on her much concerned queries to a presentation from many of the contributors at the Eighth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Jennifer’s considered responses help us understand how we operate within and against tradition so that we might, collectively, serve the movement of qualitative research toward useful, doable, and critical ends that help us all grapple with the implications of the “posts.” Finally, we note across the contributions an evocative mix of revitalizing familiar frames, what might be called “the old new,” and, especially interesting to us, the bringing into being of the new new. That latter phrase comes from Spivak (1999) in speaking of the “new new” (p. 68) of the “indigenous dominant” (p. 67). In this, much of the “edge” in what follows comes from such places as Australian Aboriginal cultural practices, the new (to education) area of animal studies, and what goes under the name of the “new materialism” so ascendant in contemporary feminist theory. We hope, then, that this special issue will be a bit of a primer in the turn to ontology and how it might take us to some place of the “always already” that is neither too late nor too soon. Authors writing for this special issue make it clear that rethinking humanist ontology is key in what comes after humanist qualitative methodology. If we cease

The Validity of Angels: Interpretive and Textual Strategies in Researching the Lives of Women With HIV/AIDS

This article fleshes out the intelligibility of validity after poststructuralism via an exploration of the instructive complications of a study of women living with HIV/AIDS. Rather than epistemological criteria of truth as correspondence, the article mobilizes categories of validity grounded in the crisis of representation as it sketches ephemeral practices of validity after poststructuralism within the context of a particular inquiry to generate a theory of situated methodology.

Methodology-21: what do we do in the afterward?

This paper asks “after what” and situates qualitative research in the present moment in the midst of various “deaths” and “returns.” With a focus on fleshing out post-qualitative research, it first sketches efforts to discipline qualitative research via standards and rubrics as a part of neoliberal govenmentality and then elaborates what post-qualitative might mean via four exemplars. The first is from Sweden, a focus on relational entangled data analysis in the feminist classroom; the next two exemplars are collaborative studies from Australia at the intersection of Western and Aboriginal knowledge systems; the final exemplar is from Egypt, a feminist post-colonial study of the women’s mosque movement. The paper concludes with a call to “imagine forward” out of troubling a narrow scientificity and enacting an “after” of neoliberalism.

Learning From Our Differences: A Dialogue Across Perspectives on Quality in Education Research

The dialogue re-presented in this article is intended to foster mutual engagement—and opportunity for learning—across different perspectives on research within the education research community. Participants in the dialogue each addressed the following questions: (1) What are the touchstones by which you judge quality or rigor in education research (for a single study, a set of studies, or a “field” or community of researchers in dialogue)? What is your chief concern or fear that the touchstones guard against? (2) Where do you see challenges to your perspective in the perspectives of other members of the panel? How might your perspective evolve to respond to those challenges? Given all of this, what are the implications for the preparation of education researchers? Opening and closing comments set the dialogue in historical context, highlight issues raised, and suggest next steps for collaborative learning from the diversity of perspectives in our field.

Foucauldian scientificity: rethinking the nexus of qualitative research and educational policy analysis

This essay calls for qualitative policy analysis that can engage strategically with the increased calls for the usefulness of social policy toward the improvement of educational practice. Michel Foucault’s concept of scientificity is used as a tool against the ‘repositivization’ at work in neo‐liberal times and its ‘rage for accountability’ where refusing to concede science to scientism appears to be a central task for those invested in qualitative inquiry. The essay concludes with a sketch of a social science that stays close to the complexities of the social world in fostering understanding, reflection and action instead of a narrow translation of research into practice.

Applied Derrida: (Mis)Reading the Work of Mourning in Educational Research.

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Critical Theory, Curricular Transformation and Feminist Mainstreaming

This paper examines critical theory, especially the work of Antonio Gramsci, in relation to feminist curricular change efforts in teacher education. It is contended that womens studies is potentially a prime example of curriculum as counter-hegemonic force. Critical theory is taken to task for the male-centeredness of its search for historical actors. The possibilities for fundamental social change that open up when we put women at the center of our transformative aspirations are explored.