Ping-Chun Hsiung

Teaching Reflexivity in Qualitative Interviewing

Reflexivity has gained paramount status in qualitative inquiry. It is central to debates on subjectivity, objectivity, and, ultimately, the scientific foundation of social science knowledge and research. Although much work on doing reflexivity by researchers and practitioners has been published, scholars have only recently begun to explore how one goes about teaching reflexivity in qualitative research. This paper contributes to the endeavour by first identifying challenges of teaching reflexivity. It then describes how I use an existing data set and hands-on learning as complementary strategies to teach reflexiv-ity in a course on qualitative interviewing. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of teaching reflexivity in sociology in general and in qualitative research methods in particular.

Doing (critical) qualitative research in China in a global era

Over the last decades, qualitative researchers from the global south have questioned the dominance of the Anglo-American core and the current divide between the core and periphery. Nevertheless, it is unclear how to disrupt the divide. This article advances this endeavour by demonstrating the interplay between Anglo-American domination and a local hegemonic discourse that has perpetuated the core–periphery divide and hindered the development of critical qualitative research (QR) in the periphery. The author conceptualizes the periphery as an incubator that nurtures locally grounded and globally informed qualitative researchers. This demands interrogating the interplay between core domination and local hegemony. Doing so lays the foundation for qualitative researchers in the periphery to explore, and eventually articulate, decentred methodologies and locally situated epistemologies on a globalized platform. Using two case studies of QR conducted in China, the article examines the practices and politics of doing (critical) QR in contemporary China. It discusses methodological and epistemological issues pertinent to decentring QR in a global era.