The Illusion of Our Separativeness

• In Event: Of Life Real and Unreal: An Ethics of the Heart

Abstract

When Lous Heshusius published her 1994 article, “Freeing Ourselves from Objectivity: Managing Subjectivity or Turning Toward a Participatory Mode of Consciousness?” in Educational Researcher, the field of qualitative inquiry was undergoing what Denzin and Lincoln (2005) described as a “profound rupture” brought about by the “crisis of representation.” As they described it, “Critical theory, feminist theory, and epistemologies of color now competed for attention in this arena. Issues such as validity, reliability, and objectivity, previously believed to be settled, were once more problematic” (p. 18). At the core of this crisis was the call for researchers to “manage their subjectivity” or, in other words, to account for their biases now that the possibility of objectivity was recognized as no longer a viable option. In this article, Heshusius both recognized and deftly averted the potential of this unfortunate turn of events to undermine the progress of qualitative inquiry. Her development of the concept of “participatory consciousness” influenced me in a way that few ideas have -- either before or since.
I also find in this piece the eloquent merging of Heshusius’s groundbreaking work in disability with her brilliant (and ahead of its time) contribution to the broader area of qualitative inquiry. It elucidates a powerful set of themes present in the larger body of her work that speak to the dangers of distancing ourselves from one another and the illusion of our separativeness, of the centrality of somatic knowing, the destructiveness of the human ego, and our misdirected attention to external form. In this paper, I explore the exquisite symmetry between her work in both disability scholarship and qualitative inquiry, having reached, in my view, full expression in this work.

Author

• Deborah J. Gallagher, University of Northern Iowa