Truth-Telling, Risk, and Methodological Responsibility

• In Event: Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Ethics, Justice, and Responsibility

Abstract

I call to question distanced inquiry mechanisms and interrogate processes of “data analysis” and conceptualizations of “risk” and “truth-telling” in qualitative inquiry. I advocate for a materialist approach to inquiry, one that necessarily troubles a logic of extraction that predominates educational research practices. I take seriously Michel Foucault’s (2011) sense of parrhesia and its relation to materialist inquiry. I ask, what risks must we take in our inquiry process to “tell the truth”? How do our assertions, our truth-telling, imperil or destabilize our very relation to an assumed other and the normalized identities we hold most dear? Lastly, how might a materialist methodological approach require particular risks of the inquirer that are lost in traditional extract-ivist approaches to qualitative inquiry?

Author

• Aaron M. Kuntz, The University of Alabama