Adjusting the Scope of Methodological Vision

• In Event: Alternative Facts, Fake News, and Educational Research: Reconsidering Qualitative Methodologies in the Age of Trump

Abstract

Objectives

In 1988 Haraway wrote that “we could use some enforceable, reliable accounts of things not reducible to power motives and…games of rhetoric” (p. 580). Haraway also stated that the problem “is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims… and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world” (p. 579).

Haraway’s problem is even more relevant today when debates about what constitutes so-called objective knowledge (Harding, 1991) have moved from the academic world to the realm of a popular culture. This paper explores whether adjusting the scope of the qualitative researcher’s focus might provide at least a partial way to generate “faithful [and widely accepted] accounts of the ‘real’ world,” while not ignoring the historical contingency for all knowledge claims. It also will describe a method for doing this.

Perspective

At first glance, at least, it would appear as if producing faithful and widely accepted accounts of the “real” world would be facilitated by keeping the scope of the researcher’s focus relatively limited. After all, claims about what most people consider to be facts are less likely to be challenged when things are directly observable. Over the last two millennia, physical scientists have continued to detect increasingly small units of matter. Arguably, there have been parallel methodological quests to locate the smallest units that matter in the qualitative research community. This move toward the micro can be observed in the turn from the general to the particular, a move that produced partial and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988; Rose, 1997), as well as in the recent strategic emphasis on “the importance of small form” as an effort to counter the big data movement (Koro-Ljungberg, Cirell, Gong, & Tesar, 2017).

Although a more micro focus may, at times, be necessary, it is not clear that a micro focus can accommodate Haraway’s other concern about detailing the historical contingency of knowledges. Indeed, events of late call into question whether research has zoomed both too far in and too far out. Here, therefore, I will reconsider what may be lost and what may be gained when knowledge is polarized into big and small. I also will explore a methodology for shifting among multiple levels of magnification at once and consider the risks associated with this move.

Modes of Inquiry/Data/Significance

In addition to engaging in the sort of conceptual analysis previewed above, the paper will rethink Haraway’s use of visual images in current contexts. Photographs, Haraway observed, are active, partial, and mediated. They possess the “elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care [that] people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view” (1988, p. 583). Moreover, images offer techniques for (re)considering potential truths, knowledges, and realities from different vantage points. The paper will employ socio-political images from public archives and the portfolio of a research photographer to demonstrate a method for moving back and forth between a “little and big” focus and, in so doing, make a significant methodological contribution.

Author

• Jasmine Ulmer, Wayne State University