Getting Intimate: The Promise and Problems of Bringing Love Into Qualitative Research

• In Event: Inspired by Love: Revolutionary Love-Based Ontoepistemic and Ethical Possibilities for Transformative Methodology

Abstract

Purpose
In this paper, I reconsider, push, and refine what I have called an “intimate” approach to
qualitative inquiry by addressing the following questions: (1) What is intimate inquiry? (2) What are its assumptions and methods? (3) In what ways does intimate inquiry nudge a more “critical” stance toward intellectual life? (4) What are the implications—good, bad, and ugly—of invoking love in qualitative educational research?

Perspectives
Using my research experiences and efforts to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, I sketched the beginnings of an “intimate” approach to qualitative inquiry that is grounded in feminist theory (hooks, 2001), governed by an “ethic of love,” and expressed as “love acts” for the individuals whose lives our work aims to shape (Dominguez, 2000). I further develop my earlier writings (Author) about intimate inquiry, a qualitative methodological approach that is organized around three activities: witnessing, engaging, and laboring with people within the context of research, practice, and activism.

Methods
I highlight how I use an “intimate” approach to qualitative inquiry and outline processes, characteristics, and ethical orientations to working with people. The following three tenets guide intimate inquiry:

Witnessing involves the deliberate attendance to people, seeing and taking notice of that which they believe is meaningful. Fears and desires are situated in a sense of past and future, and experiences become the fabric of time and space.

Engaging points us to the posing of problems and the highlighting of contradictions that are inherent to all experiences of the peopled world. To engage is to put people in deliberate dialogue around the mundane, the taken-for-granted, the whispered, and the hushed. When we engage, we publicly name what we have witnessed and draw upon multiple vantage points—including the lenses of the inquirer herself—for a fuller and more complicated understanding of people’s issues.

Writing as testimony—an incomplete account of events—is a considerable part of carrying out the task of representing testimonials and knowledge of those with whom we are in community. The narrative becomes a vehicle through which we come to know other people and ourselves by implication; it reflects not merely a distant other but the social relations in our own environment. The love-based ambition for writing lives is a certain kind of reception that involves empathy and responsibility to think differently about the world. Constructing a text that might nudge this sort of intentionality and introspection is a labor of love. Laboring encompasses the mental work of writing, but also the physical labor—the work of the hands and the bodies—of sharing available resources.

Significance
Academics have a hard time examining the place of “love” in social research. A substantive barrier is our tendency to think about “research” not as a careful exploration of specific social, intellectual, or methodological problems that bear on the everyday circumstances of real people, but as the product of observable and replicable processes, of science. I offer a radical counter narrative of the possibilities that a broadened perspective on education research might enable.

Author

• Crystal T. Laura, Chicago State University