Research to Create New Worlds: Narrating Difference Through Paradox

• In Event: 45.095 - Sheraton Roundtable Seven - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 45.095-7 - Post-Qualitative Inquiring: Discussions on Transcripts, Writing, Fields, and Research

Abstract

In this paper, I explore a deployment of paradox as research method as a means to illustrate its creative potential. The larger study explores the locations of liberal education within biopolitical student success regimes in higher education. Whereas biopolitical research seeks similarities (of student profiles, transcript data, outcomes) to predict graduation rates and control present practices accordingly, paradox brings researchers to confront realities that coexist without requiring similarity or contradiction. Through paradox, researchers can shift focus to realities that escape biopolitical and other hegemonic ways of knowing, and in doing so, can explore the more-than of our current truths and create the worlds to which current research can only gesture.

Author

• Laura Elizabeth Smithers, Old Dominion University