Performing Dissertation Research and Liberating Academic Writing

• In Event: 47.083 - Performing Dissertation Research and Liberating Academic Writing

Abstract

The presenter will provide an overview of forms of dissertation inquiry with the intent to explore possibilities to push methodological and representational boundaries to perform dissertation research and liberate academic writing.

Researchers are increasingly interested in engaging in various approaches in the social sciences. Educational researchers are developing a wide range of such approaches: autobiographical research (e.g., Grumet, 1990; Pinar, 1988; Schubert & Ayers, 1999), biographical research (e.g., L. Smith, 1994), memoir (cf., Neuman & Peterson, 1997), personal narrative and narrative inquiry (e.g., Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), narrative multiculturalism (e.g., Phillion, 2002), cross-cultural narrative (e.g., Conle, 2000; He, 1999, 2003), life history (e.g., Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995), oral history (e.g., Yow, 1994), reflexive ethnography (e.g., Davies, 1999), ethnography (e.g. Soto, 1997; Valdés, 1996 & 2001), phenomenology (e.g., Van Manen, 1990), hermeneutics (e.g., Smith, 1991), portraiture (e.g., Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1998), fiction as inquiry (e.g., Eisner, 1997), and more. Many of these approaches overlap.

Many inquirers have not only questioned whose knowledge should be considered valid and how experience should be interpreted, theorized, and represented, but also confronted issues of equity, equality, social justice, and societal change through research and action (He, 2010). Many of these researchers perceive inquiry and writing as a form of libratory or radical democratic practice (e.g., Ayers, Hunt, & Quinn, 1998; Freire, 1970; Grande, 2004; Giroux, 2004; McLaren, 2002; Simon, 1991). Many of these researchers, in varying degrees, search for autobiographical and cultural roots of inquiries; bring personal, professional, and cultural experience to research; let participants to name research problems and define research questions; immerse themselves in the lives of participants in various cultural milieus as they collect stories, oral histories, or other forms of data; and make meaning of inquiries in relationship with participants with various cultural and linguistic backgrounds. These researchers are searching new ways to look at, think about, and write about their inquiries. The key to these approaches is the recognition that researcher is not separate from the cultural phenomena of the inquiry, the stories/oral histories/data collected, findings, interpretations, and writings. As we explore forms of inquiry in our research programs we illuminate what we think of as the cultural qualities and potentials of research and make connections between complex cultural phenomena, inquiries, and representation possibilities to foster social justice, social and educational change engendered from research and writing.

The presenter will also give an overview of various culturally, linguistically, and politically relevant inquiry methods creatively utilized in diverse forms of dissertation research such as cross-cultural narrative inquiry, critical race narrative inquiry, critical race geographical narrative inquiry, auto/biographical inquiry, critical ethnographic inquiry, critical aesthetic inquiry, critical portraiture, memoir, fiction, oral history, documentary film, painting, and poetry. Innovative writings engendered from those inquiries will be also briefly mentioned which will lead to individual performative presentations.

Author

• Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University