The Story Is in the Data: An Afro-Futuristic Approach to Restorying the Dissertation

• In Event: Doing Diss. Differently: Black Aesthetics, Hip-Hop Scholarship, and the Dissertation

Abstract

In this paper, I outline the methods used to restory research data into a speculative fiction novel. Using the format of an author reading, I focalize how I transformed traditional dissertation data and analysis methods into a non-traditional dissertation format. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) suggest that narrative researchers are the narrators of the story. In my dissertation, I embody this stance of researcher as narrator by writing a speculative fiction story from a first-person perspective. Not only does this format align with narrative inquiry, however, it also aligns with womanism (Phillips, 2006) and Muted Group Theory (Ardener, 2006), the theoretical frames that guided my project. Explicitly, storying this research embraces the theories by honoring various modes of storytelling, upending rigid lines that determine how research has to be structured, honoring a collaborative narrative creation, and acknowledging the otherworldly, the possible.
My principal research question was: How might Black girls use written and oral storytelling to discuss, critique, and subvert experiences with social in/justice? To obtain the data, I conducted a writer’s workshop in which seven girls and I engaged in multiple activities that would lead us to the creation of Afrofuturist short stories. Data sources included 32 hours of audio from the writing workshops, 10 hours of audio from the individual interviews, 20-25 written artifacts from each girl, and researcher field notes and reflections.
To analyze the data, I used narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Riessman (2008) notes that a thematic narrative analysis requires researchers to work with interviews and artifacts to isolate relevant plot points into a chronologically cohesive story. The written report is filled with stories that the researcher interprets using their theoretical lenses. My coding process was iterative and reflexive. I read and reread the data, coding for spaces where I found patterns and themes to generate larger categories in which my codes could be combined. I then reviewed the themes I constructed against the corpus of data and against my theoretical framework, re-coding additional data as necessary.
I used speculative storytelling to communicate the research, threading prominent themes obtained from the thematic analysis throughout the story. The introduction was used as a space for world building, constructing an imaginary world that uses details from the present as a way to construct the statement of the problem. It was also the reflexive space where I grounded myself in the study, as reflexivity and excavating the researchers’ story is imperative for narrative research. Instead of a traditional literature review, I created composite characters to represent the scholars who are informing my work and to represent the theories that guide this work. In lieu of a traditional findings and discussion section, I created dialogue, characterization, setting, and plot information from the interviews, written artifacts, and short stories. I use the epilogue and author’s note to denote the significance of the study to education research. In this way, each traditional dissertation section is still represented even though I presented the data unconventionally.

Author

• Stephanie R Toliver, University of Colorado - Boulder