Performance in Thematic Analysis (Poster 9)

• In Event: Themes Without Coding: Expanding Approaches to Thematic Analysis

Abstract

Continuing reliance on Enlightenment thinking founded in science and reason has foreclosed ways of knowing that are rooted in embodied experience, orality, context and sensing. Performance offers ways of knowing and being in thematic analysis that may not be possible through other onto-epistemologies. Additionally, performance is always already fleeting, ephemeral, and liminal. On the other hand, thematic analysis has been theorized and taught in the existing methodological literature though a much different approach. In many of the introductory qualitative texts, which often lay the foundation for students' introduction to qualitative inquiry, "traditional" (Braun & Clark, 2006) thematic analysis is approached as a procedural (often prescribed) process during which inquirers follow step-by-step instructions for making meaning with their data, employing terms such as “data reduction” (Grbich, 2013, p. 61), “pins down” (Flick, 2014, p. 422), and “conclusions more easily drawn” (Pajo, 2017, p. 292). In contrast to some of the more established methods for conducting thematic analysis, the ephemeral and embodied nature that defines performance cannot be reduced; performance resists pinning down. This paper posits that the field of performance studies makes an important contribution to thematic analysis and explores the ways performance expands processes of meaning making. In particular, this paper offers ways for qualitative researchers to consider how human beings perform to make culture, affect power, and reinvent their lives. Unlike “traditional thematic analysis” that insists on reduction and simplification, performance disrupts static and reductive representation. As Pollock (2005) succinctly put it, "Performance won't stand still long enough for theory to wrap it up nicely" (p. 1). To these ends, through sharing excerpted transcripts and comparing a performance-focused analysis to a traditional thematic analysis, I show how performance brings rich frames for conducting data analysis.

Author

• Joseph D. Sweet, University of North Carolina - Pembroke