Reading as Relational: A Feminist/Queer Analytic Method (Poster 11)

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

Abstract

Objectives
Despite being pervasive as a practice, reading is generally conceptualized as preceding methods of qualitative analysis, rather than a method of analysis itself. Certainly, researchers read transcriptions, documents, archival data, and other texts as they engage in their analytic processes; however, we wonder what happens when reading operates as a practice that disrupts reductive practices of data analysis (i.e., coding)? What happens when reading is elevated as a practice of relational and reflexive data analysis that serves to generate ‘themes’? In this poster, we think-with these questions and explore reading as a method of thematic analysis.

Theoretical Framework/Modes of Inquiry
In this poster, we explore feminist and queer theoretical lenses for both reader response (Rosenblatt; 1991) and alterity (Britzman; 1998) literacy approaches. Reader response centers relationality by drawing on the reader’s/researcher’s personal connections to the text/data as the basis of generating findings, and alterity demands reflexivity as the approach actively works to disrupt readers/researchers forming personal connections between self and text. Freire (1970) noted, “themes exist in people in their relations with the world” (p. 106); thus, the practices of relationality and reflexivity become differently important to reading as analysis.

Data Sources
This poster provides examples from both authors. For instance, Author1 shares a collaborative study on academic women and the ways in which Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1986/2020) carrier bag theory of fiction inspired a feminist theoretical and methodological exploration of reading and analyzing the mothers’ narratives. In addition, Author2 discusses a second collaborative study on graduate student women that drew inspiration from Barad’s (2015) concept of cutting together-apart, queering traditional conceptions of self and other(s) through a focus on reading for intra-action and dis/connection. Through these studies, the authors explored how reading became an integral part of an iterative and highly collaborative analytic process.

Substantiated conclusions
In this poster, we attend to how we, as researchers and readers, are necessarily and inextricably woven into the transcripts and data with which we engaged. The contradictions and relational overlaps were, throughout our reading, not a problem but instead the point. Reading as thematic analysis opens us to attend to the nuances of the participants’ stories in important ways that were aligned with the feminist and queer theoretical frameworks within the respective studies.

Scholarly Significance
Because reading has often been dismissed as a prelude to qualitative analysis, or is conflated with other more “legible” or “accepted” analytic practices, we invite future researchers to explore how they approach/conceptualize reading in their analyses. As such, we encourage scholars to attune themselves to reflexive and relational reading practices, and to consider if/how that reading is analytic in nature. We assert that reading is more than a means toward an analytic end, but is an analytic practice worthwhile for discussion and further exploration.

Authors

• Kelly W. Guyotte, University of Alabama

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill