Complicated Attempts at Soft and Slow Data Analysis: The Relational Potential of Descriptive Review With Co-Researchers

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 10:50 am
  In Roundtable Session: Describing the Immeasurable: The Transformative Potential of Descriptive Review for Teaching, Learning, and Research (Table 29)

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores how descriptive review was used by a group of three Indigenous, three racialized and two white co-researchers, who were femme* and dis/abled, to collaboratively analyze art that they made over a seven month participatory-informed, arts-based project. The goals of the paper are to discuss the relational potential of descriptive review for collaborative research and to note what we can learn from how difficult it is to approach data analysis slowly.
Theoretical framework
There are two key concepts underpinning the analysis: (1) softness and (2) slowness.
“Softness” can be understood as a politic that values relationality, emotionality, and connectedness. It is rooted in a disabled femme of colour theoretic (Kafai, 2021; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Schwartz, 2020), a Black feminist love politic (Nash, 2011), and matriarchal perspectives of kinship (Anderson, 2010; TallBear, 2018).
“Slowness,” or “being lazy" as Shahjahan (2015) calls it, is a decolonizing perspective that involves caring less about always getting a desired result and instead cultivating greater embodiment. It is interconnected to softness’s commitment to relationality and is one attempt at rejecting colonial notions of time (Shahjahan, 2015).
Methods and data sources
The methodology used was dream-mapping (Cavanaugh, 2023), an arts-based participatory-informed approach. There were three main data sources: art, semi-structured interviews, and field notes. The art was collaboratively analyzed using descriptive review (Himely, 2002/2011). The interviews and field notes were individually analyzed by myself using a thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2022): first memo-ing, then identifying initial codes, followed by naming and refining themes iteratively.
Results
This paper will present two findings:
Describing and noticing each other’s work can cultivate connectedness. The ways do-researchers talked about each other’s art focused on feeling, mutual support, and connectedness and left many of the educators and youth feeling more confident that they had something worthwhile to say.
Softness and slowness in research takes unlearning. Analyzing slowly (trying to linger with what is in front of us before making sense of it) or "being lazy” in our analysis (being more embodied and less focused on results) was difficult. It was challenging for us all to not jump to interpreting and analyzing art during the descriptive review process. It was also hard for everyone to do less in the art-making and analysis process despite us having intentional conversations about it being okay to participate in different ways, including opting out.
Scholarly significance
Pedagogically, descriptive review has often been used by educators to appreciate individual students’ meaning-making and, methodologically, to closely examine written and visual data of participants. It has yet to be fulsomely discussed as a collaborative analysis tool for co-researching in participatory research. If intentionally “soft” and “slow," descriptive review might be a tool for queering, femme-inizing, cripping analyses and delinking from colonial logics of meaning-making in research.

Author

• Lindsay Cavanaugh, University of Toronto