Rethinking Trustworthiness as a Materially Ethical Activity in Qualitative Inquiry (Poster 7)

• In Event: Manufacturing Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research

Abstract

In this poster, we explore how the global ravaging of COVID-19 converged with the United States’ profound social unrest following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and the egregious murder of Ahmuad Arbery by a neighborhood vigilante, creating an “immediate now” (Kuntz, 2019). In the midst of this “immediate now,” our research team spent nine months online with faculty, staff, and administrators in one middle school in the Deep South between March and December 2020, and trustworthiness, for us, became what Aaron Kuntz (2019) calls a materially ethical activity.

While the original intent of our project was to explore how this middle school might use COVID-19 as a catalyst to reimagine a more equitable and just education for its students, this convergence of events created an opportunity for us as both humans and qualitative inquirers to let go “of control, of tendencies toward prescription, of habit” in order to generate new processes “of living, being, becoming” Kuntz (2019, p.68). In other words, as we met weekly online with teachers, staff, and administrators and listened to the daily--and sometimes hourly--decisions they had to make in response to government and district directives and the social, emotional, and health concerns of their school community, our conversations that followed centered on the ethical responsibilities we had to the community. Those responsibilities were not about capturing and representing what was unfolding in the present--that was not possible--but instead what new and different kinds of processes we might invent that could be useful to the school community right then, as each moment changed, shifted before our eyes. As Kuntz (2019) reminds us, “We cannot fully understand the present. Capture is not a possibility. Simultaneity is too much. So what then is the role of inquiry if not to know the now? It is to invent. To create.” (p. 40) This materially ethical orientation allowed us to live, be, become in the “immediate now,” to invent as we went--to live differently within the ever-evolving structures of the government, the school district, the university, and our lives.

In the presentation, we will draw on these concepts and our experiences to rethink how we might attend to trustworthiness in qualitative inquiry in ways that move beyond traditional notions of credibility and recognizability (Tracy, 2010). We will discuss the ethical dilemmas we faced and how we navigated the tension between honoring the school community and critiquing systemic issues. We suggest here that trustworthiness in qualitative inquiry is a materially ethical activity (Kuntz, 2019) that requires researchers to be constantly attuned to the “immediate now” so we can turn toward more creative and inventive processes and away from static representationalism.

Authors

• Hilary E. Hughes, University of Georgia

• Amy S Murphy, University of Georgia

• Rachel Ranschaert, University of North Texas

• Kelsey Benson, University of Georgia