A Layering of Selves: Bias, Subjectivity, and Paper Dolls (Poster 10)

• In Event: Artful Inquiry in Qualitative Research: Philosophies and Enactments

Abstract

This poster examines the ways that qualitative research students often understand and engage with subjectivity, bias, and objectivity—all important concepts in the field (Peshkin, 1988; Preissle, 2008; Author, 2015, 2024a), with an artful twist. Our teaching experience has emphasized the degrees to which students understand subjectivity, and bias as an element of subjectivity, as a problem to be solved by objectivity, and the inadequacy of current common teaching practices, such as subjectivity statements, to address these concerns. As we have engaged in our own qualitative inquiries and supported students’ efforts to navigate the field, we have come to appreciate the challenges, inconsistencies, and seeming impossibilities of navigating subjectivity and bias as part of understanding and doing qualitative research (e.g., Finlay & Gough, 2003; Peshkin, 1988; Preissle, 2008; Author, 2024b). Here, we share an artful effort to disrupt conventional engagements with these concepts. Inspired by Haraway’s (1988; 2016) emphasis on embodied layers of subjectivity and Barad’s (2014) discussion of cutting together-apart as a creative, generative, and playful process, we draw from collaging in/as research (Chilton & Scotti, 2014; Scotti & Chilton, 2017) to offer paper dolls as a constructive and disruptive way to invite students to consider themselves as multifaceted participants in/of the research process. We will share examples from students’ and our own efforts. Each person examined layerings of self within the research process by building at least five layers of/for our dolls, and then afterward reflected on the process, our choices, and our products through a writing activity on a classwide collaborative online bulletin board with guiding questions. These paper dolls were certainly fun, but they were also challenging and illuminating. Each slice of the paper, each folded tab to hold a layer in place, invited new discoveries of self and of what it means to do research and be a researcher.
Layers. Cutting. (Re)Assembling. Playfulness. Joy.
This play was “quite practical,” as it pushed students and us to make “embodied discoveries” that literally entwined our various identities, experiences, and positionalities (Scotti & Chilton, 2017, p. 360). Rather than conventional and problematic tendencies to approach subjectivity as a checklist, as a researcher confessional, or as a step in achieving objectivity, the paper dolls made subjectivity a personal, constant, and overlapping concept that stretched across the personal and professional. This mode of artful inquiry offered students and us new and “lively languages” that helped us to “actively intertwine in the production” of both old and new: engaging with the longstanding concepts of researcher identities and subjectivities, and doing so in ways that open new “fields of possible bodies and meanings” within qualitative research (Haraway, 1988, p. 596).  


[References omitted here due to word count (form lacks a separate field for references). See submission document.]

Authors

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

• April M. Jones, University of Alabama