Reorienting Method: Counter-Story, Embodiment, and Refusal as Currency in Qualitative Inquiry

Session Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This session centers scholars who treat method not as neutral procedure but as cultural, political, and ontological currency. Each paper engages counter-story, embodiment, and refusal to reorient qualitative inquiry toward practices that emerge from historically marginalized communities. Working through dance, archival grief, speculative theory, and culturally rooted storytelling, presenters foreground nonlinear temporality, epistemic specificity, and methodological dissent. Together, these works disrupt extractive research norms and offer textured approaches that honor lived experience, complexity, and memory. This session models how qualitative research can hold multiplicity, reject containment, and move with—and through—the communities it seeks to engage.

Sub Unit

• Division D - Measurement and Research Methodologies / Division D - Section 3: Qualitative Methodologies

Chair

• Daniel Thalkar, University of San Diego

Papers

• A (Hopeful) Theory of Everything: Counter-storytelling with Chela Sandoval and Ernst Bloch - Daniel Thalkar, University of San Diego

• Dancing Themselves Free: A Qualitative Study Examining Black Girls' Embodied Literacies in Majorette Dance Spaces - Tempestt S. Johnson, University of South Carolina

• Echoes Without Sanctuary: A Black Queer Feminist Methodology of Grief - Ashley Williams, University of Georgia

• Challenging Dominant Paradigms: Culturally Relevant Research Methods - Michelle Parkins, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Session Organizer

• Kakali Bhattacharya, University of Florida