Doing Research Somewhere Between Nowhere and Everywhere: A Case Examination of How Place Matters

• In Event: Interrogating (Un)Masking in Qualitative Inquiry at the Intersections of Critical Geographies and Spatial Justice

Abstract

Educational researchers regularly use pseudonyms to reference their study sites. The practice is so pervasive as to have become an unexamined default (Lahman, et al, 2015; Lang et al, 2016) laden with methodological and ethical presumptions because little good can be imagined from actually naming where we have conducted our research (Guenther, 2009; Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017; Stein, 2010). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a retrospective interview with one researcher whose work in Garden City, Kansas, has spanned over three decade’s time, I explore how the decision to identify a research site—and thus study a particular somewhere rather than a fictional nowhere or generalized everywhere—has mattered. Specifically, I engage select tensions between whether such disguises are possible or beneficial in relation to 1) what motivates external funders and the communities under study, 2) what informs similarly interested academic, journalistic, and other constituents around a common understanding of place and social phenomenon, and 3) how an explicitly referenced place can advance questions of scholarly and public relevance.

Author

• Jennifer C. Ng, The University of Kansas