Using Cultural Production Theory and Ricoeur’s Philosophical Hermeneutics as a Framework to Explore Individual Interpretations

• In Event: Roundtable Session 75
  In Roundtable Session: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Critical Theories in Qualitative Research

Abstract

In exploring the experiences of female first-generation students as science majors at a research university, cultural production theory was used as a theoretical lens in order to explore how these students felt that their experiences in undergraduate science were influenced by their gender, race/ethnicity, and/or class, with the data analysis grounded in the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur (1984; 1992). The authors developed data analysis questions using Ricoeur’s (1984) ideas of narrative configuration to explore which common cultural understandings were used by participants to make meaning of their lived experience. These questions provide a strategy to examine how participants may be referring to common cultural understandings but their individual interpretations of these understandings can have different implications for their meaning-making.

Authors

• Rachel Wilson, Appalachian State University

• Julie Kittleson, University of Georgia