The Paradox of Mourning Qualitative Research

• In Event: Working Through Methodologies Without a Proper Name

Abstract

Purpose: In this paper, we (colleagues across institutions; professors/students within a university) embrace the tension between using the label qualitative research to signal to a field of inquiry inclusive of multiple methodologies and the assertion that is it time to give up that label. Specifically, we take up Derrida’s (2001) text, The Work of Mourning, to produce and map paradoxes of mourning that happen as we come together to discuss our individual histories with qualitative research. The goal is to maintain qualitative research as an unrepeatable event that can address the complex social worlds in which we live and work.

The Research: Scholars have found the label qualitative research useful for various reasons, such as responding to inadequacies of positivism. Simultaneously, qualitative research as a proper name is problematic because it gathers in umbrella-like fashion a motley crew of enactments and productions of methodologies. Rather than “forcing one structure to fit all circumstances,” Koro-Ljungberg (2016) suggests that “scholars ought to get surprised, confused, disoriented, and uncomfortable” (p. 6) with methodology. To do that, we position qualitative research as an event – that which “cannot be fully fathomed or analyzed, but only inhabited, settled into, coped with” (Caputo, 1993, p. 94).

Specifically, Derrida’s (2001) talk of mourning helps us cope with the event of qualitative research and the impossibility (and necessity) of using a label that problematically simplifies it. For Derrida, mourning does not simply lament a loss, but is a productive and affirmative paradox. Singularity, for example, is most apparent in the unrepeatable event of a person’s death. Yet, our mourning is always bounded by practices that are repeatable and known. Rather than mourning being finished, then, it remains open to never-ending questions of responsibility to the other. For us, a death of qualitative research is wrapped up in mourning multiple others, including mentors, ourselves as methodologists and professors of methodology, methodologists we cite, and philosophical texts we have always read alongside methodology.

To explore those questions of responsibility, we create parameters (e.g., timelines for reading theory, data collection sites like Google Docs, modes of collaboration) for a qualitative research study, which becomes a scene for mourning the label qualitative research. We map (on paper and unexpected platforms) the research that is produced, the paradoxes in labeling that work qualitative research, and how all of those data force us to construct responsibility in relation to what we do. Rather than relying on a predetermined ethics that can be mechanistically applied, this exploration resulted in practices of mourning (including collaborative practices across colleagues and students/teachers) that cannot be repeated but “that provoke different and new ethical and practical questions about urgent decision making”(Koro-Ljungberg, 2016, p. 119).

Significance: Particularly in an increasingly pervasive audit culture, qualitative researchers need to approach labels critically, lest we be lumped together and dispensed with at once. As educational researchers seek to maintain a capacious qualitative research to address the complexities of school and society, new understandings and enactments of responsibilities outside duty (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016) must be produced.

Authors

• Jessica Van Cleave, Mars Hill University

• Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, Georgia State University

• Travis Marn, University of South Florida

• Csaba Osvath, University of South Florida

• Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, University of South Florida