Jasmine Ulmer
Wayne State University, Education, Faculty Member
- Communication, Communications, Educational Leadership, Educational Leadership and Change, Humanities, Humanities and Social Science, and 40 moreEnvironmental Humanities, Arts and Humanities, Ecocriticism, Speculative Fiction, Culture and the Anthropocene, Anthropocene studies, Utopian, Dystopian, and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Utopian Literature, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Science Fiction Studies, Utopia and Science Fiction, Slow Philosophy, Literature, Literatura Latinoamericana, Literatura, Comparative Literature, Transdisciplinarity, Transdisciplinary research, Interdisciplinary Studies, Interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinary research (Social Sciences), Program Evaluation, Change Leadership, Leadership and change management, Higher Education, Higher Education Management, Anthropological Theory, Peace Education, Visual Communication, Anthropocene, Visual Studies, Visual Culture, Qualitative methodology, Qualitative Research, Qualitative Research Methods, Research Methodology, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methods and Methodology, Organizational Studies, and Critical Organizational Communication Studiesedit
It is easy to feel small, powerless, and unable to spark any sort of change. Being only one person among billions can seem overwhelming indeed. So much is completely beyond our control. There are only a limited set of decisions that... more
It is easy to feel small, powerless, and unable to spark any sort of change. Being only one person among billions can seem overwhelming indeed. So much is completely beyond our control. There are only a limited set of decisions that people are able to make in life, generally speaking. Given the circumstances, however, there are even fewer decisions that folks will be able to make from here. Of the choices that remain, one involves whether or not we choose to engage in a shared and collaborative practice—of whether or not we are committed to the people in our lives, to the people on this planet, and to the other forms of life on Earth. As such, this is a book about survival in the face of mass extinctions, including those of the academic type. This is a book about ethical research practices, about simple truths, about the commitments we initially made to this work, and about how we might better support each other along the way. Most importantly, this is a book about finding and making our own communities. Communities do not belong to any one person or small group of people. Rather, communities—genuine, real, and vibrant communities—belong to us all. This is a book about how.
Research Interests: Feminist Theory, Qualitative methodology, Qualitative Methods, Cultural Theory, Academic Writing, and 15 moreCollaboration, Hope, Pedagogy, Feminism, Shared Leadership, Qualitative Research, Epistolary literature, Shared decision making, Feminist Research Methods, Arts-Based Research, Research Writing, Anthropocene, Kindness, Writing Qualitative Research, and Critical Qualitative Research Methodologies
What is feminist transdisciplinary research? Why is it important? How do we do it? Through nineteen contributions from leading international feminist scholars, this book provides new insights into activating transdisciplinary feminist... more
What is feminist transdisciplinary research? Why is it important? How do we do it? Through nineteen contributions from leading international feminist scholars, this book provides new insights into activating transdisciplinary feminist theories, methods and practices in original, creative and exciting ways – ways that make a difference both to what research is and does, and to what counts as knowledge. The contributors draw on their own original research and engage an impressive array of contemporary theorizing – including new materialism, decolonialism, critical disability studies, historical analyses, Black, Indigenous and Latina Feminisms, queer feminisms, Womanist Methodologies, trans studies, arts-based research, philosophy, spirituality, science studies and sports studies – to trouble traditional conceptions of research, method and praxis. The authors show how working beyond disciplinary boundaries, and integrating insights from different disciplines to produce new knowledge, can prompt important new transdisciplinarity thinking and activism in relation to ongoing feminist concerns about knowledge, power and gender. In doing so, the book attends to the multiple lineages of feminist theory and practice and seeks to bring these historical differences and intersections into play with current changes, challenges and opportunities in feminism. The book’s practically-grounded examples and wide-ranging theoretical orbit are likely to make it an invaluable resource for established scholars and emerging researchers in the social sciences, arts, humanities, education, and beyond.
Research Interests: Feminist Theory, Interdisciplinarity, Feminist Philosophy, Feminist Disability Studies, Transdisciplinarity, and 12 moreApplied Transdisciplinarity, Feminism, Feminist Ethics, Feminist activism, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, Interdisciplinary Studies, Interdisciplinary research (Social Sciences), Feminist studies, TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, Feminist Theories, Transdisciplinary Practice, and Transdisciplinary research
Reorganizing our library during the pandemic, James secretly placed Jasmine's copy of The Hundreds by his copy of Exercises in Style, the latter offering 99 different narrations of the same story. In our accidentally large archive of... more
Reorganizing our library during the pandemic, James secretly placed Jasmine's copy of The Hundreds by his copy of Exercises in Style, the latter offering 99 different narrations of the same story. In our accidentally large archive of abstracts for which we never wrote papers, we had a collection of constrained writings, all iterations of our shared research narrative. Many of these were unsubmitted responses to calls for papers (CFPs), conferences we were not able to attend, or papers we never got around to writing. We share the following sample of 24 abstracts here as an invitation, should anyone wish to develop these ideas. Furthermore, abstracts themselves constitute a genre of scholarly communications, the art of which might be developed to make research more accessible, abstracts themselves being situated in front of paywalls. Ultimately, this project led to the 25th abstract and introduction to our podcast, the Researchers' Cardbox.
Research Interests: Genre studies, Scholarly Communication, Transdisciplinarity, Podcasting, Abstracting, and 11 moreAcademic Publishing, TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, Information and Communication Sciences, Abstract, Call for Papers, Podcast, Research Abstract, Scholarly Publishing, Call for Papers, Cultural Studies, Indexing and Abstracting, and Communications
Teaching matters. And there are many ways to teach, particularly when it comes to qualitative inquiry. Accordingly, we consider how qualitative pedagogical practices can attend to the ways in which we live and learn in our more-than-human... more
Teaching matters. And there are many ways to teach, particularly when it comes to qualitative inquiry. Accordingly, we consider how qualitative pedagogical practices can attend to the ways in which we live and learn in our more-than-human world. To keep within a pedagogical frame, we write this introductory article through a pedagogical lens. We hope we make transparent why we conceptualized this special issue, how we envision pedagogies individually and collectively, how we approached each step through a pedagogical lens, and what we’ve learned since. Along the way, we ask the following: What are pedagogies? When and where do they happen in qualitative research? Moreover, what do they produce? These are among the questions that—as qualitative teachers, learners, scholars, and guest editors—we offer an invitation for readers to explore.
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There are many ways to frame how and why we go about research, particularly when it comes to unsettling traditions. From the beginning of our studies, we can be encouraged (or even required) to situate our contributions within gaps, or... more
There are many ways to frame how and why we go about research, particularly when it comes to unsettling traditions. From the beginning of our studies, we can be encouraged (or even required) to situate our contributions within gaps, or deficits, in the existing literature. This teaches us to launch our work on the limitations of others. As an alternative, I wonder how scholarship might turn on its own merits, instead. I suggest that care and gratitude offer two important possibilities.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Dance Studies, Choreographic Methodologies, Axiology, Qualitative methodology, and 15 moreQualitative Methods, Critical Pedagogy, Academic Writing, Choreography, Choreography (Research Methodology), Qualitative Research (Education), Phd Writing, Qualitative Research Methods, Dance Education, Dutch Literature, Gratitude, Belgian Literature, Research Writing, Kindness, and Critical Qualitative Research Methodologies
Although this is a simple message, the time for community and kindness is now. Competing with other inquirers can yield individual rewards, but such moves risk sacrificing our collective futures for both immediate and rapidly diminishing... more
Although this is a simple message, the time for community and kindness is now. Competing with other inquirers can yield individual rewards, but such moves risk sacrificing our collective futures for both immediate and rapidly diminishing gains. A commitment to inclusive and welcoming qualitative communities, however, opens different paths. As such, this conceptual article suggests that collaboration and cooperation are not simply collegial matters: they are necessary in these troubled times. Differences over whose approaches are “right,” “best,” or “most appropriate” can be not only unproductive but also counterproductive in sustaining futures that include us all. When threats to democratic inquiry seek to divide us, there is no need to divide ourselves and forgo the joyful work that can be found in qualitative inquiry.
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What if—in light of the escalating pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology? Because this question moves beyond slowing the pace or volume of productivity to address underlying issues of ontology, it asks not how we... more
What if—in light of the escalating pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology? Because this question moves beyond slowing the pace or volume of productivity to address underlying issues of ontology, it asks not how we can find a slower way of doing scholarship, but how we can find a slower way of scholarly being. A philosophy of Slowness has sparked movements around the globe regarding Slow Food and Slow Cities; these and similar movements disrupt daily practices that prioritize speed, efficiency, and output at the expense of quality. In response, a Slow Ontology approaches writing as a site of creative intervention. This article offers methodological possibilities for writing a Slow Ontology in qualitative inquiry: each attends to how we might write the materiality of our local environments. In writing a Slow Ontology, researchers might create writing that is not unproductive, but is differently productive.
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The posthuman turn has radically–and rapidly–shifted what is possible in research methodology. In response, my aim in this conceptual paper is to suggest entry points into posthuman educational research methodology. I outline aspects of... more
The posthuman turn has radically–and rapidly–shifted what is possible in research methodology. In response, my aim in this conceptual paper is to suggest entry points into posthuman educational research methodology. I outline aspects of posthumanism while recognizing its multiplicity: there are many posthumanisms and each offers different twists, turns, and ways of thinking about methodology. In unfolding the potentials thereof, I locate posthumanism within our current epoch, which some scholars have suggested be renamed the Anthropocene to account for the impact of humanity on the planet. Then, I describe how posthumanism situates, processes, and affirms knowledge in interconnected and material contexts. Next, I consider how non-representational research imagines and animates methodologies that think differently. I conclude by discussing a postdisciplinary future for more-than-critical inquiries. Significantly, this article addresses recent advancements in posthuman research and engages with ongoing theoretical, methodological, and ethical debates.
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This brief essay engages with environmental stewardship and scale in the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Kees Boeke’s illustrated children’s book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps and Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten—a... more
This brief essay engages with environmental stewardship and scale in the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Kees Boeke’s illustrated children’s book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps and Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten—a short film based on Boeke’s book—this photo essay illustrates how, through the production of eco-art, the practice of macro photography can suggest the presence of worlds within one’s world. Creative engagements are offered so that children and adults, who must all live through and contend with the Anthropocene, might appreciate notions of environmental scale, particularly in relation to our ecological footprints over time. In so doing, visual media such as illustrated books, films, and macro photography encourage sustainability on a larger scale than humanity has yet to imagine.
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With a pedagogical aim, we offer an overview of some, though certainly not all, of the potential initial framing considerations in forced displacement research. We then engage with several of the key terms currently in use by... more
With a pedagogical aim, we offer an overview of some, though certainly not all, of the potential initial framing considerations in forced displacement research. We then engage with several of the key terms currently in use by international agencies before discussing how those terms can be (re)interpreted as they are taken up in transnational contexts. In attending to the ethics of naming throughout, we suggest that terms developed by international policy bodies should be approached situationally in disasters as part of humanitarian aid. Just as document-specific definitions need not go beyond the document, situation-specific terms should not become oppressive labels that have the potential to stigmatize people for the rest of their lives. Thus, we caution against assigning such terms as fixed identity categories, as they have the potential to reduce a person to a situation in which they may have once found themselves.
Research Interests: Political Philosophy, Social Policy, Refugee Studies, Immigration, Immigration Law, and 8 moreAfrican Disapora Studies, Forced Migration, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), Contemporary Political Theory, Refugees and Forced Migration Studies, The status of the refugees and the internally displaced under international law, Political Theory of Borders and Mobility, and Public Policy
Photographic and citational practices tend to be approached as separate acts. Photography—the etymology of which involves writing with light—emanates from the materiality and spatio-temporality of a physical site. In this sense, given... more
Photographic and citational practices tend to be approached as separate acts. Photography—the etymology of which involves writing with light—emanates from the materiality and spatio-temporality of a physical site. In this sense, given that photo- graphs make aesthetic reference to matter within a specific site in space and time, photographs could be thought of as sitation- al. And yet, in the act of making references, photographs could be thought of as citational, too. Photographs are created by someone, somewhere, trying to communicate something; in so doing, photographs cite every- day points of reference that accumulate in our collective memories and archives over time. Photographs are evidence—written in light—of thoughts or expressions or events that have already occurred. As references, photographs operate through the site / cite.
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Rereading Walter Benjamin's often overlooked theme of preservation in his work, we offer an interpretation of an art installation that appeared in the winter of 2018 in The Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan, USA. By interpreting... more
Rereading Walter Benjamin's often overlooked theme of preservation in his work, we offer an interpretation of an art installation that appeared in the winter of 2018 in The Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan, USA. By interpreting this installation and Benjamin's insights on preservation, we make recommendations on how to make readable rhetoric that might be used to positively shape digitally disseminated climate change activist media. We examine three types of preservation: 1. preservation that makes inaccessible, 2. dialectical preservation, and 3. the preservation of the collected. In so doing, we show how performative acts of publicly available art might directly respond to the environmental crisis and how the legibility of that art might offer hope for survival in the age of climate change.
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In photo essay form, text and images show how us how we can decelerate and refocus the Anthropocenic gaze.
Research Interests: Visual Studies, Photographs, Photography, Posthumanism, Qualitative methodology, and 13 moreVisual Culture, Qualitative Methods, Critical Posthumanism, Photography Theory, Visual Communication, Qualitative Research, Philosophy of Photography, Visual Methodologies, Arts-based methodologies, Arts-Based Research, Anthropocene studies, Anthropocene, and Arts and Humanities
This practice-based article illustrates how dance education pedagogies can help refugee youth adjust to new settings. To support refugee youth in narrating aspects of belonging in their everyday lives, this article offers pedagogies for... more
This practice-based article illustrates how dance education pedagogies can help refugee youth adjust to new settings. To support refugee youth in narrating aspects of belonging in their everyday lives, this article offers pedagogies for creative movement that unfold through multiple stages. As developed in the first author’s dissertation study and shared here, the teaching exercise includes walk stories, storyboarding, still frames, sequencing, music, props, and dance. The different elements come together into visual autobiographical narrations, or finales of created movement. By creating movement that is meaningful, children and youth are able to shape curricula in relevant ways that respond to and reclaim their lived experiences. Significantly, this pedagogical exercise offers opportunities for children and youth to explore local communities through creative movement.
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This article proposes a posthuman / materialist somatechnics approach which encourages a more nuanced, ethical, and embodied attentiveness to how humans, nature, and materialities are not separate, but actively emerge through... more
This article proposes a posthuman / materialist somatechnics approach which encourages a more nuanced, ethical, and embodied attentiveness to how humans, nature, and materialities are not separate, but actively emerge through entanglements and in co-constitutive relation with one another. Such an attentiveness recognises that we are shaped by the places in which we live and by the many others – human and nonhuman – with whom we live. It also urges the need to reshape research methodologies. To illuminate how we might more closely attend to the places in which we live, learn, teach, inquire, and research, this article offers a series of situated, speculative, and somatechnic engagements arising from our recent ventures in two separate post-industrial cities. The article is framed as a mode of writing otherwise – as a series of experimental elemental essays and the theory-practice diffractive musings they have given rise to. Taken together, the essays and musings aim to contest deficit discourses of post-industrial cities and the multiple bodies who / which inhabit them. The posthuman situated and speculative somatechnics approach we propose offers insights into unexpected and surprising new relations. We hope the elemental essays and musings which follow invite readers to take up the ‘practice of the pause’ in their own places and spaces.
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Though the Anthropocene potentially is many things, a strategic plan is not one of them. Rather, it offers a warning, an important concept, an opening to rethink research methodology, and an opportunity for higher education to work toward... more
Though the Anthropocene potentially is many things, a strategic plan is not one of them. Rather, it offers a warning, an important concept, an opening to rethink research methodology, and an opportunity for higher education to work toward better futures for (and with) the planet. The Anthropocene also asks difficult questions of how we might do differently, live differently, and go about research through more generative and sustaining processes. Simultaneously, it can replicate some of the same habits that may have brought the Anthropocene to bear. To illustrate, I consider how research is produced both in and about the Anthropocene. I then caution against turning the Anthropocene into an industry before suggesting that—in the midst of its enormity—we might foster little practices that work differently for tomorrow, beginning with today.
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In this visual essay we revisit a summer immersion, Ecologies of Girlhood. An array of women curators, storytellers, musicians, performers, artists, ecologists, scientists and scholars shared their practices in an intergenerational and... more
In this visual essay we revisit a summer immersion, Ecologies of Girlhood. An array of women curators, storytellers, musicians, performers, artists, ecologists, scientists and scholars shared their practices in an intergenerational and interdisciplinary format with a group of girls between the ages of 7and 10. The immersion unfolded through a series of walking provocations sparked by local elements – indigenous plants, stories, poetry, ballads, sheroes, rivers, streetscapes and art. Exploring playful
modes of curating, the girls gathered some of these moments and objects together, as last day overflowed into an exhibition with pop-up lectures, performances, and opportunities for making, learning and teaching. For us, curating with embraces our alongsideness with, rather than our acquisition of, what is ecologically threaded through girlhood, and offers a way of creatively placing and performing ourselves within the contributions of women in Appalachia, with the land and with one another.
modes of curating, the girls gathered some of these moments and objects together, as last day overflowed into an exhibition with pop-up lectures, performances, and opportunities for making, learning and teaching. For us, curating with embraces our alongsideness with, rather than our acquisition of, what is ecologically threaded through girlhood, and offers a way of creatively placing and performing ourselves within the contributions of women in Appalachia, with the land and with one another.
In putting ourselves on paper, we risk letting our papers become proxies for who we are. It perhaps is telling that scholars refer to collective papers as oeuvres, or bodies of work. The contributions, impacts, and lives of academics are... more
In putting ourselves on paper, we risk letting our papers become proxies for who we are. It perhaps is telling that scholars refer to collective papers as oeuvres, or bodies of work. The contributions, impacts, and lives of academics are repeatedly measured in units of paper. I am reminded of how, in his Nobel Prize lecture, author Gabriel García Márquez called for ‘[a] reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty’ (1982, para. 6). Similarly, I wonder how a philosophy not of paper might materialize and what, in turn, it might do.
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In that moment, Laurel Richardson had whispered an unspoken secret just to me. I waited to make sure no one was looking. Then I knowingly, yet surreptitiously, nodded back.
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Writing can be a (playful) practice that develops through techniques. To illustrate, I draw from the works of Erin Manning to describe how I take up techniques in both writing and dance. I then suggest several potential techniques for... more
Writing can be a (playful) practice that develops through techniques. To illustrate, I draw from the works of Erin Manning to describe how I take up techniques in both writing and dance. I then suggest several potential techniques for fostering a postqualitative writing practice: following creative impulses, situating writing within concepts, and finding time to not write. Discussions of these techniques are augmented by a series of play spaces in which readers might choose to experiment by folding, cutting together-apart, slowing, and more. The play spaces are designed to encourage readers to consider how they might invent techniques for their own practices. Significantly, writing techniques shape practices that emphasize how and why writing becomes. Without examining writing habits and how they might develop further through techniques, we risk holding scholarly writing in stasis and limiting its future only to what already has been done.
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This piece incorporates multiple forms of creative, arts-based research. Photographs are placed alongside a series of poetic statements: together they illustrate and build upon Erin Manning’s theoretical concept of the “minor gesture.”... more
This piece incorporates multiple forms of creative, arts-based research. Photographs are placed alongside a series of poetic statements: together they illustrate and build upon Erin Manning’s theoretical concept of the “minor gesture.” For Manning, minor gestures are subtle movements that occur around us as the world constantly continues to unfold. As such, the photographs included here depict evolving street art from several neighborhoods in Detroit; they are from an ongoing research project that involves how local residents communicate through everyday images, folk art, and graffiti. I offer these images not as evidence to analyze or interpret, but as visual experiences that have provoked and stayed with me. They have made me think differently about what research is, when and where it happens, and how it might be written. The first three pairings of images and text work within a 55-word limit (to keep within the boundaries of flash fiction). In tandem with the next two pairings, they examine how minor gestures encourage us to slow down, wake up, read more, and listen and respond to everyday environments. These practices have the potential to increase researchers’ awareness of images that surround, such as the object-based assemblages, graffiti, and unexpected texts pictured above. Through slow approaches to research and writing, therefore, images potentially offer insights into how people communicate through everyday visual interventions.
Research Interests: Communication, Visual Studies, Photography, Qualitative methodology, Visual Semiotics, and 11 moreEveryday Aesthetics, Visual Communication, Qualitative Research, Street Art, Qualitative Research Methods, Arts-based methodologies, Photography (Visual Studies), Arts-Based Research, Slow movement, Qualitative Methodologies, and The Photographer and Everyday Life
In the current moment of social, political, economic and environmental disquiet, unprecedented numbers of children have been forced to leave their homes and settle in new communities. As schools worldwide receive increasing numbers of... more
In the current moment of social, political, economic and environmental disquiet, unprecedented numbers of children have been forced to leave their homes and settle in new communities. As schools worldwide receive increasing numbers of refugee youth, there is a pressing need for thoughtful educational research that inquires into the unique individual needs and experiences of displaced learners. Given that students’ journeys are shaped by movements across physical, cultural and linguistic spaces, we suggest that related scholarship might benefit from Third Space theory. Within this theoretical framework, neither language nor culture is static. Rather, both are continuously shaped through interactions – including those that are non-verbal. For students who may be learning in an unfamiliar language, visual methodologies offer a means and venue for communication. To explore how refugee youth might benefit from Third Space theory and visual methodologies, we first review scholarship that examines how children and schools negotiate educational space. We then describe a series of methodologies that scholars might consider when conducting research with refugee youth, including photovoice, fotonovela, digital storytelling and quilting. Significantly, pairing a Third Space theoretical framework with visual and participatory methodologies may address issues of language, power, vulnerability and ethics.
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In the move toward a critical form of qualitative inquiry that realizes its transformative potential, this article encourages scholars to consider axes of need within research. A flexible framework suggests how researchers might respond... more
In the move toward a critical form of qualitative inquiry that realizes its transformative potential, this article encourages scholars to consider axes of need within research. A flexible framework suggests how researchers might respond to situated need through theoretically and con-textually grounded inquiries. In first drawing from critical geography, the concepts of heterotopic space and spatial justice are used to theoretically explore potential sites of critical transformation. These fluid spaces next are situated along five possible axes of need: food, water, shelter, justice, and love. By way of illustration, axes then are read through the lens of an urban city; potential responses take shape as a research agenda that could include visual and experimental forms of mapping. Importantly, the framework offers methodological openings for a critical form of qualitative inquiry that directly responds to, and participates in, issues of local need.
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What if we expressed critical qualitative inquiry is/as love?
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In this article, the street is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art. Through a... more
In this article, the street is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art. Through a critical performance geography and a qualitative inquiry of the street, I photograph the movement of art across walls, doorways, windows, sidewalks, lampposts, alleyways, gutters, and dumpsters over a 7-month period in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Detroit (N = 806). After describing street art as a fluid genre that has developed into a diverse spectrum of post-graffiti, I explore how street art contributes to a changing visual terrain through discussions of racism, decolonization, gentrification, and the role of art in spatial justice. Photographic cartography is introduced as (a) a visual method of performance geography that illustrates material-discursive “fault lines” and (b) a critical means of analyzing conversations in contested public space. Significantly, street artists simultaneously work within and against urban renewal policies in “creative cities” such as Detroit. Given that the arts are at the center of sophisticated visual discourse regarding democracy and the battle over public space, researchers might continue to examine how street artists inscribe social justice in, on, and around the streets.
Research Interests: Communication, Visual Studies, Photography, Qualitative methodology, Visual Culture, and 9 moreVisual Semiotics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Visual Communication, Street Art, Urban Graffiti, Photography (Visual Studies), Critical Cartography, Graffiti, Street Art and Writing, and Visual Communication and Visual Semiotics
Abstract: Images can be photographs, but they also can be the visual surroundings of everyday life. As images shape our daily settings, they choreograph the thoroughfares and backdrops that shape us. In the process, images can influence... more
Abstract: Images can be photographs, but they also can be the visual surroundings of everyday life. As images shape our daily settings, they choreograph the thoroughfares and backdrops that shape us. In the process, images can influence what we think, how we feel, and when and where we act. To explore how, I return to photogeny (Talbot, 1839), a past concept that involves the production of images (and how after-images can continue to produce affects, emotions, ideas, and wonder). Revisiting the concept of photogeny provides an opportunity to reconsider what images are, how they create, and how they have the capacity to activate others in everyday environments. To begin, I provide a brief overview of how the term 'photogeny' emerged and evolved. I then take up the concept of photogeny as method (per St. Pierre, 2014) through a series of images from an urban neighborhood area known for its irruptions of folk art. Next, I explore the productive—or photogenic—attempts that the images make to generate ethical futures and collective change (Guattari, 1995). After that, I discuss how, through a return to wonder (MacLure, 2013) in research and everyday life, ordinary images have the capacity to intervene toward a more peaceful, kind, thoughtful, and generative world, one minor gesture at a time (Manning, 2016).
Resumo: As imagens podem ser fotografias, mas também podem ser o ambiente visual da vida cotidiana. À medida que as imagens moldam nossas configurações diárias, eles coreografam as vias e os cenários que nos moldam. No processo, as imagens podem influenciar o que pensamos, como nos sentimos e quando e onde atuamos. Para explorar como, volto à fotogenia (Talbot, 1839), um conceito passado que envolve a produção de imagens (e como as imagens posteriores podem continuar a produzir efeitos, emoções, idéias e maravilhas). Revisitar o conceito de fotogenia oferece uma oportunidade para reconsiderar o que são imagens, como elas criam e como elas têm a capacidade de ativar outras pessoas em ambientes coti-dianos. Para começar, forneço uma breve visão geral de como o termo "fotogenia" surgiu e evoluiu. Em seguida, considero o conceito de fotogenia como método (por St. Pierre, 2014) através de uma série de imagens de uma área de bairro urbano conhecida por suas irrupções de arte popular. Em seguida, exploro as tentativas produtivas ou fotogênicas que as imagens criam para gerar futuros éticos e mudanças coletivas (Guattari, 1995). Depois disso, eu discuto como, através de um retorno à maravilha (MacLure, 2013), na pesquisa e na vida cotidiana, as imagens comuns têm a capacidade de intervir para um mundo mais pacífico, amável, pensativo e generativo, um gesto menor por vez (Manning, 2016).
Resumo: As imagens podem ser fotografias, mas também podem ser o ambiente visual da vida cotidiana. À medida que as imagens moldam nossas configurações diárias, eles coreografam as vias e os cenários que nos moldam. No processo, as imagens podem influenciar o que pensamos, como nos sentimos e quando e onde atuamos. Para explorar como, volto à fotogenia (Talbot, 1839), um conceito passado que envolve a produção de imagens (e como as imagens posteriores podem continuar a produzir efeitos, emoções, idéias e maravilhas). Revisitar o conceito de fotogenia oferece uma oportunidade para reconsiderar o que são imagens, como elas criam e como elas têm a capacidade de ativar outras pessoas em ambientes coti-dianos. Para começar, forneço uma breve visão geral de como o termo "fotogenia" surgiu e evoluiu. Em seguida, considero o conceito de fotogenia como método (por St. Pierre, 2014) através de uma série de imagens de uma área de bairro urbano conhecida por suas irrupções de arte popular. Em seguida, exploro as tentativas produtivas ou fotogênicas que as imagens criam para gerar futuros éticos e mudanças coletivas (Guattari, 1995). Depois disso, eu discuto como, através de um retorno à maravilha (MacLure, 2013), na pesquisa e na vida cotidiana, as imagens comuns têm a capacidade de intervir para um mundo mais pacífico, amável, pensativo e generativo, um gesto menor por vez (Manning, 2016).
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This special issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology offers a series of curations and creations from emergent scholars within the equally emergent field of postqualitative research.
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The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA)... more
The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the language used by a 21 st century skills-focused reform organization to promote its program alongside the language that local actors used to explain its implementation. We examined source materials, field notes, interview data, and publicly available organizational data collected over a five-year period to critically examine how discourse 1) illustrated alignment between the stated and implicit audience for the school reform program and 2)
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Recent developments in critical policy analysis have occurred alongside the new materialisms in qualitative research. These lines of scholarship have unfolded along two separate, but related, tracks. In particular, the new materialist... more
Recent developments in critical policy analysis have occurred alongside the new materialisms in qualitative research. These lines of scholarship have unfolded along two separate, but related, tracks. In particular, the new materialist method of diffraction aligns with many elements of critical policy analysis. Both involve critical theory, complexity and multiple analyses. To examine diffraction as a potential method of critical policy analysis, this paper enacts Karen Barad’s method of diffraction through the theoretical writings of Jane Bennett and Gloria Anzaldu ́a. Using the example of teacher leaders who are involved in educational policy, Bennett’s vibrant ecologies illustrate ecosystems of teacher leadership and Anzaldu ́a’s borderlands demonstrate how teacher leaders bridge their roles within multiple layers of community, governance and identity. Through the method of diffraction, critical policy analyses may produce broader perspectives regarding the ways in which differing stakeholders, groups, technologies and even theories collectively shape policy. Significantly, understanding educational policy differently may result in better educational policy-making.
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As the possibilities of hypermodal inquiry intensify against the boundaries of qualitative research, a hypermodal assemblage performs an unfolding–refolding of layers within the space of Deleuzian thought. By exploring a literary question... more
As the possibilities of hypermodal inquiry intensify against the boundaries of qualitative research, a hypermodal assemblage performs an unfolding–refolding of layers within the space of Deleuzian thought. By exploring a literary question asked by F. Scott Fitzgerald and later repeated by Deleuze, a Deleuzian lens transports the ontologically real into the realm of the postmodern, expanding alternative conceptualizations of the conventional question, “What happened?” Here, layered text, images, and sound flatten into a hypermodal intensity of passageways through poststructural philosophy, literature, and visual art. By exploring hypermodal reading and writing practices, this assemblage reimagines prohibitive thresholds within qualitative inquiry.
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This paper seeks to examine how embodied methodological approaches might inform dance education practice and research. Through a series of examples, this paper explores how choreographic writing might function as an embodied writing... more
This paper seeks to examine how embodied methodological approaches might inform dance education practice and research. Through a series of examples, this paper explores how choreographic writing might function as an embodied writing methodology. Here, choreographic writing is envisioned as a form of visual word choreography in which words move, pause, gain emphasis, and flow as if dancing across the open page. To explore writing as choreography, this paper primarily draws from three theoretical perspectives on embodiment: phenomenological, new materialist, and Deleuzian. For each of these perspectives, this paper describes its approach to embodiment, provides choreographic writing examples, and discusses the implications thereof for dance education practice and research. Given the increasing importance of practice-as-research and creative arts inquiry, this paper finds that choreographic writing provides an alternative mode of communication for dance writers and qualitative researchers alike. Significantly, choreographic writing also offers new pedagogies for dance education researchers. In so doing, dance provides a venue for written arts-based research.
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This article explores visual forms of writing through cartography and methodological events. As re-envisioned writing practices and textual methodologies potentially push boundaries of qualitative research. Various related and unrelated... more
This article explores visual forms of writing through cartography and methodological events. As re-envisioned writing practices and textual methodologies potentially push boundaries of qualitative research. Various related and unrelated inquiries, representations, and practices set in motion a series of methodological events related to writing, analysis, and our researcher selves.We propose that writing visually through cartography may help scholars avoid recycling research and retracing existing educational policies. Furthermore, we propose that uncertain textual authority and non-linear textuality may manifest as productive analytical and methodological space within a Deleuzian installation of visual writings.
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This article examines Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity as a new materialist methodology. Given that plasticity simultaneously maintains the ability to receive, give, and annihilate form, plasticity and plastic... more
This article examines Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity as a new materialist methodology. Given that plasticity simultaneously maintains the ability to receive, give, and annihilate form, plasticity and plastic readings offer material-discursive possibilities for educational research. This article begins by discussing the evolution of plasticity, applications thereof, and its location within new materialist philosophy. To then demonstrate the possibilities of plasticity, this article takes the example of educational policy reform in relation to technology-centered models of education. A plastic reading of ongoing policy discourses argues that conceptualizing policy, stakeholders, and technology as plastic contribute new scholarly understandings regarding the shape and movement of educational policy formation. Significantly, the methodology of plastic readings provides an ideal lens through which to approach educational policy development as a series of entangled ideas and interests. In addition, plastic readings enable the re-envisioned types of analysis and critique increasingly called for by qualitative methodologists and new materialist scholars.
This study examines how participation in a US Department of Education policy fellowship influenced the career pathways of teacher leaders. This sample of teacher leaders is illustrative of teacher leadership development beyond the... more
This study examines how participation in a US Department of Education policy fellowship influenced the career pathways of teacher leaders. This sample of teacher leaders is illustrative of teacher leadership development beyond the classroom and demonstrates challenges and opportunities. Notably, 64% of participants reported changing their work-related position post fellowship. Although many participants left the classroom, most remained within the education profession by adding and path-finding new teacher leadership roles. We suggest that these trends have significant implications regarding the structure of occupational roles for teacher leaders.
[Editors' Choice Award.] Recent publications by major newspapers in the USA have reinforced the perception that teacher quality represents a national crisis. By releasing individual teacher evaluation data in online, searchable databases,... more
[Editors' Choice Award.] Recent publications by major newspapers in the USA have reinforced the perception that teacher quality represents a national crisis. By releasing individual teacher evaluation data in online, searchable databases, several newspapers have influenced public perceptions of teachers and teaching. A framing analysis of selected media events and publications identifies how these media-based actions have created and perpetuated a discourse of professional inadequacy. Rather than envision educators as fixed within media frames, however, the author discusses how practitioners can reinscribe their profession by engaging with the media and the public themselves. In this model, counter-narratives become a means to deconstruct metanarratives, foster complexity, and expand practitioner voice(s). In a turn toward poststructural theory, the author considers how counter-narratives and petit narratives might proliferate across online media into an assemblage of multiplicities that de/reterritorialize educational discourse. Such a reinscription potentially represents a first move in shifting public discourse about teacher quality onto both more nuanced and more productive ground.
Writing operates on many of the same principles as dance. Taking place within the limited space of the page, writing similarly attempts to present several compressed storylines within a single composition. And as this occurs, writing and... more
Writing operates on many of the same principles as dance. Taking place within the limited space of the page, writing similarly attempts to present several compressed storylines within a single composition. And as this occurs, writing and review processes work to produce publications that are intended to appear effortless, organic, and sustainably made.
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n the book In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), Margaret Atwood asks: “What would a species-wide self-rescue effort look like if it played out in actuality?” Atwood poses this question within a compilation of essays... more
n the book In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), Margaret Atwood asks: “What would a species-wide self-rescue effort look like if it played out in actuality?” Atwood poses this question within a compilation of essays published later in her career. But, contrary to what the title of the collection might suggest, we are not on other worlds, we are still on Earth, and in many ways, imagining a self-rescue effort has been Atwood’s project from the beginning. This effort has involved a sustained focus on survival.
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Transdisciplinary feminisms remain in motion. In moving across disciplines, they flow—fall—seep into different theories, methodologies, and practices. As the authors in this collection have expressed, there are many diverse and hopeful... more
Transdisciplinary feminisms remain in motion. In moving across disciplines, they flow—fall—seep into different theories, methodologies, and practices. As the authors in this collection have expressed, there are many diverse and hopeful visions for how this can, and does, occur. Their writings are filled with rich endeavors that pose, perform, run away, live in the hyphens, inhabit spiritual dimensions, decolonize, and carefully—but willfully—intervene across varied global academic perspectives, genealogies, and histories. From art to ecology, education, history, sociology, critical theory, chemistry, and more, scholars are reshaping feminisms in ways that are at once inter-, multi-, post- and transdisciplinary. And as they convey with us here, many of these movements have not been uncontested. Even more to the point: feminisms continue to be contested across disciplines. The pasts of feminist work carry over into the work of the present, and likely will continue to do so in futures that have yet to be determined. By way of response, this last chapter considers transdisciplinary feminisms through rusty futures.
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Research Interests: Photography, Qualitative methodology, Visual Communication, Qualitative Research, Arts-based methodologies, and 9 moreArts-Based Research, Writing as a method of inquiry, Poetic Inquiry, Qualitative inquiry, Stream of Consciousness, Visual Communications, Writing Qualitative Research, Stream of Consciousness Writing (General), and Visual Essays
The troubles of the world often seem big--sometimes in ways that can be enormously and overwhelmingly so. It does not help that, in comparison, I can seem so very small. On most days, I am at a loss as to what to do. At the same time, I... more
The troubles of the world often seem big--sometimes in ways that can be enormously and overwhelmingly so. It does not help that, in comparison, I can seem so very small. On most days, I am at a loss as to what to do. At the same time, I find myself contemplating two particular questions: (a) How can I help make the world a better place? (b) How am I best positioned to the ugliness that can surround? I continue to circle back to the importance of classroom teaching.
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Our aim in this chapter is to review and critically examine the status of 'data' in qualitative inquiry. As the title indicates, we suggest that this status is methodologically and theoretically problematic. Yet, because data (and their... more
Our aim in this chapter is to review and critically examine the status of 'data' in qualitative inquiry. As the title indicates, we suggest that this status is methodologically and theoretically problematic. Yet, because data (and their various versions, forms, and reversals) remains open to doubt, data also create productive problems and creative problem spaces. Before discussing contemporary and innovative possibilities and extensions of data, therefore, we will address how the very notion of data has been challenged by major upheavals in qualitative methodology over the last 30 years. Such upheavals have occurred in the wake of the various “turns” that have convulsed the humanities and social sciences: post-structuralist, postmodernist, deconstructive, Deleuzian, performative, posthumanist, affective, and material feminist, among others. These theoretical shifts and movements have altered customary conceptualizations of knowledge, thought, and being. Despite the emergence of more dynamic and diverse notions of data, however, there is still a widespread assumption that data are predominantly passive and subservient to the work of analysis and interpretation. Yet, perhaps theoretical shifts and movements are slowly unsettling the conservative notions of data that have prevailed in empirical research studies and arguably continue to dominate the field today.
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As spacetimemattering, ‘data’ remain in perpetual motion. Within quantum contexts, therefore, the focus for qualitative methodologists becomes not how to capture, tame, or bestill moving ‘data,’ but how to address the movements of ‘data’... more
As spacetimemattering, ‘data’ remain in perpetual motion. Within quantum contexts, therefore, the focus for qualitative methodologists becomes not how to capture, tame, or bestill moving ‘data,’ but how to address the movements of ‘data’ through space, time, and matter. Following Barad, this chapter turns to several international exemplars from the visual and performing arts that embody ‘data’ as spacetimemattering: Murmur Study; YOUR TEXT HERE; In Unbridled Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; and SNAP. In the process, these exemplars raise several questions for researchers interested in ‘data’ as spacetimematterings: How might ‘data’ exist in real-time or outside temporal linearity? How might ‘data’ intra-act with material place and digital space? How might ‘data’ be written as spacetimematterings? How might ‘data’ write spacetimematterings? By way of illustration, I then discuss recent works that develop three potential modes of writing (post)qualitative research: choreographic writing, hypermodal writing, and photographic cartography. In so doing, various forms of multimodal writings provide venues in which to explore how ‘data’ write, perform, enact, teach, and reconceptualize research.
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In this chapter, we examine how the discourses of education reform intersect with twenty-first-century policies that purport to prepare students to be productive members of a global economy. Through the example of a national reform... more
In this chapter, we examine how the discourses of education reform intersect with twenty-first-century policies that purport to prepare students to be productive members of a global economy. Through the example of a national reform organization that promises to deliver twenty-first-century skills and competencies, we demonstrate how discourse shaped and revealed the aims of the program as it was implemented in three high schools. We show that education discourse shapes policy initiatives at the same time that it influences practices of schooling and society that prioritize commercial interests over social improvement.
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In normative qualitative research discourses, images represent and validate. Yet even many critical uses of images are not critical of the images themselves; rather, criticism is directed toward the reality that the images purportedly... more
In normative qualitative research discourses, images represent and validate. Yet even many critical uses of images are not critical of the images themselves; rather, criticism is directed toward the reality that the images purportedly represent. In this chapter, we put forward examples of critical scholarship that may caution other researchers to attend more closely to the ways in which they use images. We focus on the blurred boundary between the ‘real’ and the imaginary within research. We also remain interested in possibilities associated with the proposed departure from epistemological and methodological foundationalism in relation to images, especially when images are used as correspondences, signifiers, or witnesses of the ‘real.’
May 3, 2013, was the sixtieth and final day of the regular Florida legislative session. During this session, there were several bills passed that affect the funding of public education. This article summarizes the effects of these bills... more
May 3, 2013, was the sixtieth and final day of the regular Florida legislative session. During this session, there were several bills passed that affect the funding of public education. This article summarizes the effects of these bills within the contexts of funding priorities, changes to the funding formula, pressing issues affecting the funding, and issues exclusive to P–12 or higher education.
Several state issues affect P-12 and higher education funding in Florida. Emphases include affordable postsecondary education options, performance funding, career and professional education, and accountability for charter and virtual... more
Several state issues affect P-12 and higher education funding in Florida. Emphases include affordable postsecondary education options, performance funding, career and professional education, and accountability for charter and virtual schools. These state issues are reflected in funding trends, funding formula changes, and budgetary trends.
Clinical and research literature in medical education indicates a dearth of opportunities to adequately and competently prepare young pre-medical and pre-healthcare professionals to attend to the needs of dying patients, especially youths... more
Clinical and research literature in medical education indicates a dearth of opportunities to adequately and competently prepare young pre-medical and pre-healthcare professionals to attend to the needs of dying patients, especially youths and their families. This study aimed to explore outcomes of an innovative palliative care program on 142 past and present pre-medical and pre-healthcare student volunteers. Results of the mixed-methods study indicate that the Streetlight program significantly impacted these student volunteers’ sense of empathy, compassion, and comfort in attending to dying adolescents and young adults. Qualitative themes included the following: leadership vision, investment among members, member characteristics, relationship with self, learning about others, learning about professions, learning about the healthcare system, spirituality, appreciation for life, and emotional connections. Given the apparent lessons reported by the past and present student members who participated in the study, the Streetlight program may be a viable model for introducing pre-medical and pre-healthcare students to compassionate palliative care.