Keynote Speakers

Writing against Othering

Michal Krumer-Nevo,

Department of Social Work Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Director, Israeli Center for Qualitative Research of Peoples and Societies (ICQM)

what bothers me most when writing research for social justice is what can I do to resist Othering.

As Rorty suggested, solidarity is the ability to see more and more traditional differences, as tribe, religion, or customs, as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation. It is the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of "us". Othering, is the absolute opposite. It is, as Pickering says, the translation of difference into inferiority, which in turn creates and justifies social distance and alienation. Since I see research for social justice as the creation of solidarity and connectedness between people from different worlds and different life conditions, my aim is to avoid Othering. But how can one avoid Othering when describing people who live in the public imagination as the prototypes of Others - women in poverty, single mothers to children of different fathers, not working, using drugs, taking welfare? Is avoiding Othering possible? And how should one go about it? By hiding some of the information regarding the women's lives? By choosing to write in a specific genre? A specific idiom or dialect? Are there any Othering-free rhetoric strategies available? Is social distance and alienation, the products of Othering, a question of tone?

Writing research for social change about women in poverty arouses acute issues of representation, and, perforce, of ontology. Objectification, focus on (deviant) behavior, de-contextualization and de-historicization, denial of dialog, use of professional jargon and an absent author are some of the textual mechanisms of Othering. Casting a pallid aura of objectivity over an essentially narrow, class-inflected perspective, they both hide and reproduce social power-relations.

In this presentation I will try to chart the rhetorical strategies of Othering and to delineate some of the possible ways of resisting them in qualitative research.

TURNING THE NEXT WIDE 21ST CENTURY CORNER: HOLISTIC RESTORATIVE JUSTICE PRINCIPLES IN QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

John H. Stanfield, II Indiana University

African American & African Diaspora Studies

The twenty first century is already in so many ways promising to make well over due significant breaks from the positivistic 19th and 20th century notions of scientific inquiry processes, including of course in the area of qualitative research processes. Nevertheless,the norms of 19th and 20th century positivistic qualitative methodology research designing and inquiry processes dictating researcher distance from those under microscopic lenses usually commodized and objectified as "subjects, " and encouraging a romanticized illusion of value freeness is still very much with us unconsciously as well as intentionally. Consequently, even in the best of intentions on the part of the qualitative researcher entrapped in conventional positivistic paradigmatic presumptions,the resultant reification of human beings as subjects is a form of mutual dehumanization encouraging normative indifference as well as dispassion on the side of the researcher and exploitation as being turned into data on the part of subjects.

There are numerous counter approaches such as participatory inquiry and post-colonial qualitative inquiry being organized by qualitative researchers these days which remind us of the moral, political, and economic necessities to break out of modes of inquiry which encourage the dehumanization of human beings as subjects reduced down to data such as narratives, field sites, interviewees, and informants calling for their human rights in research processes and empowerment and justice as well as peace in their daily lives. This is a good thing since such movements certainly indicate a turning away though gradual from the positivistic norms which have governed qualitative research just as much as quantitative research or so called "mixed methods." Yet there is another turn which is needed which involves the researcher as well as the researched in this growing age of moral and other humanity concerns of "the research process." We researchers like our so called research subjects are in need of utilizing research processes as means to find once again who we are as human beings as we encounter those we "study" and rehumanize them and therefore we rehumanize ourselves especially when 'the subject" hails from a different population or community from ourselves normally dehumanized in our life histories and in the expectations of our professional scientific communities.

Thus the essential strolling in holistic restorative justice in qualitative inquiry as an urgent opening door as the next wide corner to turn in early 21st century qualitative inquiry. This presentation explores my journey as a theological sociologist to this restorative justice perspective still evolving and how "it works" as a research process which not only discovers and interprets but also rehumanizes those we study and thus rehumanizes ourselves as researchers who happen to be first and foremost human beings thus in need of conscious raising, empowerment, liberation, justice, and unification with others in our own lives as people.

Arthur Bochner
Svend Brinkmann
Gaile Cannella
Kathy Charmaz
Julianne Cheek
César Cisneros
Ma. Chapela-Mendoza

John Creswell
Greg Dimitriadis
Carolyn Ellis
Uwe Flick
H. L. Goodall, Jr.
Jane F. Gllgun
Ken Gergen

Sharlene Hesse-Biber
Ken Howe
George Kamberells
Patti Lather
Yvonna Linclon
D. Soyini Madison
Joseph Maxwell
Donna Mertens

Janice Morse
Ronald Pellas
Chris Poulos
Roy Ruckdeschel
Johnny Saldaña
Tami Spry
John Stanfield, II

Karen Staller
Ian Stronach
Harry Torrance