Morning Session 8:30 AM -11:30 AM

1. Kerry Freedman and Richard Siegesmund

Workshop Title: CREATING AND ANALYZING THE VISUAL IN RESEARCH

Understanding the visual image in qualitative research has become increasingly complex. In social science, the visual has centered on images -- either still or moving-- recorded by a camera. Traditionally, these images have been used as data that record a world as it is. Recently, the subjectivity inherent in visual images-- forms of exclusion and collusion--have become the focus of issues in research methodology and interpretation. Jim Goldberg's photo essay of homeless teenagers in Los Angeles, "Raised by Wolves," provides a case study of contemporary practice. Of particular interest, Goldberg contends that this work should only be judged by artistic criteria, and not be seen as social science. Art has a long tradition of drawing attention to human suffering and being a galvanizing force to social action. Is there any difference between the artistic visual image, which records and provides data for analysis of the world as it is, from a social science visual image that also records and provides data for analysis?

Furthermore, recent methodologies of arts-based research have opened the visual to an array of media beyond photography. The researcher may rip and juxtapose images into metaphors. The researcher may manipulate visual materials-- such as paint, clay, or fiber-- to create objects that become objects of analysis or representation of analysis.

This workshop, led by professors of art education, will examine creation and analysis of the visual image in qualitative research. We explore different strategies, developed in the discipline of art education, for leaning to talk productively about images. Participants are urged to bring visual data that they have made or collected as a part of their own research interests and we will explore methods of interpretation. The workshop leaders will also provide critique for developing participant's artistic perception in their framing of visual data collection. Workshop discussions will also provide guidance on how visual research can be framed within traditional or arts-based methodologies.

2. Greg Dimitriadis & George Kamberelis

Workshop Title: The Critical Use of Focus Groups

In this workshop, we will explore focus groups as productive sites for developing rich understandings of social phenomena, for engaging in pedagogy and reflection, and for doing political work. These related activities are all central to conducting research in what Denzin and Lincoln have called the eighth moment of qualitative inquiry.

Basically, focus groups are collective conversations or group interviews. They can be small or large, directed or non-directed. Focus groups have been used for a wide range of purposes over the past century or so. The U.S. military (e.g., Merton), multi-national corporations, Marxist revolutionaries (e.g., Freire), literacy activists (e.g., Kozol), and three waves of radical feminist scholar-activists, among others, have all used focus groups to help advance their concerns and causes. We will discuss these conceptual issues as well as related strategies for conducting rich focus group sessions.

Our workshop will begin with a discussion of the nature and function of focus groups, along with our concerns about their fate in conservative social and political times. Next, we will present a brief history of focus group research from its beginnings in media effects research during WWII, through its popular use in various social movements, and to its current explosive dispersion across many disciplines and for many purposes. Finally, we will discuss how we have used focus groups strategically in several of our own research projects. This discussion will include topics such as: how to recruit participants; how to choose spaces for hosting collective conversations; how to develop and use leading questions; how to follow up on key themes developed by group members; how and when to manage groups; and how to listen for “subtexts” that emerge from focus group discussions; and how interpret and deal with apparent “breakdowns” in group processes and understandings. These up close and personal examples of focus groups in action should help to illustrate their productive possibilities, their inherent dangers, and the many contingencies involved in focus group research.

3. Christopher N. Poulos and Sarah J. Tracy

Workshop Title: Writing Quality Inquiry: Self, Stories, and Academic Life Creating Resonance in Qualitative Research

Resonance refers to research’s ability to meaningfully reverberate and impact an audience. Even the best-written qualitative text may not provide direct insight into the lived experiences of others. Indeed, some audiences maintain the myth that qualitative research is not applicable outside of the specific context of study because it is not statistically generalizable. However, in this workshop, Chris Poulos and Sarah Tracy discuss how researchers can engage in practices that will promote empathy, identification, and reverberation of qualitative and ethnographic research by readers who have no direct experience with the subject of the study.

Resonance can be achieved through a variety of methods. Some are more appropriate to particular studies, and feel more natural to some researchers than others. We will discuss four in particular. Emerging from his narrative ethnographic approach (as typified in his book, Accidental Ethnography), Chris will discuss achieving resonance through aesthetic merit and evocative writing. Emerging from her iterative qualitative approach (as discussed in her book, Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact), Sarah will cover how to create naturalistic generalizations and critical case studies.

Not every qualitative study must achieve resonance in the same way, but all high quality qualitative texts must have impact. Through this workshop, members will learn how to articulate this quality to naysayers who dismiss qualitative research as “non-generalizable” and, perhaps more importantly, how to create resonance in their own work. Participants should bring a brief sample of their writing to work on.

4. Adele E. Clarke & Reiner Keller

Workshop Title: Mapping Discourses

Situational Analysis (Sage, 2005), developed by Adele Clarke, offers powerful suggestions for moving grounded theory around the postmodern turn, drawing upon Foucault and others. One main strategy is integrating discourse analysis into GT-research. Situational Analysis proposes the use of positional maps in order to account for discourses as elements of situations, aspects often unattended to in American qualitative research. The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD), developed by German sociologist Reiner Keller, is now available in English (Doing Discourse Research, Sage, 2012). Situated in the interpretative paradigm it draws on Berger & Luckmann's sociology of knowledge and also includes Foucauldian concepts. SKAD's theoretical basics, methodological reflections and methods of discourse research share common arguments with Situational Analysis while proposing tools like the analysis of interpretative schemes, classifications, structures of phenomena and others.

The session will introduce the basics of both Situational Analysis and SKAD, concentrating on concrete tools and ways of doing research and mapping discourses.

5. Johnny Saldana

Workshop Title:Ethnodrama and Ethnotheatre: Arts-Based Research from Page to Stage

No prior theatre or performance experience is needed to participate in this workshop. Arts-based research, ethnodrama in particular, has been advocated by such key figures in qualitative inquiry as Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln as a powerful way for ethnography to recover yet interrogate the meanings of lived experiences. This workshop will introduce the fundamentals of dramatizing data and explore how qualitative research transfers "from page to stage." The session will provide a literature review of available ethnodramas with participants reading aloud informally from scripts (and, pending A/V availability, watching videos of ethnotheatrical performance). We will then explore how the participants' personal lived experiences can become "autoethnographic monologues." Participants will select a personal story as the basis for workshopping an informal retelling of that work to peers. The facilitator will guide each researcher-as-storyteller through the process of selecting necessary sensory details, choosing evocative language, and employing gesture and voice as instruments for dramatizing the data.

6. Uwe Flick

Workshop Title: Triangulation in Qualitative Inquiry

In this workshop I will present a concept of triangulation in qualitative inquiry that justifies continuing the use of this concept, approach and strategy even in times of mixed methods. In the first part of the workshop I will outline and update the discussion about triangulation. In the second part, I want to work with the participants on their own experiences, questions and problems in the use of triangulation. One central issue of this outline will be how to use triangulation in qualitative inquiry for discussing the usefulness and challenges of working systematically with several qualitative methods.

7. Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt

Workshop Title:'Between the two': Using Deleuzian Thought in Collaborative Writing

'philosophy involves creating concepts that are always new'. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 5)

Within the excitement and expectation of the crisis of representation it is not just philosophy that engages in the continuing processes of creative conceptualisation; we wish to argue that in all aspects of human and post human research such processes of engagement are both inevitable and necessary. Further we would argue that Richardson's inducement to use writing as a method of inquiry steers us headlong into exciting and productive conceptual and collaborative collusion with the ideas and approaches of Deleuze.

This provides a sketch of our performative autoethnographic method in which we focus upon moving material and discursively constructed selves into the spatial and temporal relationality of the assemblage. In taking this focus the emphasis upon the human subject is differentiated through the use of inter and intra-acting collaborative writing which, we argue, opens up exciting new possibilities for future post qualitative research practices.

The workshop is designed, therefore, to promote the use of a range of 'figures' found, conceptualised and illustrated in the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze & Guattari, with a view to encouraging workshop participants to employ these figures in practical engagement with, and development of, their own writing in collaborative contexts.

Pre-workshop reading will be distributed to provide some introduction and an opportunity to:

• use and critically reflect upon Deleuzian philosophy,
• initially consider how figures drawn from this philosophy might contribute to collaborative writing approaches
• read some examples of collaborative writing that has made use of these figures

References: Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? London: Verso.

8. Mitch Allen (Publisher, Left Coast Press, Inc.) & C. Deb Laughton (Publisher Guilford Publishing Company, Methodology & Statistics)

Workshop Title: Publishing a Qualitative Study

    This workshop is designed to give the researcher guidance on how to publish a qualitative study. Taught by two of the leading publishers of qualitative books, you will learn how to think about your book or article as a publisher or journal editor would, how to sell them on your idea, and how to get the writing finished. Using instruction, brief exercises, and group discussion, you will be given strategies for approaching and convincing a publisher to publish your book, ways to make your article attractive to editors, and concrete steps for finishing that half-done study on your computer. Bring your book or article idea to be discussed.

9. Sharlene Hesse-Biber and Ron Chenall

Workshop Title: Mixed Methods, Emergent Methods & New Technologies for Use Inside and Outside the Academy

This workshop provides a social transformational approach to research geared to those researchers working outside and within the academy who would like to learn more about how to integrate emergent methods and new technologies into their research in order to better address complex and critical social problems and issues. This workshop is especially useful to those working in highly turbulent environments where there is a need for a rapid research response that seeks to address a range of social crises.

We examine step-by-step how a qualitatively- driven mixed and emergent methods research model can tackle complex social issues.

We specifically explore "how to" infuse your research project with internet-mediated tools for data collection (such as mobile surveys; online ethnographic tools). We introduce a range of emergent data analysis tools that allow the researcher to integrate computer-assisted software as well as multi-media analytical and data interpretation tools (such as GIS, internet and mobile technologies )into a mixed methods and emergent research project.

We demonstrate how using computer assisted software tools to analyze your data can be an excellent way to manage large numbers of qualitative text, audio, video and graphic data as well as still images. We will demonstrate how computer assisted software can carry out a grounded theory approach to the analysis of your data --from memo-ing to coding and retrieving your materials. It is also possible to conduct team work across geographical regions. We will use HyperResearch, an easy to learn user friendly computer-assisted software package that analyzes qualitative data ( text, audio, video and graphics) as well as HyperTranscribe, a computer-assisted transcribing software tool (you can download a free demo of each product at researchware.com ).We will take up some advanced features of the HyperResearch and HyperTranscribe program (www.researchware.com) starting with the Hypothesis Tester and advanced coding and memo features, including the network diagramming. We will talk about transcription as a form of data analysis.In addition, we will demonstrate how HR software is used to integrate a mixed methods analysis and emergent methods analysis. Before the workshop meets we ask you bring a short reflexive memo that outlines your researcher standpoint-- the set of values you bring to your research (for you to refer to and/or share with others, if you like). We will provide a didactic exercise on finding your data analysis standpoint.

10. Claudio Moreira & Marcelo Diversi

Workshop Title: Decolonizing Classrooms and Epistemologies

This workshop is thoroughly grounded in the worlds of both the colonizer and colonized and it focuses primarily on the political space of classrooms and academic knowledge production. We, the authors, situated between the world of northern academe and our southern origins, try to create a dialogue that works back and forth across Paulo Freire, Gloria Anzaldúa, Soyini Madison, Dwight Conquergood, Linda T. Smith and various Third World feminisms. This workshop evokes the form of a manifesto, an invitation to allied scholars to think through the implications of connecting theories of decolonization, postcolonial and indigenous epistemologies, with emancipatory discourses, critical theory, critical pedagogy and performance.

It is designed around the central idea of co-constructing, with students in higher education, a dialogical collaboration in the processes of interpretation and production of decolonizing scholarship. We, facilitators and participants, will share our humble, and humbling, experiences in resisting colonizing rituals (e.g., use of titles and other power markers), exploring decolonizing possibilities of being (e.g., unconditional human rights), and critiquing teaching while teaching. We believe that critical methodologists can, in concert with indigenous methodologies, speak to oppressed, colonized persons living in postcolonial situations of injustice: women of all colors, situations, and ethnicities; queer, lesbian, transgendered individuals; Aboriginal, First Nation, Native American, South African, Latin American, Pacific and Asian Islander persons. We seek the utopia of social justice. At the end, we hope participants will have new language, narratives, and ideas for advancing critical pedagogy from within our colonizing educational system.

Reference: Diversi, M., & Moreira, C. (2009). Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis. Left Coast Press.

11. Jerry Rosiek

Workshop Title: Narrative Representations in Qualitative Research: Beyond Authenticity to Transformative Cultural Action

Participants in this workshop will explore various theoretical frameworks used to inform and defend the use of narrative forms of representation in qualitative research. The purpose of the workshop will be to move beyond naïve notions that narratives provide more accurate, authentic, or comprehensive representations of human experience. A rhetoric of transparency, it will be argued, implicitly imports positivist assumptions about the purpose of research, thereby limiting the more subversive potential of narrative research. Contemporary philosophy and sociology of knowledge scholarship will be used to open up new conceptions of the transformational possibilities of narrative modes of writing.

The workshop will begin with a review of the distinction between “narrative inquiry” vs. “narrative construction” found in early writings on the place of narratives in social science. From there it will explore the application of various philosophical traditions to understanding the use of narrative representations, including:
• Critical Theory
• Feminist philosophies and methodologies
• Poststructuralism
• Critical Race Theory
• Pragmatism
• Indigenous philosophies and methodologies

The facilitator will demonstrate how different frameworks clarify, enhance, and constrain the use of narrative representations in different ways. Participants will be encouraged to bring narrative research projects they are working on for discussions about which theories best suit their ambitions. Through the workshop, participants will better understand the limits of the use of narrative representations as modes of naturalistic description. They will emerge with a conceptual map of several alternative ways of framing the value of narrative representations—ways that more compatible with personally and politically transformative purposes for research. Finally, they will leave with a bibliography of a variety of theoretical literature relevant to the use of narratives in qualitative research.

Afternoon Session: 12:30 PM – 3:30 PM

12. Alecia Jackson & Lisa Mazzei

Workshop Title: Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research

In this workshop, participants will learn how to use various philosophical concepts to open up the process of data analysis in qualitative research. The purpose of the workshop is to present a new analytics that refuses mechanistic coding and reducing data to themes in traditional qualitative data analysis. The workshop leaders will show how “thinking with theory” pushes research and data and theory to exhaustion. Using a common interview data set from first-generation academic women, the workshop leaders will demonstrate a process of “plugging in” theory and data; that is, the same data excerpts will be viewed across various theoretical perspectives to show how different readings get produced. Then, participants will be guided through the application of analytical questionsprovoked by the following theorists and their concepts:
• Derrida - Deconstruction
• Spivak – Postcolonial Marginality
• Foucault - Power/Knowledge
• Butler - Performativity
• Deleuze – Desire
• Barad – Material Intra-activity

This workshop will be interactive. In addition to working with data provided by the workshop leaders, participants will be encouraged to share data from their own research as well as theoretical perspectives, concepts, and analytic questions from their own disciplines.

13. Arthur Bochner & Carolyn Ellis

Workshop Title: Writing Autoethnography and Narrative in Qualitative Research

This workshop will focus on writing personal narratives and reflexively including researchers' selves and their interaction with participants in ethnographic projects. Topics covered will include: narrative truth; ethics; developing scenes, characters, conversation, and dramatic action; writing vulnerably and evocatively; truth and memory; writing as inquiry; interactive interviews and co-constructed narratives; evaluating and publishing autoethnography.

14. John W. Creswell

Workshop Title: Controversies and Issues in Mixed Methods

Mixed methods research is now 20 years old, and significant developments have taken place around the world and across many disciplines in the last five years. As interest grows, it is matched by an increase in questions and controversies. This is a healthy sign of the development of the field, but, unfortunately, the controversies are little discussed in the mixed methods scholarly literature. This workshop will address these controversies, and discuss topics such as how we need to resist the move toward consensus in mixed methods research, how certain forces may be misguiding mixed methods (e.g., funding sources), how the language of mixed methods may marginalize qualitative research and create dominant discourses, how the paradigm debate continues on underground, and how mixed methods designs misappropriate methods from other fields. The format will be a presentation augmented by discussion in which participants share experiences with these issues.

15. Norman Denzin & Michael D. Giardina

Workshop Title: Performance Ethnography

This performance-based workshop will focus on the implications of decolonizing emancipatory discourses, and indigenous epistemologies for critical, interpretive inquiry. The workshop will foreground post 9/11/01 racialized performance narratives. Participants will form performance groups, Working back and forth between the personal. moments of epiphany, and the political, we will stage performances that enact visions of a free democratic society. Traditional forms of qualitative inquiry are put into relief as we disrupt the notion of "business as usual" in the current interpretive social science community.

16. Kathy Charmaz

Workshop Title: Grounded Theory Methodologies for Social Justice Projects

This workshop session introduces ways to use grounded theory methods to study social justice issues. Grounded theory methods consist of flexible guidelines to adopt, alter, and fit particular research problems, not to apply mechanically. With these guidelines, you expedite and systematize your data gathering and analysis. These methods and the area of social justice are treated as serving mutually complementary purposes. Grounded theory methods can assist social justice researchers in making their work more analytic, precise, and compelling. A focus on social justice can help grounded theorists to move their methods into macro analyses. Major grounded theory strategies will be presented with suggestions about how use them to spark fresh ideas about data. Familiarity with grounded theory methods is helpful but is not necessary. The work session covers an overview of basic guidelines and includes several hands-on exercises. If you have collected some qualitative data, bring a completed interview, set of field notes, or document to analyze. If you do not have data yet, we will supply qualitative data for you. If you prefer to use a laptop for writing, bring one, but you can complete the exercises without a computer.

17. Yvonna S. Lincoln and Gaile S. Cannella

Workshop Title: New Experimental Writing Forms

Participants should come with some qualitative data, analyzed and organized in a systematic fashion, if at all possible, as writing will be a part of the workshop. Exploration of experimental forms--pleated, layered texts, poetry, fiction, "messy 0/00 texts, autoethnographic stories, and performance ethnographies--will be undertaken, in part via performance and dramatic reading, and participants will begin writing experiments utilizing their own data. Small research projects, dissertation data, or other ethnographic studies provide good fodder for writing exercises.

18. Pirkko Markula

Workshop Title: Foucault's Methodologies for Qualitative Research on the Body, the Self, and Health

In this workshop, we will explore how Foucault's theoretical tool kit can be used to examine the looks and uses of the body, body technologies, and ill and healthy bodies. In our workshop, we will begin our discussion by reviewing Foucault's major concepts (e.g.,power relations, discourse, disciplinary techniques, technologies of the self) as they relate to doing qualitative research on the body and the self. We will provide specific examples and set a number of exercises to illustrate the possibilities for analyzing qualitative empirical material through a Foucauldian lens. These examples and exercises should help illustrate the possibilities, but also the boundaries, of using Foucault's tool kit to study the body and the self within the constraints of neoliberal society.

19. Valerie Janesick

Workshop Title: Oral history in the postmodern digital era: Making meaning through testimony, interviews, photography and film

Oral history is emerging as a meaningful qualitative approach to documenting the lived experience of any given individal. In this session, members will practice oral history techniques including interviewing, taking photographs and reviewing testimonial documents and various written chronicles. Members will participate in the use of technology to document and analyze oral history data. Technology will include, the video taped documentary, the audio tape and the use of photography and film. Members will practice writing up key themes from sample interview data and will take photographs of the setting and people of the conference. Members are encouraged to bring digital cameras or any hand held camera of choice. By placing oral history in the contexct of history and social science research, the members of this workshop will be able to decide on the usefulness, importance and strength of oral history methodology.

20. Tami Spry

Wrkshop Title: From Body to Paper to Stage: A Methodology for Writing and Performing Autoethnography

Why perform autoethnography? What is the pedagogical or epistemological gain? How does performance operate as a methodology of research and knowledge construction? This workshop provides a methodological introduction to performative autoethnography, blending three elements—the lived body, the body on the page, and the body in performance. In this workshop we will engage the process of critical reflection, writing, and performing autoethnography as a continual and interdependent process through a clear and comprehensive methodology of analyzing, composing, and performing autoethnography through the concept of a "textualizing body". As such, performance as a method of inquiry is intimately heuristic whether or not one intends to perform the autoethnography. The composition and performance process continually forms and reforms the body, the body of the text, the text of the body, and ultimately offers a deep and intimate understanding of self/other/culture. Performative autoethnography is a methodology available to all people regardless of any previous theatrical experience.

21. Ron Pelias

Workshop Title: Writing Strategies for Working with the Words of Others

This workshop explores various ways in which citations might be used in qualitative inquiry. Instead of seeing citation simply as a contextualizing literary review at the beginning of an essay or as a mode of evidential proof, the workshop opens up alternative writing strategies for using the words of others. Workshop participants will practice such writing methods as generative spin, affective dissent, and layered intervention. Participants are invited to bring several brief quotations that they would like to experiment with in the workshop.

22. Robin Jarrett & Angela Odoms-Young

Workshop Title: Now that I Have It, What Do I Do With It? Exploring Techniques for Interpreting, Writing Up and Evaluating Qualitative Data

This workshop explores the related processes of interpreting, writing up and evaluating qualitative data. Case study examples will be highlighted to provide an overview of techniques that can be used to discover meanings and examine social processes and social interactions in qualitative data. Issues discussed include: inductive approaches to data analysis, integrating multiple data sources, data reduction and data display techniques (e.g., visual, text), and using findings for theory development. Attention will be given to writing up qualitative data to reflect its rich descriptive nature as well as multiple voices and perspectives, targeting written products to scholarly/applied journals, and communicating research findings to different audiences. This workshop will also examine the relevant criterion for maintaining and assessing data quality.

23. Anne Kuckartz

Workshop Title: Qualitative Data Analysis – Enhancing research outcomes with QDA software. A hands-on introduction to MAXQDA.

This hands-on workshop provides deep insight into the new version of MAXQDA. At the end of the workshop youwill not only know how to use serendipity tools in order to dramatically enhance the “harvest” from your data; you will also be able to perform all basic elements of a state-of-the-art qualitative data analysis: Starting with importing your data, which can be texts, audio-video files, pictures, PDF docs, setting up a code system, (re)arrange codes according to the changes throughout the analytical process, assigning codes to text segments, writing memos, attaching them to your documents or codes; label, link and manage memos, allowing you to immediately refer back to each of your notes, perform searches (simple and complex) and finally to present results of your analysis in a clear and convincing way.

Participants should bring their own laptops. If you do not have access to a laptop or have any questions about the workshop, please feel free to contact us at maxworkshops@maxqda.com

24. Tony Adams and Stacy Holman Jones

Workshop Title: Queer Communities, Qualitative Inquiry, and Telling Stories (Not Often Told)

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the stories—the queer stories—that are not told in research on/with queer communities—stories that are too contentious, or stories that we, and others, seek to push away: stories of silence and fetish, children and curiosity, death and dying; of pain, confusion, connecting, and not connecting; stories that we are told to not tell. Participants will discuss a variety of topics related to queer experience and queer storytelling, and, in so doing, illuminate the (im)possibilities of language, embodied performances of sex, gender, and sexuality, ways in which queer stories and storytelling can be used in classrooms, and how queer stories and storytelling can motivate change in/with queer communities and our larger world. In preparation for the workshop, participants should bring a queer story to share. Together we will engage, write, and perform these stories as part of an effort to manifest, document, and give an account of queer stories as well as to queer storytelling in the academy and in the world.

25. Bronwyn Davies

Workshop Title: COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY WORKSHOP

In this workshop I introduce collective biography as a research method. Collective biography works with language, but also at the level of bodily knowledge and affect (that is, the body before language). It works beyond individualized versions of the subject, toward knowledge of what it might mean in practice to be subjects-in-relation, subjects-in-process (Davies and Gannon, 2006, 2009). The relationship between the participants and the written texts of their memories, which are generated in the workshop, is developed through a particular kind of close attention to each other’s stories. Through listening and questioning each other on the remembered, embodied, affective detail, each story becomes collective knowledge.

The group begins by selecting a topic to work on. Working with their earliest memories in relation to the chosen topic, participants first tell their own remembered stories. Each participant listens to the others’ telling, questioning where the words are not clear, listening in order to know how this story is lived in an internal way, questioning the story-teller wherever they, as listener, find they cannot imagine what happened. Each listens in such a way that each memory, in its embodied, affective detail, becomes imaginable with/in the minds/bodies of all the participants.

When each person has told one or more memories, and each one has been openly (without judgment) listened to by the others, each participant writes her or his memories down, paying particular attention to both the affect, the body before language, and to the language. The written stories focus on one pivotal moment, attempting to capture the just-thisness of that particular moment. They are written without clichés and explanations, and without judgment. They do not import expressions that would be foreign to the subjects in the stories, or that would draw attention to the story-teller now.

Each story is then read out loud to the group. The participants listen again, actively and with care, to the affect, but also focussing on the words, listening to know the story from inside itself, to register it in the folds of their own listening body. Each one asks, in listening, “how is this possible in an internal way”, listening in order to know for themselves “the mode of existence that it implies, that it envelops in itself” (Deleuze, 1980: np).

When this is part of a research project, the cycle of talking, listening, writing and rewriting continues until everyone is satisfied with the way the stories have taken them into their chosen topic. The analytic work, usually done as collaborative writing, draws on these memory stories, and extends the collective apprehension of those stories through the analytic process of writing.

References

Davies, B. and Gannon, S. (2006) Doing Collective Biography, Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Davies, B. and Gannon, S. (2009) Pedagogical Encounters (pp. 1-162). New York: Peter Lang

Deleuze, G. (1980). Cours Vincennes, 12/21/1980, http://www.webdeleuze.com/ php/texte.php?cle=190&groupe=Spinoza &langue=2)