Physical or sexual attraction plays an important role in shaping a wide range of relationships and in myriad ways. Our primary interest here is in how attraction shapes the qualitative research experience. Close examination of popular sociological ethnographies found that attractiveness is used as a descriptor, and almost always in a distancing…

This article documents the first stage of the qualitative research process: "entering the field." In it, the author, a young graduate student, uses portraiture to describe her journey to find a "research site" and then establish a "research relationship" with this community, a town in rural Arkansas. This portrait…

Two colleagues, Ann and Jacqui, came together, within the safety of an imagined actors' studio, to explore the challenges that Ann faced in planning a new graduate program in public health nutrition. They met before, during, and after program implementation to discuss Ann's experiences, and audio-taped and transcribed the discussions. When all…

Yet today, despite recent welcome additions, relatively little is written about teaching qualitative research. Why is that? This article reports out a relatively simple, yet appealing, pedagogical move, a lesson the author uses to teach qualitative data analysis. Data sorting and categorization, the use of tacit and explicit theory in data…

In this article, I use a Spivakian decolonizing perspective to take simplification to task in two ways--the simplification of methodology with/in grants and the simplification of critique that skirts the impossibility of noncomplicitous research and researchers. I posit that "neoliberal scientism"'s grants culture is colonizing research--narrowly…

This article presents some results arising from the meta-analysis of the educational research that has been developed at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal). The intention was to understand the status of the educational research produced, the main thematic trends studied, affiliated scientific domains, conceptual frames mobilized, and…

In this article, the authors reflect on an experience with research representation in which they deliberately engage to push their notion of what research poetry might be. The authors discuss the experience that began when they examined approximately 50 in-depth narrative interviews of international doctoral students' graduate school experiences.…

In this article, the authors critically examine the use of space in education research and illustrate how spatial analyses of education reframe persistent educational problems in productive, actionable ways. The authors juxtapose critical spatial analyses with traditional temporal analyses. The authors approach the knowledge-construction process…

This article explores the affordances and risks of practicing friendship and mentorship as methodological approaches in two qualitative studies: (a) the mentor's study in a diverse 9th grade classroom and (b) the protege's subsequent study of teacher professional development in the same school. Friendship methodology, as theorized by Tillmann and…

It is sometimes a difficult journey receiving ethics approval for research involving vulnerable populations, research involving our own children, or innovative research methodologies such as autoethnography. This autoethnographical account is a story about one student who wanted to write a PhD dissertation in a very different way and also the…

This article is a focused response to the call for a "conscious use of crystallization," in qualitative research. To this end, the author brings into play a full-bodied textual metaphor, the "palimpsest," to stimulate the expansion of an integrated crystallization typology--comprised of woven and patched approaches.…

This article brackets assumptions embedded in the framing of this special issue on "problematizing methodological simplicity in qualitative research" in a effort to understand why policymakers put pressure on all types of researchers, including those who use qualitative methods, to provide relatively simple, even somewhat mechanistic portrayals of…

The authors detail an educational ethnography of a university queer cultural center's role on campus and in the surrounding community. The data include participant observation, in-depth interviews, and artifacts. The authors review lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, ally, and questioning (LGBTAQ) issues in higher education, heterosexual…

Spoken Word, presented here, is an embodiment of critical theory, where discourse centered on the intersections of race, class, identity, lived experiences, and critical consciousness are named, analyzed, and interpreted in critical performance narratives. Merging the social sciences and the humanities--blending narrative, radical performance…

This article examines the ethical issues bound up in the ways research problems are initially framed: the questions asked, the temporal and spatial frames of the study, the ways participants are defined. It explores the consequences of thinking through ethical issues using recent reconceptualizations of "agency" and suggests extensions of the ways…