Becoming … in the Midst/Wide-Awake/In-Between: An In-Process Narrative Inquiry

Using the frame of the artist’s in-process critique, this article presents the author’s ongoing theoretical inquiries and reflections on a narrative inquiry. Drawing on Clandinin and Connelly’s conceptions and Maxine Greene’s writings on aesthetic education, narrative inquiry is explored as a methodology where being in the midst requires wide-awakeness to ourselves and the Other— it is a space of fluidity and possibility. By considering narrative inquiry as an active, relational, and incessant process of meaning-making, the author comes to re/consider the constructivist underpinnings of her previous work with different theories that have allowed her to create new understandings of narrative practice. Through a relational and processual ontology, possibilities for narrative inquiry emerge as a productive shift in narrative inquiry toward becoming

Breaking the Fourth Wall: Co-Constructing Evaluative Practices in the Graduate Methods Classroom

This article centers on the authors\u27 experiences co-teaching a semester-long qualitative ABR course by exploring a pedagogical practice implemented by Kelly—the co-construction of an evaluation rubric between teacher and student. We focus on this practice in particular because we believe it is uniquely situated for graduate student teaching. Typically, instructors develop course assessments on their own, establishing their own criteria for what should be included within an assignment. Students, then, refer to rubrics as they compose their assignments ensuring they ‘meet’ or ‘exceed’ the articulated criteria, with little opportunity to provide feedback on how their work is evaluated. Breaking the fourth pedagogical wall occurs when instructors engage students in unconventional practices, for instance, inviting them to elevate their voices with regard to how they are assessed, to talk back, and to decenter who the authority actually is

Regard(less) as a Feminist Pedagogical Practice

In 2020, COVID-19 became a global pandemic that shifted everyday life, spatially, temporally, and affectively. As teachers who care(d) for students simultaneously navigating uncertain pandemic terrain, we found ourselves changing our practices to accommodate the varied complexities we all faced, and how those complex identities were already embedded in a socio-political landscape within a pandemic. With regard to these students, we adapted our teaching. Regard(less), we carried on. In this article, we think with regard(less) as a pedagogical concept and practice that playfully, though necessarily, shifts between regardless and regard. Though regardless we kept teaching, we did so with regard to and for students in our classes. We narrate regard(less) as a feminist practice within two qualitative inquiry courses Stephanie and Kelly co-taught with Kelsey in 2020

Desirable Difficulties: Toward a Critical Postmodern Arts-Based Practice

Prior scholarship on collaborative writing projects by women in the academy acknowledges sustained attempts of intraracial and interracial collaboration/divides. Interracial collaborative scholarship, while noble in effort, may result in unacknowledged tensions surrounding racial identity politics. In these collaborative environments the problematics of race cannot be denied, with Black women often drawing upon their racialized identities, while White women emphasize their gendered identities. An unawareness and/or invisibility of Whiteness as a racial construct of privilege further problematizes feminist postmodern discourse. This polyvocal text focuses on responding to and working within the tensions of identity politics encountered in interracial scholarship among four women academics. What follows is an attempt at describing an arts-based project, emerging from concentrated efforts to develop an approach to collaborative scholarship aimed at identifying and inhabiting the divides rather than only navigating around, over or under them

Is This Research? Productive Tensions in Living the (Collaborative) Autoethnographic Process

We came to collaborative autoethnography quite by accident. In this methodological paper, we consider our experiences as we embraced a new methodology, taught and researched collaboratively in an interdisciplinary space, and grappled with how we might nestle our work in a journal with no history of publishing autoethnographies—all while becoming awakened to critiques against and arguments for autoethnographic research. Our discussions are presented along with portions of our lengthy e-mail correspondences written during our research process and center on two prominent facets of our research experience: interdisciplinarity and the research process. Entangled in our methodological unpacking, we highlight “Productive Tensions” that emerged from both our collaboration and reviewer feedback that is presented alongside our discussion. Through seeing these tensions as productive, we argue that embracing diverse perspectives can serve to strengthen the depth of engagement, quality, and potential impact of (collaborative) autoethnographic research

Backs and Fronts: Stitching Thread and Thought Through Manning, Methodology, and Art

This paper started with a messy embroidery back and a question: What happens when we play with/in mess, attending to how front/back, process/product, art/research, are counterparts in the event? To answer, we passed embroidery and writing techniques through each other, exploring what becomes possible when you think and make relationally, that is, between. Here, we stitch together Erin Manning’s theorization of the event with our experience. As we attuned ourselves to how thinking back-and-front together mattered, we found that our artful inquiry required us to rethink both what we thought and how we thought. Thus, we found that a methodology of front and back was made in this event, as a result of passing between. Finally, we invite readers to experiment with crafting their own methodologies of the between by flipping over their research as the embroidery hoop, and thereby opening the inquiry to its more-than

(Wo)monstrous suturing: Woman doctoral students cutting together/apart

This paper centers the experiences and understandings of women doctoral students during two separate focus groups and collaborative collages. (Re)theorizing “monsters” as “intra- sectional” through Karen Barad’s and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s scholarship, we (re)position the “monstrous” as agentive and self-creative concepts. We explore the concept of (wo)monsters and the (wo)monstrous: empowered women participants who, through their verbal and artistic participations, cut themselves, others, and the group together/apart. In making these cuttings, they worked to (re)suture themselves and their group(s) back together in (re)generative, (wo)monstrous ways. The women’s participations emphasized their (wo)monstrosities as affirmingly fantastical, imagining new ways of being and wreaking havoc on hegemony and hierarchy

Tumbling from Embodiment to Enfleshment: Art as Intervention in Collective Autoethnography

We, the four authors, found ourselves swept into the tenure process, tumbling as we inquired into what this transition meant to each of us and to all of us. Through a methodological grounding in collective autoethnography – and expanded by art intervention, we came together in our inquiry to explore key experiences as new professors, asking how we individually, collectively, and aesthetically move(d) through our transitions into tenure track assistant professorship. We found it was through the embodied acts of listening, attuning, and responding with/in our flesh as women and as researchers that we felt the friction of Tenure as another body in our collective. Tenure provoked our poems, tears, arguments, victories, aches, paintings, tenderness, stitches through fabric, movements, and identities. This article serves as a methodological unpacking of our arts-based research process that used Tumblr, individual and collective artmaking, and visits to each other’s homes. While our collective work seeks new potentialities of understanding our tumbling selves as women, artists, and researchers new to the academy, we also see this work as opening our stories to the world in order to create new possibilities beyond our project

Making sense of safety

The increased calls for an improved academic safety culture currently being issued by regulatory organizations outlines a very prescriptive approach to addressing safety in colleges and universities. This study focused on how academic researchers made sense of and responded to the safety programs that have been instituted by their organizations. The focus was on scientific researchers who have active research laboratories. The data was collected using semi-structured interviews and analyzed with grounded theory. The results indicated that these researchers grounded their understanding of safety and of institutional safety programs in their professional identity, developed during their own educational and early professional experiences. Further study is warranted to determine if these findings are indicative of these scientific fields across the country. This data suggested that prescriptive compliance requirements regarding safety activities would not be easily accepted by these groups if they were not consistent with this identity. While they were not overtly noncompliant, they did resist institutional safety requirements placed on them that were not in line with the social norms of their professional group. These results could lead to an altered approach towards addressing safety concerns at colleges and universities. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries