SPEAKERS

April Jones, Venus Watson, Boden Robertson, Ryn Bornhoft

Boden Robertson  00:00

Hello everyone and welcome to qualitative conversations the podcast series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. My name is Boden Robertson and I'm a PhD candidate in educational research at the University of Alabama specializing in qualitative methodologies and will serve as the moderator for our episode. Our focus today will be the recent conference on culturally sustaining pedagogy to critique and reimagine teaching qualitative research that was hosted by the College of Education Department of Educational Studies, psychology research methodology, and counseling and funded through the Spencer Foundation. Drs. Stephanie Shelton and Kelly Guyotte at the University of Alabama received a grant for the conference. Put tons of planning and coordination into it and along with invaluable support of April Jones and Carlson Coogler, who are both graduate students here at the University of Alabama. The conference brought an array of scholars to examine culturally sustaining approaches teaching and conducting qualitative research. Our episodes guests today are graduate students in the educational research PhD program at the University of Alabama who are also specializing in qualitative methodologies, and who attended the conference and will and will focus on their experiences from the conference and their process of understanding culturally sustaining pedagogies and their impact. We're very happy to be participating in this today. And we'll start with introductions from our guests, April Jones, Venus Watkins, and Ryn Bornhoft, if you'd please introduce yourselves.

April Jones  01:30

Hi, everybody. I'm so glad to be here. My name is April Jones. I am a doctoral candidate in the program at the University of Alabama that Boden has just mentioned. My research interests centers, areas of child welfare and juvenile justice specifically surrounding issues of social work and social justice, social justice, along with the marginalized communities that engage with and intersect with those particular systems.

Venus Watson  02:01

Hi, my name is Venus Watson and I am a PhD candidate at the University of Alabama with a focus on qualitative methodologies. And my research interests include black girlhood, black womanhood, and identity. I'm super excited to be here with you guys today.

Ryn Bornhoft  02:22

Hello, my name is Renbourn haft I am excited to be here. This is my first time ever recording a podcast. So I am focusing on issues surrounding disability and educational access in informal education settings, such as museums sort of covering both K through 12 and adult to a certain extent since museums have mixed audiences. So I'm looking forward to all our discussions. And I'm a PhD student.

Boden Robertson  03:01

That's also that's also important, right. Well, thank you. Thank you guys. All for. Thank you all for joining us. So we'll start with, we'll start with the first question, which is, I guess kind of obvious. So in, in your opinion, what does culturally sustaining pedagogy mean?

Venus Watson  03:21

So in my opinion, culturally sustaining pedagogies, their teaching methods that do more than just accept or include a student's cultural backgrounds in the classroom. So they aim to support and keep those cultural practices and identities alive and growing. This approach understands that students come from diverse cultural backgrounds, and that these differences are valuable. And

Hello everyone and welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. I am Jori Hall, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I also serve as the chair of the Egon Guba Award for Outstanding Contributions to Qualitative Research for the Qualitative Research Special Interest Group. I am beyond excited today to be joined by Dr. Giovanni Dazzo who was the recipient of the 2023 QRSIG Outstanding Dissertation Award for his dissertation titled Restorative validity: Exploring how critical participatory inquiry can promote peace, justice and healing. Giovanni is an interdisciplinary researcher, and evaluator and assistant professor at the University of Georgia. His work is focused on critical theoretical approaches to research and evaluation methodologies. In particular, he is interested in exploring the intersections of validity and ethics within critical participatory forms of inquiry, and the ways in which research and social policies can better be informed by communities. His work has been featured in a multitude of peer reviewed journals, such as the International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Educational Action Research, Cultural Studies ⇔ Critical Methodologies, and Conflict Resolution Quarterly. Giovanni is also the co-author of the recently published textbook by Sage called Critical Participatory Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Guide. Giovanni, it is a pleasure to have you with us today.

Thank you, Jori. It's a pleasure to be here. You make me sound so good.

Well, it's easy based on all the fabulous things you've done. Are you ready to get started? Giovanni?

Yeah, let's get started.

Great. So I was thinking that our audience would greatly appreciate learning more about your dissertation work. Can you just talk a little bit about your dissertation, maybe about its scope?

Yeah, so the dissertation really focused on a long term critical participatory action research project in Guatemala. And I partnered with an organization that conducts forensic anthropology. It's the forensic anthropology foundation of Guatemala. So essentially, in their day to day, they investigate possible made mass grave sites that resulted from the country's 36 year armed conflict, which happened from 1960 to 1996. And then they work closely with communities who witnessed and experienced those atrocities to document the stories of those who are forcibly disappeared by the government. And they then extract DNA from living family members exhumed human remains from mass grave sites, and then attempt to match the DNA so they can identify those who were disappeared. So I worked alongside the forensic anthropology foundation of Guatemala or FAFG. And Kaqchikel speaking my community to see how we could all together as a research collective, explore how the research process could be made more restorative.

And really, if you start to think about it, the work of FAFG is literally extractive to communities. They're pulling DNA from swamps, they're digging into the earth, and they're hoping to produce a match. Unfortunately, the success rate at the moment is just 14%. Because these human remains have been in the ground anywhere between 28 to 64 years.

And those who witnessed the atrocities happen.

They continue to pass away as time goes by. So we really sought to form the basis for this conceptual methodological framework called restorative validity. Truthfully, I stopped calling it a framework, because journal reviewers kept asking, is it a theoretical framework, a conceptual framework, a methodological framework so I started calling it what it is, and it's an agenda. It's a call to action. And we really wanted to explore and understand the factors that aid or impede

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Katrina Struloeff: We really appreciate having all of you here today to discuss alternative research roles. Some traditional and some non traditional spaces that we think about

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Katrina Struloeff: and we're very grateful to have our 3 panelists Dr. Pharaoh, Dr. Sanchez and Dr. Pianan.

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Katrina Struloeff: and just to give you a little bit of background on the qualitative research sig of Ara we are established in 1,983. And we provide a space for discussing Floss.

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Katrina Struloeff: the ethical, mythological, and philosophical elements of qualitative research.

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Katrina Struloeff: and we really are looking to ensure the legitimization of nontraditional forms of research

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Katrina Struloeff: within academia and beyond and we're really excited to provide this resource for grad students, so we can have conversations around different avenues than we traditionally talk about in academia.

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Katrina Struloeff: so today we're gonna allow each of our panelists to kind of tell us their stories and their pathways. in the nature of qualitative research.

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Katrina Struloeff: And then from there we'll open it up for a. Q. A. From participants in the audience.

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Katrina Struloeff: If you have questions that are budding, feel free to put them in the chat as we go, and we will be sure to collect those at the right time.

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Katrina Struloeff: And with that I want to kick it off because I know where a few minutes already into our space and hand it over to Dr. Fernaro

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Katrina Struloeff: to discuss her role as a non Academic academic Call

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Katrina Struloeff: Job at the School District of Philadelphia.

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Elisabeth G. Fornaro (Lis) (she/her): Thanks, Katrina. Hi, Everyone I'm. I'm Liz Fernaro and I currently work as a research specialist in the office of research and Evaluation.

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Elisabeth G. Fornaro (Lis) (she/her): I'm: so I'm just gonna give a little bit about my background, and how I ended up in this role.

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Elisabeth G. Fornaro (Lis) (she/her): And I think as we continue this app this morning. there'll be a space for questions. so just feel free to

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Elisabeth G. Fornaro (Lis) (she/her): Ask for any clarification or any more information on anything I share.

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Elisabeth G. Fornaro (Lis) (she/her): so I went to Temple University, which is in Philadelphia, and I studied urban education.

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Elisabeth G. Fornaro (Lis) (she/her): My dissertation was qualitative. I. It was loosely based on ethnographic methods.

SPEAKERS

Tanja Burkhard, Shena Sanchez

Tanja Burkhard  00:16

Okay, thank you so much for inviting us to the qualitative conversations podcast. My name is Tanja Burkhard, and I'm really happy to be here with Shena Sanchez to talk about CRT and qualitative research. We'll start by maybe me introducing myself briefly and then I will give it over to Shena. My name is Tanya Burkhard. And I am an assistant professor at Washington State University Vancouver. And I've been a member of the QR SIG for a while and I'm very excited to be on this podcast today. Shena?

Shena Sanchez  00:59

Hi, I'm Shena Sanchez. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and qualitative research. And I'm happy to be here and have this conversation.

Tanja Burkhard  01:13

Okay, and so I know just a little bit about your work from a while ago, and I would love to hear more about what you're currently doing. But before we do that, could you speak a little bit about yourself and your work and how you came to CRT as a methodological or theoretical framework, just kind of your journey to where you are in employing critical race theory?

Shena Sanchez  01:37

Yeah, um, so my work is my work centers, student voice and identity, specifically, girls of color from poor and working class backgrounds, immigrant backgrounds, I also look at educators well being, and my hope is that, you know, we can understand students better into an identity better and as well as our educators to form just better school communities. Right? It's because so much of, you know, the school is about relationship and so. So just finding better ways to care for people who are in schools, students and educators alike. And I came to critical race theory. So it's kind of like a long story. But to make it short, many, many years ago, I was in a master's program at Vanderbilt. And that's when I really just started kind of exploring, just from like an academic standpoint, like inequalities and injustices and that sort of thing. And I was just very dissatisfied with the course offerings, because I didn't really feel like there were courses that helped us understand sort of the the power structures and the hierarchies that existed. So I don't know what I was doing. But I found this class in the course catalog. And it wasn't called critical race theory, it was called something else. And it was taught in the higher ed, I think department, and I took it and that's where I first was introduced to CRT. And I think like many people who come to the theory after just like years of just experience and knowledge that something is up, right, and that we like, for me, I didn't have the words to describe it. And I didn't have that theoretical grounding, and just reading their spells work. Like just from the get go, I was like, this makes so much sense. Like this is it and then bringing in, you know, Kimberly Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, just like just going through all of the, you know, founders of critical race theory. It just, to me, it really opened my eyes gave me the language gave me sort of the framework for understanding, not just my experiences, but how I was observing, you know, the world and society. So that's really where it started. And honestly, that's what made me want to go and get a PhD. That's what really prompted me to want to learn more. And so I looked for a program that really, you know, emphasize critical theory and had scholars and faculty that, you know, we're experts in critical race theory, and that's how I ended up at UCLA. And from there, I just kind of took the, you know, the years in grad school where you have ample time to, to just explore and be curious and learn. A

2023 QRSIG Program Preview podcast

Thu, Mar 30, 2023 8:12PM • 20:30

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

sig, sessions, qr, conference, qualitative research, opportunities, year, program, virtual, submission, jessica, members, methodologies, education, annual meeting, reception, wonderful, community, literacy, reviewers

SPEAKERS

Renuka de Silva, Alexandra Panos, Jessica Van Cleave

Jessica Van Cleave  00:04

Welcome to Qualitative Conversations, the podcast of the qualitative research special interest group of AERA. I'm Jessica Van Cleave, the chair of the QR SIG, and I'm happy to be joined today by Alex Panos and Renuka de Silva, our program co-chairs. In this episode, we preview the QR SIG program for the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting, discuss what members can expect from the place-based and virtual components of the conference, and highlight opportunities to connect for QR SIG graduate students and members.  

Alexandra Panos is an Assistant Professor of literacy studies and affiliate faculty in measurement and research in the College of Education at the University of South Florida. She earned her doctorate in literacy, language and culture education, with a minor in inquiry methodology at Indiana University Bloomington in 2018. Alex takes a transdisciplinary stance in her work as a critical qualitative methodologist and grounds her theoretical, methodological and empirical work in her substantive field of literacy studies. She has published numerous articles and book chapters that focus on qualitative methodologies and literacy studies. She centers her scholarship on the reality that, to quote Octavia Butler, there is no end to what a living world demands of you. For her, this means prioritizing community engaged and post critical activities that center spatial and ecological justice. Alex is completing her three year term as program co chair at the conclusion of the 2023 Annual Meeting. 

Renuka de Silva is an Assistant professor of teaching and leadership in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of North Dakota. She is the director of the Indigenous teacher education program. As a qualitative researcher she examines issues and trends in Indigenous education, diversity, equity, inclusion, and cultural contexts of higher education. Her primary research focuses on indigenous epistemology and the importance of storytelling in native and indigenous cultures. Renuka is an artist and an activist. Her activism centers on creating pathways for scholars from underserved communities to engage in research that is non Eurocentric. As an artist, Renuka's research examines relationships between artists and their works, connecting activism and transnationalism. She hopes to promote and support scholarly work, where embodied experiences are [k]new knowledge that continues to shape people and create identities that are meaningful to themselves. From this space, scholars will interrogate imposed identities with prefabricated borders and limitations placed on everything that is self and the physical body. We are fortunate to have Renuka remain as program co chair for two more years. Thank you both for joining me today for our 2023 AERA Annual Meeting program preview podcast. As we all know, the Annual Meeting can be an overwhelming experience, especially if you're attending for the first time. Hopefully, this episode will orient and help our listeners to understand the conference as well as the QR SIG offerings. So let's start by talking a little bit about the format of the conference this year. The Annual Meeting will take place in two parts with the place based meeting in Chicago, April 13th through 16th, and the virtual component of the meeting May 4th through 5th. How has that impacted the program and what can attendees expect?

Alexandra Panos  03:58

Thanks, Jessica. It's wonderful to be here today. So the place-based and virtual components are really similar to normal conference experiences. We have 13 sessions in the place based conference taking place in Chicago, and four sessions in the virtual component in May. We're really excited that we received powerful proposals for both parts of the conference. And we wanted to make sure that people realized that if you register for the place based conference, you automatically are able to join virtually in May. And of course we encourage all folks to check out the program this year and reach out to the wonderful presenters about their work, even if they're not able to attend one or both formats of the conference. We tried to make the program really visible in our newsletter that will be coming out in recent weeks and right before the place based conference, and encourage synergies and connectivities over time and space in these place based and virtual components.

Jessica Van Cleave  04:57

Thank you so much. That's really helpful to conceptualize the two different spaces where we can engage this year. So can you offer us an overview of the program? For example, how many sessions does the QR SIG offer? And what kinds of topics can attendees expect to find?

Renuka de Silva  05:55

Thank you, Jessica. I would love to answer that question. As we said, we have a total of 17 sessions this year across the place based and virtual conference opportunities. We're excited about all of our sessions. One session that is particularly exciting is one we are co sponsoring with our wonderful colleagues in Division G, social contexts of education, on Monday at 4:10, titled, Educational Research at the Intersection of Contemporary Black Studies and Posthumanism: Risk, Possibilities, and Purpose. We hope that this session brings our two units closer together to consider the important ideas the presenters are sharing. We are grateful for the broad range of expertise being shared this year with topics addressing innovative applied methods, critical engagement with qualitative methodologies, and creative and thoughtful sessions designed to bring many ideas together from many perspectives, to other place based sessions that are bringing big groups of folks together, to think broadly are Writing and Articulation of Qualitative Research on Monday at 2:50pm and Postfoundational Qualitative Inquiry on Tuesday at 9:50am. And we want to give a shout out to our virtual symposium Interrogating Consequential Education Research in Pursuit of Truth in Living Theory, which will be Thursday, May 4, at 8am CST.

Jessica Van Cleave  06:09

Wonderful! It sounds like there really are some exciting offerings this year. I'm looking forward to this. So there is a long process that gets us to this place of building such an interesting and exciting program. So can you talk to us a little bit about what is the process for reviewing and accepting submissions and what kinds of things are taken into account in that process?

Alexandra Panos  09:05

Definitely. It's the biggest part of our work as program co chairs and one that we believe is exceptionally important and something we take very seriously. So we would like to start by saying that we rely heavily on the expertise of our volunteers who share valuable insights about each submission. This is not something we do in isolation. We rely on the volunteers in our in our community here in the QR SIG. To support this process. We together as program co chairs assign each submission for reviewers with one of those being a graduate student who's getting experience in this process and practice. While supported by outside folks, as a team, then we individually and collaboratively consider each submission and its reviews to make a final decision of acceptance or rejection. And one thing I'd like to point out is that when we initially match reviewers with a submission, we prioritize matching reviewers with submissions in their areas of expertise, in particular, for work that's being proposed that has been historically in prejudice presently marginalized in the academy. So for folks who submit proposals that might have keywords or topics related to critical race theory, queer theory, feminist methodologies, or disability studies, just to name a few, certainly others, we do our absolute best to ensure, in particular for those that they have reviewers with background in those areas. We also want to note that while we certainly love having submissions that address the conference theme, we welcome all submissions, addressing qualitative methodologies, and that that's the center point. For our review process, centering methodology, qualitative methodologies, the most important part of a proposal and what we're looking for, in the QR SIG. But as a whole, the review process, we tried to make it as holistic as possible, informed by the experts that make up this wonderful community.

Jessica Van Cleave  11:09

It's still in the context of AERA, which is enormous. So how can members locate the sessions that they are interested in from the QR SIG for the place based meeting. 

Renuka de Silva  11:42

Definitely check out the online program through AERA. There's a great feature that you can map out your own schedule by favoriting, or liking, your sessions. And you can search by unit to find the session for your SIG. Additionally, our newsletter will be out by the conference and includes an overview of the program. So that should be helpful. 

Jessica Van Cleave  12:07

Fantastic. Yeah, there are some great tools out there and, and do look out for the information coming out via the listserv as we get closer to the play space annual conference. So how can members access the virtual sessions.

Alexandra Panos  12:24

So very similarly, you'll get login information from AERA for accessing the virtual platform, and then you'll also be able to access the sessions through AERA web page, but look for info from AERA directly, not just from us for accessing that virtual space. But in terms of our program, you can see the sessions in the program the same way you would for the placed based session. So the online program this year, while we have two components, the place based and the virtual, you can find everything within our more traditionally understood AERA online program. So star are SIG sessions, favorite, like them, whatever word we want to use for that, review the newsletter, and that includes the virtual component as well as the place based.

Jessica Van Cleave  13:14

Wonderful, thank you so much for helping us understand some of the tools that are available to us for finding those QR SIG sessions. So aside from those regular sessions, what other opportunities are there for QR SIG members to connect with our SIG?

Renuka de Silva  13:29

Well, yes, please come hang out with us. We have two opportunities together as a SIG with all members, the business meeting, which will be Friday morning, bright and early at at 8am. And then reception will be on Friday evening at 7:30pm. A whole day of SIG events. Beyond these events, there are some closed sessions that are fantastic. And that if you haven't, if you aren't involved this year, please check out for, for it for next year. The mentoring session is on Saturday. And we'll bring together groups of scholars to problem solve and explore their stuck places. We also have what we call office hours, both in person and virtual, so that folks can sign up for to get to know, one on one opportunities to talk through a specific issue with a leading scholar in our field. So those are some of the ways. 

Jessica Van Cleave  14:30

Wonderful. Thank you so much. And you also hopefully saw that those office hours are were available for signing up through March 24. And if you didn't get that opportunity, as Alex and Randa mentioned, make sure to keep your eyes open for next year's opportunities. So you mentioned the business meeting and the reception. So can you talk to us about what members who attend the business meeting can expect at those events or at the reception?

Alexandra Panos  14:59

Yeah, definitely. So this year, we have a new format for gathering as a SIG. Typically in the past, we've had one evening business meeting and reception combined event. So everything took place at one time. But this year, we have been asked by AERA to separate those events. So we have a business meeting in the morning and the reception in the evening. As Renuka mentioned, we will have food at both so bright and early on Friday morning, when you join us for our business meeting, we'll have breakfast items, and coffee and tea. And at that event, we will be going over SIG business, getting program updates from our executive committee officers, we will also be sharing and giving out our awards to the exceptional work in the field that's being honored by our awards committees, including the Dissertation Award, the Book Award and the Egon G Guba Award. And then in the evening, that evening, Friday evening at 7:30pm. We will have our reception and the Guba lecture this year by Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya. So, please come and check that out. We also have a short speaker event related to the passing of Dr. Brigitte Smit. So if you would like to pay your respects to her with our, with our community, we'll be doing that in the evening. And at the evening reception, we'll have drinks and food and time to connect with one another.

Jessica Van Cleave  16:46

Wonderful. So it's great that there are all these opportunities to be together as a community in addition to sharing our work and scholarship. So what suggestions given all of these opportunities, what suggestions do you have for members to navigate the AERA program and take advantage of what the QR SIG has to offer?

Renuka de Silva  17:08

So we mentioned earlier the program options to create your own schedule to do this, AERA is so big searching by unit, and then selecting QR SIG is super helpful, too.

Jessica Van Cleave  17:23

Wonderful. So really thinking about taking those tools into account and using what is at our fingertips already is really, really helpful. So thank you for that reminder. So let's say you're interested in the QR SIG offerings, but you're not yet a member. How can you become a member of the qualitative research SIG? And what are some of the benefits of membership?

Alexandra Panos  17:45

Yeah, please become a member. But when you join AERA and become a member of the bigger community, the bigger AERA community, you have the opportunity to select and join divisions and SIGs. And what you can do is if you select the qualitative research SIG, you are a member. It's as simple as that. Benefits from joining the SIG include receiving emails specifically for our membership, which include many opportunities for connecting with other members, mentorship workshops, calls for special issues related to qualitative research, and our personal favorite opportunities to review for the conference and get that service in support of our community. I think just a final note that I wanted to share about AERA and navigating it is that it's the most important thing is to have fun. There is an overwhelming amount of things to do at AERA. It's really possible to overdo it. Jessica and I spoke earlier today about how at both of our first annual meetings, we tried to attend a session in like every slot and be at every single thing and couldn't say no to anything and it was just too much. It's completely overwhelming, not worth it to burn yourself out. So from that experience, I know I've learned to build in time to process after sessions that I attend that I'm incredibly interested in. I take time to write, even chat with colleagues, who had also attended the work like the connections are the most important part in many ways. And I think sometimes those in between spaces are where conference experiences happen. So if you get invited to lunch or coffee, or drinks or a reception at AERA, go. So just final plug for joining the business meeting in particular if you want to get involved in the SIG and learn more about it and joining our reception for time to think with one of the leading scholars in our field and have a drink with colleagues.

Jessica Van Cleave  19:56

Thank you so much. Plus AERA is really expensive. It's always in an expensive city. So find those opportunities for free meals. It definitely can help. Thank you both so much for being on this episode of the podcast to help us preview the 2023 annual meeting. Really appreciate your time.

Renuka de Silva  20:18

Thank you, Jessica.

Alexandra Panos  20:20

Thank you, Jessica. I can't wait to see everyone in Chicago.

Jessica Van Cleave  20:24

All right, coming right up y'all: April 13 through 16

SPEAKERS

Alecia Jackson, Lisa Mazzei, Jessica Van Cleave

Jessica Van Cleave

Hello and welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast hosted by the qualitative research SIG of AERA, the American Educational Research Association. I'm Jessica Van Cleave, Chair of the Qualitative Research SIG and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Gardner Webb University. The Qualitative Conversations podcast doesn't have a regular host. Instead, each episode is organized by our podcast committee. Today I have the pleasure of hosting this episode, in which I interviewed Dr. Lisa Mazzei and Dr. Alecia Jackson about their recently published second edition of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. Lisa Mazzei is Professor of Education Studies and Alumni Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, where she is also affiliated faculty in the department of philosophy. She is a methodological innovator in post human inquiry, and her work is widely read and cited across disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, business and medicine. She is the author of Inhabited Silence in Qualitative Research from 2007. Alecia Jackson is Professor of Educational Research at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies program. Dr. Jackson's research interests bring feminist post structural and post human theories of power, knowledge, language, materiality and subjectivity to bear on a range of overlapping topics deconstructions of voice and method conceptual analyses of resistance freedom and agency in girls and women's lives and qualitative analysis and the posts. Her work seeks to animate philosophical frameworks in the production of the new and her current projects are focused on the ontological turn qualitative inquiry and thought. Together they are co-authors of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research, first and second editions, and coeditors of Voice in Qualitative Inquiry from 2009. Their forthcoming edited book, Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry, will be published in 2023. Lisa and Alecia, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Qualitative Conversations.

Lisa Mazzei

Delighted to be here. Thanks for inviting us.

Alecia Jackson

Thank you for the invitation.

Jessica Van Cleave

Absolutely. So some of our listeners may not be familiar with your work, or maybe new to your work. So would you be willing to tell us a little bit about yourselves, how you came to write together, and how you came to write Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research?

Lisa Mazzei

Well, Alecia and I say that we share an academic genealogy. We first met at AERA in 2005, I think I was presenting a paper on some of my voice work. Alecia came to attend the session. And she came and introduced herself at the end of the session. And I had just finished reading an article that she had written about subjectivity with new teachers. And so I was so excited to meet her and I had just been reading her work. And so we sat out in the hallway for about an hour. And we're talking about projects. And we said that we should propose a session for AERA the following year on voice because we were both looking at voice and challenging conventional understandings. And so that was right before I was moving to England, I moved to England in 2006, was attending the British Education Research Association Conference, started chatting with a book editor. And like a good editor, he always says, What's your current project? And so I told him about this idea that Alecia and I had for a session and he said, that sounds fabulous. Can you get a book proposal to me in a month? So I'm at this conference, emailing this woman that I've met in person once saying, can we put a book together, a book proposal, and that was the proposal we wrote for voice and qualitative inquiry. And the reviews were very positive for the book. But people who read the proposal didn't think that we could secure some of the authors that we had said we would put that would contribute. And they didn't know that I had studied with Patti Lather at Ohio State University, Alecia had studied with Bettie St. Pierre at the University of Georgia, and through these feminist networks, we had connections with some scholars who were doing some very interesting work. So that was the that was the beginning of our long and fruitful partnership.

Alecia Jackson

Yeah, when we were working on the voice book, I traveled to Manchester. And so we had some writing time together. So one thing I do want to say is that Lisa and I have, ever since the collaboration began, we've never we've never lived in the same time zone. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's something that, you know, is really unique to the way that we've made things work. But we went to Manchester, we worked on the voice book, and then you came here, and we were working on Thinking with Theory. So we've had a couple of times that we've worked together, but in you know, Lisa has explained kind of the origin story. And then how Thinking with Theory came about is that after the voice book, we got really interested in we both were doing separately, we both were working on philosophically informed inquiry. And it didn't have that name at the time. Nobody was calling it that. Nobody was you know, calling it thinking with theory. It didn't have a name. And but it's what we were doing. And we started because we're reading each other's work and through the voice book, we realized is that, you know, what, what would it be like to, you know, to write something together, that was an alternative to, quote, data analysis. We were both talking about how to teach this way of doing this kind of analytic work and conceptual work. And there were lots of journal articles that people doing this kind of analytic thinking. But there wasn't anything that was out there cohesive, that we could use me, really to us in our teaching, that was kind of the impetus. So we were at the Congress. And we were out to dinner with Philip Mudd, who was our editor for the voice book. And we pitched this idea of taking, you know, one data set, and we will talk about how we don't really use that language anymore in a moment. But we talked to him about how to maybe conceptualize a book where we had one set of data that we looked at, that we analyzed across different theories. And he really loved it. And at that dinner, you know, he said, Yeah, let's put this together and see, see what it's like.

Jessica Van Cleave

Thank you so much. It's really fantastic to sort of trace that process, obviously, briefly from that first meeting, until the beginnings of thinking with theory. So as you began the process of writing, thinking with theory and moving through to publication, what were your hopes for the book at the time?

Lisa Mazzei

I think I don't know, I don't know what our hopes were, I think our hopes were that it would be I mean, we've talked, we talked about our work when we started envisioning a new project as what kind of intervention do we want to make? And I remember extending what Alecia was saying, I remember being at the Congress, and we started talking about wanting something for our teaching and going to the book exhibit and looking at what was what was presented as analysis. And it was all about coding. And so our I think, you know, our initial hope was, well, this, this isn't what this is not representative of the kind of work that we do. This isn't how we teach our students. And so as Alecia said, We wanted something for our own teaching. And maybe I guess the hope was that it would be picked up by others and be useful to them. So

Alecia Jackson

yes, I think it was a matter of, of what Lisa said, the intervention, I think, is a really good word. We, as I mentioned, what we did there wasn't a name for what we were doing. And we said, we wanted that we you know, Bettie St. Pierre always says write something that people can cite. And so that was something that, you know, she's always said to, and you've probably heard it too, Jessica, write something that people can cite. And, and, and put something out in the world that people can, you know, can use, and I really have a big part of part of the impetus for both of us, I think was to give this alternative to the field and name it in some way and have it so that, you know, it was it would become something that was recognizable that people could use, and really to take the field into that direction. I think that we, you know, back in the early 2010 to 12 qualitative research was shifting. It was shifting away from, you know, interpretive work and even critical work. And it was just time, it was time to bring it all together and give it a name and give it a place. And there was just so much enthusiasm right away because I think people were really didn't feel like coding was really analysis. So, you know, we had already done some work on that talking, writing about pieces, we're writing about how coding is not analysis and, and I thought this was just a way to give it a place in in the in the in the field

Jessica Van Cleave

Well, I mean, it's fascinating because as you said, Yes and that advice from Bettie it's definitely something that that I think all of us who have ever worked with her have heard, and it's so true. since y'all have published the first edition of Thinking with Theory, there's been an explosion of all of the you know, the methodologies without methodology, and concept as method and anti-methodology. You know, this sort of thing that you said there was a hunger for at the time. I mean, I think there's no better evidence than how much has proliferated since then. So in the years since its initial publication, Thinking with Theory has become a staple in qualitative inquiry. People are citing it not only in dissertations, but in articles across the field, across publications. Instructors are using your text in their masters and doctoral level courses, Thinking with Theory has really become part of the canon of what qualitative analysis can be and can mean. And one thing also from Bettie, that comes up for me a lot when I think about what work does, especially aside from what your hopes might have initially been, is Alcoff's, quote, to paraphrase, you never know where your work goes and what it does there. So what do you think about where your work has gone? And what it's done there? How it's been taken up and received, since you published?

Lisa Mazzei

Do you want to start Alecia or? No? Um, you know, I think, what do I think? This isn't about I remember the first time I was at AERA decades ago, and I had a piece that had come out in ED Researcher, and I was walking, like, from building to building and there was someone sitting on a bench. And I happened to glance and they were reading my article. And I thought, oh, my gosh, what, what? What a, what a validation, I guess, of one's work to know that someone would take the time to actually pick it up and read it. And so I think that the fact that people are talking about thinking with theory as a methodology is not something that I ever imagined would happen. I think one of the things that I'm most proud of in terms of the work that Alecia and I've done together is that people will say to us at conferences, or students will say to us how pedagogical the work is how, how much it helps them understand. And that was really a primary goal of ours was to, to extend the reach of this way of thinking, so that people would consider a new analytic, if you will. I'm not I don't feel like I'm really answering your question. I don't go ahead, Alecia.

Alecia Jackson

No, I think it's, I think that Lisa and I are both very, I don't know, humble people, and we just didn't really write this book in order to, you know, do anything other than, I don't know, I think we kind of wrote it for ourselves, at first, you know, and then because we wanted to do something together. And then I think, I've been most surprised, I guess, at how it's not just in educational research, like when I've had to go through and do my, you know, annual reviews, and, you know, going up for promotion, and all that. And you pull up the, you know, the Google Scholar citations, and it's just surprising to me that all sorts of social science disciplines have picked up this work. It's not just educational research, but it's, you know, people in, in all sorts of disciplines that I never would have imagined. I think there was even some citations from a business journal. And I just thought, wow, you know, so I guess what's been most delightful is that it's crossed all kinds of boundaries, which I believe that's one of our missions in, you know, is reaching into other found, you know, do some do some deterritorialized thing through the book, in terms of qualitative research, but it moving across all these other fields, you know, anthropology, sociology, business, I mean, just, there's just a whole, a whole lot of other disciplines that have taken it up. And just the expansion of that has been really surprising. I would have never thought that the work would go there. But it's really, I think, it's exciting. It's humbling. It's very endearing for people, you know, on social media to, you know, make comments about that. They have it, they've read it. It's, you know, I had a colleague who did a Fulbright in Australia. And she got there and was working with a faculty member. And the first thing they said is, oh, you work with Alecia Jackson, look, I have the book, you know, do you know. And it's just so it's just wonderful that it's just connected us, to so many people. And it's been so useful and so helpful. So.

Jessica Van Cleave

So then you get asked to write a second edition of this incredibly impactful book that has gone all of these places and done all of these things. When you were first asked to write that second edition, how do you approach that as a project, especially given how big Thinking with Theory is?

Alecia Jackson

It was very difficult. And we've been working on the second edition for a while the pandemic hit us, and it slowed everything down as it did for a lot of people. We changed editors, in in the at somewhere in the middle of all this, but we, we wanted to do something because it will talk a little bit about how the book is different. But in the intervening years after this was published, we began to critique some of the things that we had done in the first edition. And we wanted to update some of the things that we had written in chapter one in particular, the way we were conceptualizing some different aspects of it. And we'll get into that, but the main thing we struggled with was, do we add more theoretical chapters? Do we keep them really, you know, they work? Why change them? Do we want to add? So it took us a while, a couple of years to really think about how we wanted it to look and what we wanted to say that would be different enough, so that people would, you know, find the second edition, you know, an actual extension of what we had done. Something different. So it, it took a while. It was a process, but once we really figured out what we were doing, it flowed pretty well, you know, we were able to really work with it. Quickly. So.

Lisa Mazzei

I mean, yeah, I think, I think initially, when we first started talking about the project, we thought that it would not, it would not involve as much new writing as it did. And when we started even, even the chapters that we that we said, Okay, well, you know, we're pretty solid with the with Derrida, there's not a lot we need to change. But then when we started really getting into it, it's like, oh, everything has to change, because all of our thinking and languaging is different. And as both of you have talked about, you know, I think when the first edition was published, that was about the time when, when Bettie published her first piece on post qualitative inquiry, and then we had special issues on data analysis after coding and so forth. And so everything that was informing our thinking, in addition to the way we were doing our own work had shifted, and, and then what we learned from working with students and the places that, that we were able to be more that we were able to show more well, what we were doing, or what we thought we were doing, because we had been doing it, you know, in the intervening time, we've been teaching it, we've been working with students around these texts in the intervening time. So I think it was it's, it's a completely different text in many ways.

Jessica Van Cleave

So that kind of leads in you, you have spoken to this, I think a little bit already with that, that your thinking and your languaging and your processes and your experiences and your inter and intra actions had all shifted since the initial publication, but how did you end up deciding then what to include, what to change ,and what not to include in that second edition?

Alecia Jackson

That was a process. I think that emerged from what Lisa was saying about the teaching, you know, using the book and teaching what really kind of confused students, you know, what, what was what were some things that they just couldn't, you know, make the turn into, because it was some languaging. Also related to where the book has gone. What it's done is we have done lots of workshops, using this text at the Congress in particular, but also individually, we've gone to institutions and have done workshops together and individually. And we just started to notice there were some some languaging, that that didn't really quite represent what we really wanted to do. And part of that was if we wanted to really make a break, we really wanted to escape conventional qualitative inquiry and go on this line of flight, we would need to really, really change how we talked about it. So the second edition, we dropped data altogether, it's not even in the title anymore. We don't use that word anywhere in in the book, and we call it instead, we came up with a concept, you know, so we were very much into this work is about concept creation, and, and so we came up with performative accounts. And that's how we talk about the so called stories that are that are part of the part of the plugging in. So performative accounts helps us to say something differently about, about memory, about language about subjectivity, what words do, what stories do and rather than representing reality or experience that they're, that these are actually ontological stories and the process of plugging in is a performative and so we use that language in Butler's chapter. And we just decided to pick it up and use it in the intro to make well actually, in the preface, we, we describe that shift from data to performative accounts, and then we had to rewrite the whole, you know, all of the middle chapters because data was everywhere. And really reconceptualize not just replace the word throughout, but really rewrite what was going on in plugging in if we call this entire process performative. So that was that was one. Lisa, if you want to talk about a couple of the others.

Lisa Mazzei

Yeah, I think we do a much better job in this edition talking about the questions and the emergence of the questions. That was also a thing that I think, through workshops and teachings that students were, how do I, you know, how do I do this? And so so an example when I sit on dissertation committees and students would, you know, in their proposal say, well, this is my analytic question. Well, now we call them becoming questions, but I would, but then it's like, no, you're you're missing the point. Because you can't identify that question up front, because you don't know what's going to emerge until you are actually immersed in the texts, both the conceptual philosophical texts and the research texts. So I think we did, we spent a lot of time talking about how to explain the process and the way that we sort of came to the process, or the process came to us. I think, another thing and Alecia picked up on the, the nature, the ontological nature of this work that, particularly in the last chapter, we we talk about the ontological nature of writing, and we talk about the way in which the very act of doing is producing these new ontological formations. And so that, that that language, I think, is also present throughout and it's, it's showing how we're shifting in our, in our present work both individually and together.

Alecia Jackson

Yes, a couple of other new changes and additions, I think, we do a better job in the second edition addressing thought and thinking. In the first edition, we were really focused on theory and I think in that first chapter, really justifying the use of theory and the importance and also in the handbook chapter four. We, we really focused on that and and in, in this second edition, we do a lot with thought and the movement of thought we rely a lot on Erin Manning's work. And in her collaboration with Massumi, and in writing about thinking and thought and in the ontology of that so that's some something that's, that's new. The Barad chapter is brand new, practically, of in the first edition, when it came out in 2000. When we were writing in 2010 and 11 new you know, Barad's book was very that's what everyone was reading. And everyone was there a lot of conference presentations on you know, using Barad, and we had to do it in the first edition, what we thought was some background work on new materialism some historical kind of description and tracing of how the emergence of this particular theory into the qualitative profession, but when we read it, when we read, we read it in terms of the revisions were like, we don't really need this background anymore ever. It's it's been around now for 10 years. People are very familiar with them. And it's new materialism and Barad and, and intra-action. And so we felt like we could do, you know, take a lot of that conversation out around some of the other feminists who were working on new materialism. So the Barad chapter is very much more focused on just Barad and intra-action, and we bring in power and we move the Barad chapter to follow Butler and Foucault that made it a little bit more sense to us, since we also added a section on post human performativity, it flows better, and we added a section on power in Barad. So both of those, the post human performativity, and the materialization of power are nice sections in Barad that flow from Foucault and Butler. So we felt like those three chapters just work together better. And then we moved Deleuze and added Guattari to the end.

Lisa Mazzei

So and just a note on the the flow. I'm I'm teaching a course this term and the students one of our texts is thinking with theory. And so last night, we started looking at we introduced her concepts last week. And so we actually took one of the performative accounts in class last night, and looked at the way it was talked about differently with Butler's concept of performativity. And then looking at the same account with post humanist performativity. And it really, it was a fantastic discussion, and the connection was much more clear for students.

Alecia Jackson

So I think it's, we've just really worked to connect, you know, really pull through the coming questions, you know, game, we don't call them analytic questions. And we really make as obvious as we can the process of the emergence of those questions, how plugging in works, and just trying to be a lot more pedagogical, with with the process.

Jessica Van Cleave

So I feel like you've already discussed this, and in your response to the last question, but I didn't know if there was anything else that you wanted to add in terms of thinking with theory as a as a concept or as a text. How, how would you say it has shifted for you both over the last decade?

Lisa Mazzei

Well, I think maybe I think we did talk about this, but but the emphasis on thought, the emphasis on newness. One of the things we talked about, I think in the preface of the second edition is how in the first edition, and we've talked about this in other ways that we were, we were still in the mode of of writing against or, or deconstructing some of the, the interpretivist hooks, if you will. And we started from that place still with this addition. And then at one point, we both said, we don't need to do this anymore, we need to push into this different territory. And so I think that's one of the that was a very important but also very freeing moment, because it's like we can, we can let go of some of this language. And we had fabulous support with our editors, partly because I think of the success of the first edition. And so then we were able to say, this is what we're going to do and you know, dropping things like the starting with method, which we did in the first book. We don't we don't do that anymore. So that we I think we felt a lot more confident in our in the acceptance of us saying this is this is how the work is now and we're not going to pretend that it we're not going to try to fit it into another way of making itself intelligible.

Jessica Van Cleave

So one of the one of the other things that has changed a lot in the last 10 years is the material discursive conditions of the world. So in what way does do those shifts mean that we should or need to, or might, think with theory differently or think with different theory or what? How do y'all think about those kinds of things?

Lisa Mazzei

I'll start and then Alecia. I mean, one of the things that we do in this edition is we, we deal with the idea of the collective. Deleuze and Guattari, this idea of collective enunciation, we talk about memory in a very different way. I think even the way that we mobilize Barad's concepts is an attention to the the formation of subjectivity and and the way things are, the way not talking about agency as some even though we worked against humanist agency in the first book, it's not even attributing agency to individuals and things and talking about agentic capacities. And so I think it's a it's a reconceptualization, and I've had some students in recent years really do some very interesting work, I think that, you know, moving and thinking very differently. So that's a that's a beginning answer to that question.

Alecia Jackson

Um, I'm very excited about the way in which we talk about or write about power in in the new Barad chapter in terms of the materiality of power, I think it's a very different way of conceptualizing it. So that that's something that I think, that we've, that we paid really close attention to. I think that that's a concept that, that once you plug it into materiality, you know, because it's history is really connected to knowledge. You know, Foucault's famous couplet or doublet, the power knowledge workings, and, you know, when we get into the materialization of power in the Barad chapter, I think it just really opens up, you know, a whole conversation and I think it's got, we have a lot to say about about that, in terms of, like Lisa was mentioning the collective. And how that that is working, were much more, I think, smarter about assemblage in the second edition, I think that has some some implications for materiality, language, subjectivity, all of that. So we've got some real, I think, shifts in, in how we're bringing those, those theories in, not only in the Barad chapter, but also when in chapters one and eight. When we're talking about thinking, we talk, we, you know, we are using some of the material discursive theories around how thought is, is material, how thinking is, is material and that that's Barad, you know, we, we quote her on that, and then, and write about what that what that looks like. So I think those theories also allowed us to make the shift away from epistemology to ontology. You know, this book is not a knowledge project. It's not representation. So we, you know, we really relied on those theories to make arguments for how research is creation, it is creation. So when we're in this, this ontology, these theories that you've mentioned, Jessica, we, we can't talk about research as knowledge production. Really, we're in a, you know, an ontology where research is helping us to imagine the worlds that we want to live in. So that's what we talk about a lot in my classes is, so what's the what's the use? You know, why are we doing this? If we're not, you know, we know so much already. Like, why do we want to keep asking the same questions. I was somewhere one time, I don't remember maybe getting my hair cut, I don't know. And I was talking to someone about what I do. And I was in that that semester, in particular, I was teaching a women's studies course and feminist theory was a graduate feminist theory course. And she said, Oh, that sounds so, so cool. And so awesome. And I'll say, Well, it's kind of depressing, because for 10 years, we've been talking about the same things, you know, in this feminist theories class, and, and nothing is really different. So I've started thinking about that and talking with doctoral students in my research courses saying, Well, what if research was became something completely different, you know, its use its purpose. And I think what we're doing in this book, is we're saying that we're making worlds, when we think with theory, we're creating something new, we're creating openings for possibilities that have been unthought. So and I see students doing this in their dissertations now. So they're picking up, you know, their theories, you know, we just went to a defense last week of a student, I was chairing a dissertation for and she's, she has a son who has autism. And so she basically did a power knowledge reading of all the, the materials of autism, all the the documentation, the special ed, you know, just everything that the path to diagnosis is what she called it and, and just recreated an entirely different world. Through that work, you know, the outcome of what she did the she got to the end and, and she said, this is this is what we need to do to the DSM to make this entire framework less deficit oriented, and less damage centered. So she recreates she did her critique, you know, her thinking her thinking with, but what came from that was her own creation, you know, a creation of a different concept, you know, how do we redefine this? How do we, you know, how do we talk about it differently? Y'all know, Heather Cox Richardson, that the historian on Facebook has been doing her letters, and posting a lot. And as a historian, she said something recently that that I've been using in my class, and she said, the way that we make change is that we have to change the way that we that people think about something. And the only way we can change the way people think about something is to change the way that we talk about it. That's it from a historian's perspective, that's, that's how change happens. And so it is about language, but it's also about worlding. And I think that, with this, these new theories and the material discursive turn and attending to ontology, in qualitative work, we can begin to create the worlds through the words that we use, changing the way that we talk about it, changing the way that people think about it, and then the doing. So I think that this book, in particular makes those connections between thinking and doing creation, experimentation, and really pushes that, again, what we talked about this in the chapter eight, what we do in research is unleash becomings. And that still is so I can read chapter eight and see what we have to say about unleashing becomings. But, but that's what I I envision, I would like to see research moving in that direction. I think that that's what those these theories, these post foundational theories enable us to do. And students are doing it like, I see them taking risks in ways that are very exciting.

Lisa Mazzei

They recognize that the descriptive project is not is not moving us. I mean, we talked about that in class last night. Okay, we know we know what's happening. So how do we what are the mechanisms for, for creating these new worlds that Alecia is talking about?

Jessica Van Cleave

So that was really exciting, because I was hoping you all would have something fabulous and, and generative and opening up to say, in relation to that, and I wildly underestimated what might happen. So I really appreciate that. That was, that was really helpful. I'm sure the, the audience is going to get a lot out of that. And I think, as I go back to the second edition of Thinking with Theory, I will now be reading it differently because of hearing the ways that you all frame it and how it's now being taken up and seeing where it goes with your students and in relation to the current projects that you have going on. So thank you for that. Um, so I'm gonna shift a little bit, if you don't mind to talk about the writing process. And you said that you have shifted and talked about writing as an ontological project as well. So what does that look like in terms of your writing partnership or your coauthorship? Either for this book, obviously, you've published a lot together and separately, so what does coauthorship look like and how has that shifted for you over the years?

Lisa Mazzei

I'm not sure it has shifted. I think that we're I think we're very appreciative of the generative nature of our collaborations together. And we often when we have not worked together on a project before, and we're working on something separately, it's like, oh, we miss we miss this. Because it does, there is a, there is an energy. And a, I don't even know how to talk about it the way in which I think we've established a great deal of trust in one another. And so it's not. So there's not maybe a hesitation that there might have been at the beginning. But it's, I can't imagine not having projects to work on together. And we keep coming, we keep dreaming up new ones.

Alecia Jackson

It feels often like it just a zigzag, you know, we're just kind of in it, we're in the middle of something. Sparks fly, and Lisa will write a word. And it'll remind me, I can you know, she'll she'll write a word that will just spark an idea. And then I can develop a paragraph from that, vice versa. We're not sensitive to, we don't hang on to our we're not, you know, if I write something, I'm not hanging on to it. And I think how many times have I said in the margin? I'm not wedded to this, or this is terrible. Just rewrite it? Or, you know, I think that we just have a real? I don't know, we see it, we look at it as as equals we don't, you know, we take turns on lead. You know, who's first? Who's second, but don't really track that. I mean, I couldn't even tell you, like, who's first, who's second on however many. It's very 50 50, I think, you know, on both of our leaders, we have that written very clearly that, that it's it's 50 50. And that way, it's in these collaborations we've done in the last decade with me on the East Coast, and Lisa on the West Coast, you know, we've had, we've joked a little while I'll get up and maybe work first, you know, and then and then, you know, Lisa will sometimes say, Oh, I can't wait to go in and see, you know, like what you've done and, and then I'll come back in the afternoon to kind of see, so it always feels like a gift. You know, when I go into the document, I there's never a time where I'm not a little bit excited to see what's developed and what's what's being made. Because it isn't an act of creation. And you know, we're not, but we're just you know, we're reading the same things. You know, it's just, it's, it's a collaboration in every sense of the word, you know, from reading the writing to, you know, the publishing, it's just yeah, it's, you know, we're respectful of when there's other things going on, you know, travel or family stuff. And, you know, it's just, yeah, it's just easy.

Jessica Van Cleave

Would that we all could have such lovely, collaborative relationships that are just easy. That's wonderful and of course, we all get to be the beneficiaries of that easy work for you. Not that it's easy, but um, so is there anything else that you want to share with the qualitative conversations audience either about thinking with theories, specifically, or qualitative research broadly or anything else that comes to mind?

Lisa Mazzei

This is not my this is not my original thought. This is something that you know, Bettie St. Pierre says all the time, but that I say to students, if you if you want, I mean, two things, I guess, you get into the middle of a project and you think that you want to think with this particular concept? Well start thinking with it. But if it's not doing the work that you want it to do, then try something else. But you have to be willing to spend the time to immerse yourself in the reading and the study in order to be able to, to do the work. I mean, Alecia, and I talked about with the first edition, people say, Well, how did you choose these theories? Well, some of them were ones that we had, because we had worked with them in pre, you know, with some of our other work. But then we as we started thinking, for example, with Barad, it was okay if we're going to do this, we need to really spend some time with it to see if it if it is doing something for us. And if it's not, then we need to find something else. So that's, I mean, we we talked about that a little bit in the book, but I think it's just really emphasizing that it's, it's it's not easy work, but it's such exciting and generative work. And I think once the students start, start encountering it then it's hard for them to imagine not doing their work in this way.

Alecia Jackson

Yeah, I think that what, what Lisa just said reminds me of how I talk about theory is that it just finds you, you know, that's something I say, in every class, we're, you know, we're, we have two theory classes that we offer in our doctoral program. We just call it theory one, theory two, and it's just, it's pretty linear. You know, it starts with positivism. And then just, by the time we get to the end of theory two, we're in post humanism. So it's, you know, just going through those frameworks, and and there were some times students just nothing really speaks to them. And so we just say, you know, just keep reading, and something, you know, that language. You know, I tell the story of how, when I first read Foucault, it was like, wow, this is language that I've always sensed, and felt that I couldn't articulate, I didn't know what I needed to say. And then here's somebody who's saying it for me. And then all I had to do is plug it into, you know, what I was encountering in the world. And, and that helped me to think differently about it and opened up to the end thought so, you know, a lot of what I like to say to students is, you know, this, this work is the pursuit of the unthought it is the pursuit of what we, you know, can't imagine yet, the not yet. We were back to the movement between the first and second edition. And, and, you know, Jessica, you read a chapter for us on Manning, because we thought we need to add a new theorist, you know, and we'd both been reading a lot of affect and gone with the affect conference. And, and we thought that that was something that was missing from the book. And so we thought, well, let's just add a Manning chapter. And it didn't, it didn't fit well. It didn't, it didn't, it didn't, it wasn't working the way that we wanted it to work. But Manning was working on us, but we couldn't figure out what was going on. So we just kept wrestling with it. And and, you know, you read it, and we got great feedback from you. And it made us really ask some questions about what what is, what are we doing? And how are we putting this to work? And what happened is, I remember we were going back and forth on it. And, and I think I texted you, Lisa, or sent you an email, and I said, I think we're using Manning, Manning methodologically like as a technique. And so we're like, whoa, that's exactly what's going on. It's not that we need to plug Manning into the performative accounts, we need to plug it into writing and thinking and doing. And so chapter eight is where Manning shows up and affect because we do a lot with pre individual sensing, and how that is part of of a thought. That thought is not just cognitive, but it's this pre individual syncing of something coming into being of the coming that's emerging. So we just stayed with Manning, but it it shifted and helped us to say something about writing and thinking and ontology that we could never have planned for. So the last thing, yeah, I'll just say is that you just don't know where you'll end up. And all of this is emergent, contingent, relational, all of those things. So just stay, as Donna Haraway says, just stay with the trouble and you know, something will will come, Donna Haraway says something, something always happens, and it always will. So I think that that's part of what the message is in in the the second edition.

Jessica Van Cleave

Well, I want to thank you both so much for your time today. This has been a delightful conversation for me, and I know our QR SIG listeners are really going to appreciate your, your descriptions of the text, as well as the connections that that you are making and thinking about, both in their roles with students and in their roles as instructors as well as methodologists. So thank you both so much for your time this afternoon.

Lisa Mazzei

Thank you, Jessica. And thanks for prompting us to think more about our own process.

Alecia Jackson

Yeah, it's very nice to, to articulate it and, and be able to really appreciate, you know, what, what we've done, I don't think I really sat and thought about the, you know, I mean, I know what the differences are between first and second edition, that really going back on this journey in time and space has been a real treat. So thank you.

Jessica Van Cleave

Thank you. Thank you. It's been a gift this afternoon.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

ukraine, war, people, ukrainian, asu, research, students, education, happening, invasion, qualitative research, february, questions, crimea, russia, universities, fled, podcast, family, moment

SPEAKERS

Tim, Mariia

Tim  00:15

Hello and welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast hosted by the qualitative research SIG through AERA, the American Education Research Association. I am Tim wells, a postdoctoral research scholar at Arizona State University and guest host for this episode of the podcast. The qualitative conversations podcast doesn't have a regular host. Instead, each episode is organized by our podcast committee. Normally, my role resides in the background coordinating episodes and editing audio, but today I'm behind the mic. In conversation with Mariia Vitrukh. Mariia is a doctoral candidate in the Education Policy and Evaluation Program at Arizona State University. She serves on the QR sig's graduate student committee. In the fall of 2021, Mariia had been in conversation with myself about an episode she had hoped to record for the podcast. That podcast episode was never recorded. This is because only a few months later, on February 24 of 2022, Russia made a full scale invasion into Ukraine taking over 20% of the territory of Ukraine. Over the past few months. Maria is Ukrainian, writing her dissertation on learning experiences of Ukrainian students who moved from war areas in Ukraine and continue education in the context of forced migration. For the past year, she had been living in Ukraine, she left only a month before the invasion to teach courses at ASU and finish her dissertation proposal. The country she left has changed forever. But this hasn't stopped her from returning. I don't think that's yet research to complete. But all of our family remains in Ukraine. So instead of the original podcast that we planned in the fall of 2021, I invited Mariia to the podcast to share her experience of researching and being a doctoral student, in candidate and in times of war. Mariia, I can't thank you enough for your willingness to be on this program. Perhaps we could start with you sharing a bit more about your background for the listeners, what brought you to ASU's doctoral program. And what were you doing beforehand?

Mariia  02:41

Tim, thank you so much for the invitation. I really appreciate the opportunity not only to share my experience as a student, but also to talk about the ones in Ukraine.

Tim  02:53

So what brought you to ASU doctoral program.

Mariia  02:57

So, after I did my second master's degree at the University of Cambridge, in psychology and education road, I went back to Ukraine and storage, or co founded an NGO Ukrainian Educational Research Association. We did a couple of projects on education in Ukraine. And as a member of the organization I applied for grant was the US State Department. And I collaborated with displaced universities in Ukraine. And those are the universities that moved from Eastern world areas of the country. I worked with them for about three years on the project, doing workshops, and preparing conferences, interviewing people. And I think this collaboration kind of pushed me to think what can I do more to speak about the stories and share the stories of those people, and especially students, and how to say that I was really impressed with what they shared with me. And I think inspired by their example, even though their stories were not the easy ones. And this kind of inspire me to look for PhD programs. So I applied to ASU because it offered an interdisciplinary approach and had a variety of methods to look into the ongoing problems. So I thought that that's a place that where I can find a way to explore not an easy topic of war and how to research war, especially education in the context of war.

Tim  04:35

Yeah, thanks. That's just a little bit of background that I think might help orient the listeners to this episode and kind of your own deep knowledge and experience in Ukraine and in how this connects maybe to your own research and really builds off some of that background. So perhaps we could start with you telling us what are you doing in February of this year when the war ramped up?

Mariia  05:05

So I've just finished my perspectives de France. And I was planning to go back to Ukraine in March, but then to do my data collection, but then all the flights have been canceled due to the full scale invasion. Yeah, so I think that was the moment where I had to make quiet, hard decisions first, do I continue with my dissertation? Then if I do, then how do I continue? And there were a lot of personal issues as well as research questions, ethical considerations. Yeah, so had to resolve a lot of those factors.

Tim  05:54

I can actually remember sitting down with you early in the winter of 2022. Before the, the the invasion, and we had a conversation. And I think, some, I guess, what struck me and what I still remember about that, as you were situating, lots of the events that were kind of unfolding because this was a time when Russia had started to militarize the border, and they kind of brought this big presence of military forces right around the border. And I was just kind of asking you about this. And what you did really nicely is situate this historically, you provided some context and things. And of course, this isn't a History podcast, but maybe you can give some background about the background and history of the war. And maybe share a little bit about what happened in 2014, and how that might connect in some ways to 2020.

Mariia  06:53

So although there is a very common discourse, saying that the vast and by West people usually refer to the United States and NATO, saying that they put too much pressure on Russian presidents, and it caused a triggered the war. But I think it the tension began much earlier between Ukraine and Russia back in 2010, when victory and a college, very pro Russian president came to power in 2016 Ukrainian government's decision to suspend the signing of an Association Agreement with the European Union, and choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union sparked progress among the Ukrainian people. The scope of progress widened, with calls for the resignation of President victory on a college and the garment. The protests later Friday expanded into Ramadan and the Revolution of Dignity. A year later in 2014, protesters eventually occupied a government buildings in many regions of Ukraine. The uprising climaxed on 18th 20th of February 2014 and fierce fighting and cave between Milan activists and pleas resulted in deaths of almost 100 protesters and 13 police officers present in college and other government ministers fled the country to Russia. And just a week later, the so called little green man, as they were famously named in media appeared in Crimea in unmarked green army uniforms, carrying modern Russian military weapons and equipment. They took over control of strategic positions in Crimea and set Russian flags. Later in April 2014. Large parts of the Knights can Luhansk regions were seized by pro Russian terrorists backed by a Russian military since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014. With the annexation of Crimea and invasion into Donbass, which are Donetsk and Luhansk region by Russia, Ukraine has become one of the countries with the highest number of internally displaced people worldwide. And these numbers can be compared to countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. And by the summer of 2014, the Ukrainian ministry for social policy had already registered close to 2 million internally displaced people, and an estimated 1 million people have fled from war zone to the Russian Federation. In terms of education, from the scarce resources available, it is known that at the beginning of the conflict about back in 2014, about 700 educational institutions suffered both higher education and school level education at the higher level education about 700,000 students and teachers for more More than three and a half 1000 educational institutions experienced psychological difficulties due to military conflict in obtaining education. And students consider about 30% of those affected by war. After the 24th of February 2022, after the full scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, over 1000, educational institutions have suffered bombing and shelling, and about 100 of them have been destroyed completely. And these numbers are continuously increasing. almost 10 million Ukrainian refugees have fled Ukraine since this escalation. And another 7 million more have been displaced internally within Ukraine, and over 12 million have been affected in the areas hardest hit by the war. And also how to remember that throughout over 7.5 million children that now are considered Children of War, and not to mention that the humanitarian needs are constantly increasing.

Tim  11:10

Yeah, thanks. So what's really clear, I think in talking with you, around this is that these events are part of a much larger, longer history that extends beyond February of this year in in dates much prior to that. But maybe you can tell us, if you're open to sharing a little bit about how you've experienced the changes of the war, the escalation within since this last year, and especially maybe how you've experienced this as a doc student doing research and qualitative research.

Mariia  11:52

Um, I think I made quite a few interesting discoveries for me both as a researcher and a human being and Ukrainian citizen, is that it's a very non translatable experience. So you can't really explain this to someone who hasn't been through similar events. Also, the news don't really reflect what is happening day by day process. After the full invasion, I had to make a decision on whether I continue with my dissertation, because the first instinct was just to pack my luggage and go back to Ukraine. And I wanted to help in some way I just didn't know how to help. I was waking up every morning with Assad if my parents are still alive. So I was sending them text messages to check in on them. And following the news constantly to make sure that the city they were in was not bombed. Also checking on my friends and their location. And I think just very recently, maybe a few weeks ago, my sister shirts that Monday, she actually saw a missile missile flying over her head. And I think that felt very surreal, because she saw that it was so close that you could literally see it. And actually, what she shared is that the moment the bomb is like about your head flying in the air, you can't really hide anymore, because it moves so quickly, that you don't really have enough time to hide. And my mom actually turned out that she saw the missile was acquired a few times, but she never told me about this. I know that my family does not tell me even half of what they're going through. And that's on the one hand, it's disturbing. On the other hand, I kind of understand that. I think another difficult aspect is that your family and France are constantly under the threat. And the first few days, of course, were a shock. I remember when I called my parents at 7am in the morning, cave time on the 24th of February. And I told them, like because they saw on the news already that the key was bombed two hours earlier, so and they were still asleep. My father saw that that's a fake news that that's not true. And I think it was true for most of my friends and people in Ukraine. And so the bombing starts at 5am. In cave time, and I think that's the most mean time to start a war because it's before the dawn. And at times, it's hard to process what is happening, especially if you're not fully awake. And some of my friends were in queue at that time. So they try to flee the city. Or normally it takes about five to six hours to get out of this key of to the most western city. And one of my friends heard that it took her about 12 hours. And it's only because she left immediately after the bombing started. Those who tried to flee like just a few hours later. If it either took them over 24 hours or even more, or they were forced to return home just because of the traffic chance, no gas, and the panic that was in the city. Also, like even now, people have to constantly be a large. They hear the sirens literally every day they have to hide in basements on some safe, safe space in their homes. It does influence children a lot, especially their education and schooling, because a lot of schools have been turned into refugee shelters, which means that in many cities and rural areas, there is no physically space to study and most of the education is done online. I guess the word is not the same throughout the time. So the first few days and weeks were the most uncertain. It is changing over time, because you learn to process things differently. It doesn't get easier, you just I think start to navigate the context of war better. At the moment, I think it's the most like drastic things is that a lot of people are dying, both civilians and soldiers. Also, the price for food is increasing constantly. Some cities just don't have access to food, water, electricity, mobile connection or internet connection. So that's that's what concerns the more like a personal explorations and discoveries I made for myself. When it comes to research, I think that the questions I was asking myself, because I was supposed to work with displaced universities and students from displaced universities. So I wondered, like how to do research with people who are under constant physical threat or whose family is under physical threat, when the cities are being shelled, and you yourself are going through this experience, or your family members, your friends are hiding in basements and trying to survive. Is it even ethical to do this type of research? Also, I know that, especially the first two weeks, people were in shock, they were panicking, there was a lot of uncertainty. A lot of people didn't know where to go and what to do. And also, like, how do you talk to people who lost their homes. So I knew that some of the students I'm may potentially be interviewing will go through the second displacement. So the first displacement was in 2014, when they lost their homes, and they had to leave the occupied territories, territories that were under war. And then in February 2022, they were going through the second displacement, losing their homes with a second time having to leave their education space for the second time, having their group mates and professors killed or injured, as well as their family members. And of course, there were like technical issues. And I just couldn't travel to Ukraine that easily. And my methods that I was using, because I'm using Artspace methodologies and somatic practices required on site participation. So this man that I need to meet with students in person, and I kind of wondered, how do we solve this issue? Yeah,

Tim  18:31

I'm actually just following up and curious. So how did you solve that issue? Were you able to meet with people in person? And have you conducted that type of research since?

Mariia  18:45

Yeah, I think that my volunteering and advocacy work actually helped me with that. Because when I started doing some volunteering at Arizona State University, I met some of the students who were from this place to universities. And through personal networking and social service. I got connected to a group of students who was in a different country. And I was very lucky to get a grant from gpsa. And travel all the way there and work with them.

Tim  19:28

This was after the invasion, correct?

Mariia  19:30

Yeah, it was actually end of April, beginning of May. And that was something completely found plans because so I thought that most probably I will have either to change the methods, change the population. Stop doing my research completely because I didn't see how it's relevant anymore because the history took a very unexpected turn, which meant that the research I wrote just half a year ago was not relevant anymore. It became a part of history. So it was not what was happening, the universities I was describing. Most of them don't exist anymore, or they had to relocate again. So when I was talking about the second relocation for people, the same thing happened for the institutions. And when I reached out professors from displaced universities, most of them told me like, we don't know what's going to happen next. We didn't know where our students are, we didn't know where most of our colleagues are. So it's very unpredictable what is going to happen next.

Tim  20:36

And that's part of well, in partly in response to that, you've also, that's you've been doing your advocacy, you started advocacy work? How have you thought about your advocacy work as related or connected in any way to your research? I know you said, partly through that work, you got funded through the Student Association at it at ASU to travel to the Ukraine correct. And do research.

Mariia  21:05

Oh, it actually was not Ukraine, I just don't want to name the country because I'm going to expose the students. I traveled to Europe to do my data collection. I think at that moment, I didn't think about advocacy, as connected to my research at all, I just had a feeling. I think there are two things First, for those Ukrainians who are outside of Ukraine, all of us feel the sense of guilt, that you are in safe conditions, and you survived. And you don't have to go through what most people are going through in Ukraine, and at times, it gets feel unbearable. And I think it's to somehow cope with a sense of guilt, and guilt of Survivor, I think you try to do something to contribute and help. So what I was trying to do was to get together those students who were at ASU into one group and organization and see what we can together do. And that's when I started meeting people. And I also had to collaborate more on meet some people from the Aspera, Ukraine people from the Aspera. And that's when I had a chance to go and talk about issues that Ukrainian students face here at ASU and had a chance to talk about was governor of Arizona juicy and as well as ASU representatives, as well as IRC and migration office asking for help both for Ukrainian students and Ukrainian refugees. Also gave interviews to local media. And I gave talks at the conferences just sharing information or what was happening at that time in Ukraine. But it was not there was not really like a goal to connect it to my research. Rather, it was like feel of responsibility to somehow do something or help in any way I could.

Tim  23:14

Write Of course. So I guess I'm Yes. still curious about research and what this process is looking like in in times of war in the middle of war and how this is, so much of qualitative research is about relationships, relationships that you form and maintain. But it's also about ethical considerations. And you're kind of in the midst of all of that, how have you navigated some of that? Both relationships, ethics, the concerns that you might have have around conduct both conducting research around a topic that's at the very least adjacent and likely very relevant to the experiences of people in war, forced migration. And then, at the same time, in this context, where so much turmoil and wars going on, I'm curious, a little bit of how you think about those and how you've experienced the research work during this time.

Mariia  24:24

I think it was not a straightforward way. And I had a lot of hesitations how and if I should continue with my research, I mean, was my dissertation. But I think working with students at ASU actually helped me because it showed where the needs are and how can I address some of the ethical issues. And in terms of building relationship, my key question was, I didn't want to re traumatize students, I will be potentially interviewing Just asking the question that may not be appropriate in that moment. So I consulted with psychologists from Ukraine that were working with refugees in Ukraine, like what is the best way to approach if it makes sense to do this research at all? And the response that I got is that, in that particular moment, people, most people feel happy that they survived. And they do want to talk they key consideration was that I do not tell them what to do, I do not tell them how to act, how to send have to feel, etc. So if I'm there to listen, and ask some questions, then have to be respectful and empathetic about their views and beliefs. And from my experience, back in 2017, when people shared although it was in retrospect, so the people I was working with back in 2016 2017, it's been already three years since the war hit for them. And one thing they shared with me is that the most traumatic experience for them was when someone would come with curious questions and observations, and would show little or no empathy. So I think I took made a note for myself and thought that if I'm there to ask questions, I have to be prepared to listen. And I realized that most of the time, it's not going to be an easy. And another aspect was that I realized that I have to be honest about my intentions for the research and the project I'm doing. And of course, confidentiality matters a lot, because for a lot of my participants, I realized they are still in Ukraine and their family members may be in danger. And also, another aspect I kind of anticipated is that the most interesting conversations are going to happen off record. And this man's that they would have to remain of records. And even though it could be tempting to use those for the project, or for the research, I realized that I mean, this is something that is shared of records, so it stays of records. Some other ethical considerations were that for most people, as it was, for me, it tends, it's hard to navigate what is happening and find, find the words to express what you're going through. So it gets easier in retrospect, that's what I've noticed, with my previous research, but it's hard. It's harder in the moment. So I had to be aware of that. Also, different people process words differently. And there are many factors for that. A lot depends on the location of the family, their economic situation, that pre will previous beliefs, experiences, involvement in the war, and how much their family members are involved. Also, the distance and safety, very often hardly an indicator indicators about how person feels because, like, as I said, like sense of guilt. And also times even helplessness can be present, even for those who are outside of the country and are relatively safe. So I realized that when I will be interviewing my participants, I have to be always aware of that. And I think also how you ask questions matter, because if you're just picking people's brain, you see what they're going through and like trying to satisfy your curiosity, this could be a very traumatic approach. And you have to be constantly aware that that these people are continuously going through the war, even though they may themselves not be in the middle of it, but their family members most probably are their friends are. And it immediately puts them in this, like continuous processing, or continuous influence. So I think these were like my key explorations. And yeah, and while trying to navigate and I think I'm still trying to navigate how to how to approach it. I don't think that that's the process that is over for me.

Tim  29:36

Yeah, of course, that makes a lot of sense. In so much is still changing. And yeah, the war evolves and continues to evolve. And what's interesting or what's concerning, I think, is that we're now creeping up on six or seven months into the war. And personally, I send It's there's just a waning of interest and it starts to get lose its front page headline status. And but so as we close out the conversation I kind of on that note, but also, I'm curious what you could share or what you would share to listeners, what else you would share to listeners, as yet we hit you know this half, half of the year moment in likely this will be a conflict and war that continues. But what else would you share with whether the listeners

Mariia  30:39

so I'm not surprised that Ukraine disappeared from the headlines. Talking about war and listening in World War on daily basis is exhausting, I think to be in the context of war is even more so. But I don't think that this is an indicator that people don't care anymore. It's just you can't be focused on world the time. In Trump's of the case of Ukraine, I believe that it opened an interesting historical consciousness. And I remember that at the very beginning on the 24th of February, the whole world was giving Ukraine about 2072 hours, and trying to predict what's going to happen next. And I think that Ukrainians refuse this bit of realization that they may lose their homeland, and they were fighting back. And we are still fighting back. Even though the whole world bugs and was waiting for Ukraine to be taking over. I think that Ukrainian population showed incredible resistance and love for their homelands. And I have no doubt that we are going to win this war, and we are going to take our lands back.

Tim  31:57

On that note, thank you so much for your willingness to share about your experience, the war, and also your experience conducting war research in the midst of this war. And also thanks for your service in the qualitative research SIG, so I really appreciate it. And it was great having a conversation with you.

Mariia  32:18

Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate this time and I appreciate listeners time to even explore this topic. So thank you

In this episode, James Salvo interview Jessica Lester on digital tools and technology in qualitative research. See the following link for the transcript of this interview: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTH5sN93LYnhIsNCI1Lvjm938OxVLyKoqoQlTClDNNbWklNd1rY791re9jTJy8lad7mMVM1fLRlSPUf/pub

In this episode, James Salvo interviews Kakali Bhattacharya, editor of the Departures in Critical Qualitative Journal. The follow is a link to the transcript of the recording.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRE14XdXBlCkELsYv-aktchCLq5GNtwUVQKvkwzyK6v8DoHqB40wKUZu4r69mPsxEMhHZGMBM6T0XYj/pub

In this Episode, guest hosts Kelly Guyotte and Seth McCall interview Candace Kuby and Becky Christ about their work on speculative qualitative inquiry and pedagogy. A transcript of the episode can be found at the following link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT3GPrMhAq3CEwVBq8RWbDijLun33mlqdbPamsjAdKDPG8w0Q1J_n4nkhfgELfVCRrunmZhAJzY1WP6/pub

In this episode, mentor, Dr. Kelly Guyotte, and, mentee, Carlson Coogler, discuss their experiences of mentorship. They specifically address mentorship within the Qualitative Research SIG. The episode begins with Carlson interviewing Kelly, but flips halfway through as Kelly begins to interview Carlson. Boden Robertson serves as the guest host, introducing the conversation. The transcript follows. 

---

Boden Robertson  0:11  
Hello everyone and welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. I'm Boden Robertson, the guest host for this episode on mentorship. And I'm very excited today to be joined by Dr. Kelly Guyotte and Carlson Coogler that have been gracious enough to lend their time and support to our QR SIG podcast episode. We'll start with introductions from our guests, and then the guests will interview each other about the QR SIG mentoring program and their experience.

Kelly Guyotte  0:41  
Thank you, Bowden. It's a pleasure to be here today. My name is Kelly Guyotte. I am an associate professor of qualitative research at the University of Alabama. I am also currently serving as the chair of the mentoring committee in the QR SIG. I had the immense pleasure of also working with Carlson she is a student in our program or educational research program with a specialization in qualitative research. And I'll turn things over to you Carlson so you can introduce yourself.

Carlson Coogler  1:11  
Yeah, hi, I'm Carlson Coogler at the University of Alabama, as was just said, I'm a doctoral candidate in educational research. I'm also the chair of the graduate student committee for the QR SIG. And Dr. Guy, as she mentioned, is my wonderful, lovely advisor, Professor, co teacher and mentor. So I'm very excited to do this with her. So I guess I'll go ahead and start asking me questions. So tell me about your experience with the QR segment authoring program. What do you do have done? What does it look like?

Kelly Guyotte  1:38  
Yeah, I had to I looked this up recently, too, because I wasn't sure how long I'd actually been on this committee. And it's been a long time, I actually joined the inventory committee in 2016. And so I started off as a committee member, I was vice chair of the committee in 2018. And then since 2019, I've been serving as chair of the mentoring committee. And so during that time, I have done a lot of things behind the scenes. So that's mostly where my my participation and support has been directed. So in terms of planning and organizing our various initiatives, I have also stepped in as needed to serve as a mentor for things such as the proposal Forum, which I think we're going to talk a little bit about, as well as the mentoring session. But really, a lot of the work that I've done has been helping to make sure these initiatives happen. And now as a chair, really supporting the committee members to make sure that we can continue to support our QR SIG membership. And I'm actually, this is gonna sound silly, but I'm looking forward to rolling off his chair because one thing that I really want to do and look forward to do is become more of a mentor in the QR SIG. So it's been really fun to plan and to be behind the scenes, but I really value mentorship. And so I'm looking forward to being able to to put myself out there a little bit more in support our various members who are seeking participation in our in our various initiatives.

Carlson Coogler  3:09  
That's awesome. Yeah. So what does the QR SIG mentoring do? What kind of help or assistance is available for students or early for faculty?

Kelly Guyotte  3:19  
Yeah, it's a really good question. We have three primary initiatives that we undertake as part of the QR SIG. So our first one is called proposal forum and proposal forum happens before AERA submissions are due every year proposal Forum is an opportunity for graduate students, for postdocs and for early career faculty who are submitting to AERA. Maybe for the first time or the second time, who would like to get some feedback on their proposals, and most usually send an email out sometime in mid May, early June or something like that. And we'll ask for folks who want to participate in that, then we will seek mentors that will be willing to read those proposals. And then we do some matching that there's a matching that happens. And then the folks who are seeking feedback will submit their proposals, which will be read by the mentors. And then the idea is that we're really helping these early career and emerging scholars to get great feedback and to really submit high quality submissions that have a high likelihood of getting accepted into the QR SIG program. Our second initiative is the mentoring session. And this is one that I think is probably is one of our more popular ones. And a lot of people have heard of it because it actually shows up on the AERA program. This one is geared toward graduate students and postdocs and I think you're actually participating this year and that right person, 

Carlson Coogler  4:49  
yes, I am really excited about it. 

Kelly Guyotte  4:51  
Great. The mentoring session. Like I said, it happens during the AI era annual meeting. This is an opportunity for folks to get together. Thankfully, we're gonna be back face to face this year, which we're really excited about. We ran it virtually last year. And it actually ended up being really lovely in a virtual setting as well. But typically what happens is folks come together, they get an opportunity to, to chat with one another to talk a little bit about what we call, quote unquote, areas of stuckness. So where are folks stuck methodologically. And so we invite senior scholars and folks who have experienced this type of thing and have wisdom that they can share, and to serve as support for these folks during the session that actually happens during the eight year a meeting. And then the final initiative is our office hours initiative. And so we've actually recently opened this up so that it caters to a lot of different types of scholars. So we have it open toward graduate students. So all of our initiatives are open to graduate students, postdocs, and faculty at any stage. So the idea here is that anyone who feels like they need mentorship can participate in this program. And if you're part of the QR SIG, you may have seen the emails have gone out quite recently on this one. This used to be a face to face meeting that happened at a era. But we've since moved that to be more virtual, although people who are attending AERA, of course, could meet face to face. But these are typically one on one meetings and they're you know, about half an hour in length, we call office hours because if your graduates, your professors office, during office hours, you're having a short one on one meeting, getting some really good focused feedback from them. And then sometimes these relationships continue to evolve, and people stay connected after that. And then sometimes it's a one off thing. But regardless, it's a great way to get some feedback on things that are going on with you methodologically.

Carlson Coogler  6:44  
That's awesome. I have experienced or am going to be experiencing all three of those. So it's nice to hear it described like that you describe some of this in your last answer. But is there anything you'd like to add about the process about like how mentors or mentees sign up?

Kelly Guyotte  6:59  
Yeah, we always submit our calls through the QR SIG listserv. And so if you're interested in participating in any of our initiatives, become a member of the QR SIG. And that way you can get these emails and get information about all of our initiatives. You may also have professors or colleagues who are members, and they may be willing to pass along the information to you. But the QR SIG is typically how we share that information our mentees matched to mentors. That is also a really good question. So I am just one of a team. We have a big committee of folks that work together on all of these initiatives. And they work really hard on the matching part. So typically, we try to design our forms in our surveys that we send out so that we can get information that will be helpful for us to match our mentees and our mentors in a way that's meaningful. So for instance, we may ask for things like methodological areas of interest areas that you're working in. Or we may ask things to the nature of theory, what are the theories that that you're you're working with. And then oftentimes, we have started to ask for specific mentors that folks would like to work with. And so we take all of these suggestions and all of this information. And we just have really smart people that are dedicated to making sure that these pairs and these collaborations are meaningful and thoughtfully designed and constructed. A lot of the behind the scenes work that we do as a committee is the matching that really took tends to take a lot of our time. And we just really try to make sure that people are paired with the types of folks that they're wanting, and that we allow, or we cultivate methodological and theoretical fit. 

Carlson Coogler  8:46  
Definitely experienced that methodological and theoretical fit and how I've been matched. I really appreciate that. What are the or what does a typical session meeting meet up between mentor and mentee look alike?

Kelly Guyotte  8:57  
So that's that depends. And I mentioned all three of our initiatives. And I think I may have talked a little bit about this, but just to be really concise and straightforward with your answer with a proposal forum. The connection is purely through email. It's all virtual. They're encouraged if they want to, they could meet up and do a zoom or something like that. But typically, it's just the mentee emails. The proposal to the mentor reviews, it emails back feedback. So it's typically email and asynchronous. The mentoring session, as I mentioned, happens at the eight year annual meeting. And so during that, typically what we do is we do some speed dating type activities. We'll then divide into to small groups and big groups, and it becomes highly dialogic, and then office hours. Like I said, it can happen either through the eight year annual meeting, or it can be virtual, and it's up to half an hour for one on one or group sessions. And typically, the mentee will come in with some very specific questions. some very specific topics that they want to discuss. And then again, it becomes very collaborative and dialogue.

Carlson Coogler  10:06  
What are the future directions for the mentor,

Kelly Guyotte  10:09  
this is actually my last year as the chair, but I will stay on the committee. So you can't they can't get rid of me too easily here. What I would love to see is I would love to see us continuing to find ways to support all of the membership of the QR SIG through mentoring is something that I would really love to see our committee take off.

Carlson Coogler  10:31  
That's, that sounds really important to me. I think that's really awesome. And you're doing such a great job right now with graduate students and our faculty. So I'm excited to see that develop, what else would you like to share about the room that didn't get covered?

Kelly Guyotte  10:45  
I'll just elaborate a little bit, we have a really active and robust committee of folks, some of the people on this committee have been part of the group almost as long or as long as I have. So we have people that have been servies for four or fives years. And so these folks are just really committed to mentorship and really value mentorship. When you see those emails that come out, just know that there's this group that that's behind them, and they're working really hard. Everything we do really takes team effort. And we have a distinct group of wonderful scholars behind it. They're making sure that things happen and are that we're doing what we can to truly support those, this SIG that feels they need mentorship. So I have some questions for you, Carlson, I know that you mentioned as well earlier that you are experiencing some mentorship by the QR SIG. Committee, and then the mentoring committee. So can you tell me a little bit about your previous experiences? As you see it?

Carlson Coogler  11:54  
Yeah, yeah. So this will be my third year of participating in in some way or another within the mentoring initiatives. So in 2020, I did an adapted version of the mentoring session that was virtual because the pandemic only was a sickness. And it was like via Flipgrid. It was really neat the way they all set it up. And I was the person who responded to my my video was on Dr. Wolgemuth. And then in 2021, I had did the office hours and ARA proposal, forum mentoring, and I happen to be paired with the same person two times. And that was Dr. Nordstrom. And then in 2022, I have the office hours and mentoring are coming up. And I'm really excited to see how that goes.

Kelly Guyotte  12:38  
So thinking back about your experiences as a mentee, what do you think has gone particularly? Well, you seem you speak very positively of your experience. I'd love for you to elaborate a little bit.

Carlson Coogler  12:51  
Yeah, there's really a lot that has gone very well. I think matching has been really excellent that y'all have been very thoughtful. And you have done a really great job of communicating what it's supposed to look like and how power how expectations etc. And the matching in the in the communication has been really nice. The mentors that I've had Dr. Wolegmuth, Dr. Nordstrom have been linked very thoughtful. And giving, for example, like Dr. Wolgemuth answered my my practical side of my moment of stuckness, but also weighed out and problematize. And I'm such an in my thinking. And that's been really helpful as I've like move forward and thinking about the relationships between this phonologies methodologies, disciplines, etc. It's like a seed that stayed with me. And very similarly, Dr. Nordstrom gave me really great and very practical feedback on my proposal. Like, for example, she's I, I should know, by the end of the first paragraph what your proposal was about. And she didn't, because I needed to make it more clear. And so that was very helpful. But then also, she gave me some suggestions for about people to read as I was struggling with the ideas. And that was really helpful. And actually it thinking through what she provided has resulted in my first single author publication, which is really exciting. So I'm very thankful for that. So I guess what I'd say is that what went well was I guess it resulted from coming with questions of stuckness and being open to how the professor's would answer it. And they did a really good job. And because I also did that with Office Hours too, and then asking questions that allowed us to move back and forth between the practical and the more like conceptual.

Kelly Guyotte  14:29  
That's really exciting to hear that you had a publication come out of your mentoring committee interactions. Congratulations.

Carlson Coogler  14:37  
Yeah, thank you and also out of your class as well. It's been a combination of all kinds of mentoring, but it would not have happened without these all these intersections. So yeah, I'm thankful for the opportunities.

Kelly Guyotte  14:47  
That's fantastic. So since you're you're now a very experienced mentee, what do you what would you want to share to other folks who are listening who may be thinking about Becoming a mentee and one of these initiatives, what would you suggest that they know before signing up and or meeting with their mentor? How might they prepare?

Carlson Coogler  15:07  
Do I think for sure, be engaged, come with questions, make notes reflect on the process afterward. And as I've said before, I think it's important to ask about practical and idea oriented stuff, to not be one one camp there. But also, I think something that's been really helpful for me is realizing this isn't a performance. Like I'm not worried, like to try not to be worried about impressing the other person, like, when it's our professor, a lot of times, we're supposed to we're student, we're expressing our knowledge about stuckness, for example, it can still be productive, not knowing can be productive. And so it's okay that you don't know the answers to your questions. That's why you're seeking mentorship.

Kelly Guyotte  15:49  
Yes, that's excellent advice. I hope that hope that folks heard that, because it is it's sometimes it feels like even to get mentorship, we have to have some answers, but really, that stuckness and those tensions and those struggles can be really productive, even if they're unresolved by the end of an interaction, sometimes it's those interactions can linger with us and affect in really profound ways.

Carlson Coogler  16:13  
Yes, I would say that all of mine had been unresolved still, or it's been pushing me in a different direction that a way to approach my question of stuckness from a different angle that's ultimately been really helpful in helping me work out where I am. That's not been fully resolved. So

Kelly Guyotte  16:28  
Yeah, you mentioned this in your introduction, but you are this year, you're serving on the QR SIG graduate student committee, and I believe you're the chair of that committee. Is that correct?

Carlson Coogler  16:38  
Yes, that's correct.

Kelly Guyotte  16:39  
Can you tell me a little bit about your role?

Carlson Coogler  16:42  
Yeah, this is my second year on the committee, my first year of being chair. So basically, what I do similar to what you were talking about on the being on the back end, is that I do a lot of organizing and supporting and facilitating, and basically, I think of it as being between two relation, two sets of relations, one between the larger grad student community, and then the grad student committee, and then between the grad student committee and an exec committee for the QR SIG. So we have three different initiatives, the writing, breathing, and our newest one, which is a dissertation Group, kind of job oriented. And so each of the members facilitate those groups like they use a few of them facilitate each of the groups together. And then we are, we've had a speaker event for this first time, which was really awesome. And we're hoping to do that similar, there's gonna be a podcast coming out about that. And then we have a meet and greet planned for AERA. So the organizing, supporting and facilitating of those things are what I do as the Chair, I wish

Kelly Guyotte  17:42  
that I could have taken advantage of that when I was a graduate student. I think that sounds really incredible. And it seems like folks are really active and wanting to be involved.

Carlson Coogler  17:51  
Yes, they are in the committee. It's just absolutely wonderful. I really just I also like, help lead one of the groups, but it is definitely not a one person thing like we are a team and they are so active, involved and dedicated and creating spaces for community for graduate students. And so it's been really a pleasure to get to work with them

Kelly Guyotte  18:10  
in thinking about the because our topic today is about mentorship. How do you see your graduate student committee also taking the practice of mentorship? Yeah, so

Carlson Coogler  18:21  
I think about the book that you and Dr. Wolgemuth edited that philosophical mentoring and qualitative research, there was this like general push to disrupt the hierarchical relationship between my mentor and mentee and to think about mentoring. And it's happening, even not even just between not even just between people that think it was Coker at all, they had the chapter where it was more than human mentors. And but so I guess as I'm answering this, I think our experience of mentorship is mostly happening not in the formal professor to student mentor mentee codified relationship. It's really like students, a student in our community groups. And I think that's really important, and something that graduate students maybe don't, or maybe not as aware of that it's not just your professors, especially if they're new graduate students who are or can be in mentoring relationships with you that you can learn a lot from other graduate students. So yeah, I think that is where we do most of our mentorship experiencing experiences are happening student to student,

Kelly Guyotte  19:19  
I love hearing you say that because it makes me think of over the years that I've been in the on the mentoring committee, I've had a lot of faculty that have communicated how much they really enjoy serving as a mentor, how much they enjoy participating in mentoring session, because they feel like they learned so much and they take away so much from those in those engagements. And so I think a lot of times students have a tendency or grad students have a tendency to think that like they're the ones getting and receiving all have this wonderful knowledge, but really, our mentors do as well and it becomes very reciprocal. So I just loved hearing you talk about that breaking down the hierarchy and thinking about mentorship in new and different ways. So, yes, as a current doctoral student, doctoral candidate, what advice do you have for other current graduate students? And maybe thinking about that under the under the topic of mentorship? How would you want to mentor them to move forward and learn?

Carlson Coogler  20:17  
Yeah, I think my main advice, especially in relation to this topic would be to really cultivate relationships in various types of relationships, mentoring relationships, like with professors at your school elsewhere and conferences, talk to people after you listen to their presentations. If you have questions or ideas even email someone after you read the article, if you have a question or thought and you want to share, just reach out, I think because a lot of us are a lot of us are in our these roles that we're in and as teachers and researchers, because these relationships are important to us and having communicating about ideas and having an opportunity to mentor and be mentored and for it to be reciprocal, like you said, so I think trying to cultivate in as many places as you can opportunities that are formal and informal for mentoring apply to be on committees like I've learned a lot about being a scholar doing qualitative inquiry as a result of being on the grad committee and learning from other graduates. And then also because I'm the chair of the exec committee, so I've heard a lot it's helped me understand and imagine what it looks like to be a professor and to be on a committee at ARA and like what that looks like. And then I think, like you said, the reciprocal aspect I can work in this weird liminal spot. We're still students, though soon, hopefully they have doctorates and be professors. And so we're learning how to be a scholars. And I think that there's like this slide that's always happening between like mentor and mentee, like we're always have. And so I think sharing and learning with humility, knowing that you do have something to share, but that you also always have something received that you're both always mentor mentee, I think is important. And it's relationships. Yeah, I guess that's the advice I would offer.

Kelly Guyotte  21:56  
I love that. And I think just having the opportunity to work with you as your as your one of your professors, and we're getting to co teach and we could get into right together, I know that I have learned a tremendous amount from working with you and reading with you and thinking with you. For me, that reciprocity is something that is really fulfilling and sustaining. So I appreciate you very much, Carlson.

Carlson Coogler  22:21  
I appreciate you too. And I 100% agree it's a joy. It's a joy to be in these relationships with you. Thank you.

Boden Robertson  22:28  
And I appreciate both of you joining us today for this episode. And I think that about wraps up today's episode on mentorship. I know that I've learned a lot and I really hope that our listeners have to, I'll be completely honest, I'm definitely sold on the mentor program and I will be and I will be signing up so you've you've at least convinced me congrat congratulations. So just to close out again to thank Dr. Kelly Guyotte and Carlson Coogler for taking the time out of their busy schedules to join us for today's episode. And until next time. Thanks for joining us for qualitative conversations.