The power and usefulness of qualitative research over other types of research inquiry comes from its unsurpassed ability to explain process and reveal complexity (Creswell, 2013;Maxwell, 2013). While quantitative researchers tend to be interested in numerically representing characteristics, variables, or concepts of interest (see Hjalmarson & Moskal, 2018 for quality considerations in quantitative research), qualitative researchers more often focus on people, relationships, situations, events, and processes (Maxwell, 2013). Many believe qualitative research can reveal the bigger picture often missed in quantitative research (Alasuutari, 2010;Maxwell, 2013). Given the recent recognition of qualitative research, we have begun to see an increase in this approach to inquiry, particularly in engineering education. Because our ultimate goal is to encourage engineering education researchers interested in qualitative methodologies to develop their unique "ways of being" and "ways of knowing" as qualitative researchers, we attempt to draw together flexible standards for the dissemination of engineering education's qualitative research in this editorial. MotivationBefore becoming an Associate Editor for the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE), I (Nadia is the first person source of the stories in this guest editorial) often thought that JEE was not very open to publishing qualitative papers. Sometimes the feedback and reviews on papers from the engineering education community pointed more to the reviewer's misunderstanding of the purpose of qualitative research. They seemed to only value research that was generalizable. Qualitative research, which is typically context-specific and not generalizable to broader populations, would therefore never meet this requirement (Willig, 2012). Thus, my frustration grew over time.As I began my role as an Associate Editor in January 2016, I began to see a different perspective. Most of the manuscripts I handle are qualitative papers, and I noticed patterns in many of them. For example, many papers included a generic boilerplate or otherwise cursory description of methods. This lack of detail did nothing to provide insight into how the research was conducted and even less on how the work could be replicated. Many of JEE's reviewers would critique these points in their reviews and then not recommend the manuscript for publication. Even those reviewers who did not point specifically to methods would suggest that they did not find the work to be trustworthy or valid, a concern that could have been allayed with more details about how the research was actually undertaken. Rarely did we get a reviewer critiquing implied assumptions of the work's qualitative nature. In

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Researchers assert that narratives do political work. Yet, in this article, we trouble the nature of this political work to account for narrative inquiry’s smoothing over of polyvocality for univocal coherence. Our posthumanist unsmoothing builds an analytical example around three successive Latourian tasks to bring to the fore competing voices and truths often obscured in conventional narrative. Drawing from ethnographic data of one low-income rural family, we seek to complicate the human-centered deficit perspective. In teasing out various voices and sociotechnical systems, this posthuman analytic exposes the hidden ways in which human lives are conditioned by political forces, which order the human conscious. As ethical beings, we take responsibility for promoting analytical tools as a means of addressing advocacy as well as social justice concerns. Ultimately, we expose implications for a narrative unsmoothing that rethinks democracy and political efforts to reclaim the voice of the marginalized, such that it can dismantle deficit perspectives, inform greater sociopolitical understandings, and mobilize more just democracies. Our task as critical scholars is to carve provocative methodological spaces for new lines of inquiry that expand our horizon of hope.

UGA). Dr. Kellam is an engineering education researcher and a mechanical engineer. In her research, Dr. Kellam is broadly interested in developing critical understandings of the culture of engineering education and, especially, the experiences of underrepresented undergraduate engineering students and engineering educators. She is a qualitative researcher who uses narrative research methods to understand undergraduate student and faculty member's experiences in engineering education. Dr. Kellam is interested in curricular design and has developed design spines for environmental and mechanical engineering programs when she was a faculty member at UGA, and recently helped design the EESD PhD program at ASU. She teaches design courses, engineering science courses, and graduate courses focused on qualitative research methods. She also serves as a Senior Associate Editor of the Journal of Engineering Education.

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