In this article, the authors use the metaphor of the rhizome of the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari as an experimental methodological concept to study the narrative construction of the self. By considering the self as a rhizomatic story, the authors create a story structure that not only offers a useful view on the way in which people narratively construct their selfhood but also stimulates an experiment with alternative, nontraditional presentation forms. The researcher is no longer listening from a distance to the stories of the participant and subsequently represents these stories. She or he becomes a part of the rhizome. The authors illustrate this rhizomatic approach and its research possibilities by presenting story fragments from their research.Researcher: As I already mentioned by e-mail and phone, I'm interested in the way people who have received a medical-psychiatric diagnosis tell about themselves. So the idea is that you tell me more about yourself and your life today. I don't have any prepared questions, so it's really the idea that you tell about what's important to you. Every once in a while I'll ask a question if I haven't understood something.

In this article, an intersubjective developmental theory that focuses primarily on the development of the interworld between the caregiver and the infant is used to integrate and interpret the seemingly incoherent and contradictory research findings on the interactions between mothers and their infants with visual impairments. The implications for further research and early intervention practices are presented.

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Traditional research examining the communicational choices made by families with deaf children tends to emanate from the premise that families engage with either of the two grand discourses on deafness (i.e., the medical or cultural-linguistic perspective). This study investigated hearing mother's engagement with the educational options for their child from a dynamic, poststructural perspective. Three Flemish mothers were interviewed in-depth at the child's ages of 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24 months. The data were analyzed within a theoretical model that describes the positioning process of the mothers. This method yielded alternative explanations for former findings concerning mothers' decision-making processes, especially the difficulty of learning sign language as a second language in an effort to provide a bilingual-bicultural education, and highlighted the importance of having rich experiences. It further showed that a bilingual-bicultural position was scarcely available and poorly supported for these mothers. These findings are discussed in relation to recent international consensus statements on best practices in early intervention.

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