Background: Despite the persistence of attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) into adolescence, little is known about the efficacy and tolerability of stimulant medications in this age group.

This article examines the interrelated concepts of self-representation in personal narratives and the production of nonunitary subjectivity as a site of interpretation in qualitative research. Through close interpretations of narrative data, I analyze how subjectivity is manifested in narratives. I conclude both that nonunitary selfrepresentation subverts humanist and patriarchal modes of discourse and that the act of narrating a nonunitary self allows forgreater self-knowledge to begained by respondents.In her delightfully thought-provoking article, &dquo;The Laugh of the Medusa,&dquo; Hdl~ne Cixous (1975/1976) proclaims that because women's biological differences from men render them invisible by logocentric systems of patriarchy, they must explode male discourse by speaking and writing in a language of their own. In this article, I want to suggest that one way that feminist qualitative researchers take up this language of their own is in their rejection of the humanist understanding of subjectivity as unchangeable or unitary in favor of an interpretation of subjectivity as always in the process of being produced, or nonunitary (Ferguson. What I hope to illustrate is the way that narrative interpretations of subjectivity as nonunitary generate alternative understandings of the self. Subjectivity has and continues to be a much discussed concept in qualitative methodology (These discussions typically focus on the subjectivity of the researcher in the conduct of research. Further, despite considerable rethinking of the role of subjectivity over the last 30 years, these discussions still assume a subjectivity that is unitary. Because these discussions have shaped my understandings of subjectivity and are the historical Author's Note: I extend special appreciation to Olivia for her generous participation in my research. Thanks to Barbara Duffelmeyer, Jeffrey Kuzmic, and Petra Munro for thoughtful critiques and editorial assistance on earlier drafts of this article, and to the QI reviewers and editors whose recommendations for revisions were most helpful.

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his paper examines the contradictory e ects of teaching multicultural education in two American white women' s university classrooms. T he authors use discourse analysis to understand the confusing results of teaching about di erence. In this analysis, course readings and a ® eld trip to an urban school are examined in regard to the instructors' intentions and students' responses. T he authors understand the puzzling results of their teaching by examining the positivist dimensions of their pedagogy, including the belief in rational approaches to overcoming racism, sexism and other systems of oppression, the belief in the possibility of replacing`bad ideas' with`good' ones, and the perpetuation of knowledge grounded in a binary system of meaning-making and language use. T he authors conclude with ideas for a postpositivist approach to knowledge, experience and action, that emphasizes the production of interpretations.We have to relate ourselves somehow to a social world that is polluted by something invisible and odourless, overhung by a sort of motionless cloud. It is the cloud of givenness, of what is considered`natural' by those caught in the taken-for-granted, in the everydayness of things.Maxine Greene (1995: 47) [I]n the end, non-identity is antagonistic; it always threatens`the survival of cooperative relationships' . In the end, only the sign of the Same, of the replication of the one identical to itself, seems to promise peace. Donna Haraway (1989: 369) Close Encounters of the T hird Kind, a tale of contacts between aliens and humans, re-presents our analysis of knowing and teaching in the area of multiculturalism. This 1977 ® lm, directed by Steven Spielberg, narrates the movements from sightings to communication to face-to-face contact of alien beings and human beings. T he ® lm portrays a range of responses to the increasingly close contacts: some people¯atly deny that any meetings with alien spacecraft occurred and angrily demand to return to their former lives. Others are`invited' by the aliens to learn more, to have personal j. curriculum studies, 1998, vol. 30, no. 4, 375± 395 Nancy L esko teaches curriculum theory at

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