Researchers who have been prepared in positivist traditions to social research frequently equate “subjectivity” with “bias,” which is viewed as both a problem to be managed and a threat to the credibility of a study. Teachers of qualitative research methods are familiar with questions about “subjectivity” that invoke “bias” from newcomers to qualitative research. This article revisits the methodological literature to examine how bias has been understood in qualitative inquiry. We argue for an approach to teaching qualitative research methods that assists students to make sense of long-standing and new debates related to “bias” and reconceptualize it in relation to their work. We provide recommendations for how teachers of qualitative inquiry might do this and illustrate these strategies with examples drawn from methodological reflections completed by a graduate student taking qualitative coursework.

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PurposeQualitative research consistently centers Eurocentrism through courses' integrations of ontological, epistemological and axiological perspectives. This literal whitewashing was a source of great frustration and confusion for the authors, four Black women, who found their identities omitted and disregarded in qualitative inquiry. Using Collins' outsider-within concept and collective narratives to center their experiences, the authors seek through their writing to actively repurpose and re-engage with qualitative scholarship that generally seeks to exclude Black women.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically informed by Collins' outsider-within concept, the authors use Deleuze and Parnet's collective biography to tell the stories of four Black doctoral students negotiating race, gender, class and intellectual identity, while critiquing Eurocentric theory, through coursework. The collaborative writing process provided shared space for the engagement of individual thoughts and experiences with(in) others' narratives.FindingsBlack women can interpret qualitative inquiry outside of the Eurocentric norm, and qualitative courses can provide spaces for them to do so by repositioning Black women philosophers as central to understanding qualitative inquiry.Originality/valueThrough collective biography (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007), this paper centers the voices of four Black women scholars who use a creative writing approach to think with/through theory as Black women (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). The paper offers new discussions of and ways in which qualitative researchers might decolonize Eurocentric ways of knowing in qualitative inquiry and qualitative pedagogy from students' perspectives.

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