Disruptions of Post-Qualitative Education Research: Tensions and Openings

Abstract

This article speaks up for those who are feeling unheard as post-qualitative inquirers. It also speaks with hope, helpfully, to those in positions of supervision and mentorship to help student researchers work across post paradigms, becoming allies with those who are attempting to experiment with new theory, figurative forms, and processes. Addressing some of the tensions we have experienced between traditional qualitative and emerging post-qualitative researchers enables us to specifically name disruptions that block, silence, and misalign. We also share openings as possibilities that remain with the tension and do not offer advice or recipes to follow. This is exactly the type of reductive process that post-qualitative research is trying to circumnavigate. In the hullabaloo, this article is a clarion call for the academy to open up education research and make room for researchers who are unbounded by the invented rules of humanist tradition and familiarity.

“Chameleonization” in the Folds of Culture: A Comparative Analysis of Cross-Cultural Qualitative Fieldwork

“…As the folding-unfolding process evolves, researchers and research subjects both have more nuanced cultural elements enclosed and deployed internally, forging an integrated, rather than a mono-cultural mindset that is a prerequisite for chameleonization. “Power and processes that shape the structures of linear models of humanist research” (Young et al, 2022, p. 3) is thus disrupted and deconstructed, followed by a reconstruction of research protocols, procedures, and ethical codes in a contextual, collaborative, and generative manner. The field in which the researcher succeeds in blending is no longer static, permanent, and pre-determined.…”

“…When different cultures encounter rules from a conventional, qualitative, and humanist methodology, they can follow varying trajectories of mutual interaction that demonstrate a “provisional, reflexive, contingent, and emergent” (Woermann, 2013, p. 3) nature of qualitative fieldwork in the post-modern era. Theories from three culturalists (Geert Hofstede, Xiaotong Fei, and Edward Hall) can be used to analyze these trajectories by destabilizing the conventional qualitative methodology, the linear process of which has long been problematic (Young et al, 2022) and challenged by context-contingent generative models.…”

A Study of Engineering Doctoral Students’ Research Experience and Degrees of Satisfaction in China

“…The progress of algorithms and computer technology is closely related to the development of higher education [1]. As the highest level of higher education, the education of doctoral shoulders the heavy responsibility of cultivating high-quality and high-level creative talents for the country's modernization construction [2,3].Engineering doctoral students(EDS) are the main and reserve force of research activities in the fields of natural science and computer technology in China [4]. The training quality of EDS directly reflects the level of technology and innovation ability, and is an important channel for building a powerful country in science and technology [5].…”