Peeling Away the Taken-For-Grantedness of Research Subjectivities: Orienting to the Phenomenological

Abstract

Qualitative research is a multidisciplinary field of practice that acknowledges and values the situatedness and subjectivities of the researcher. Therefore, reflexively accounting for one’s subjectivities is a crucial part of a research report. Less discussed is how subjective understandings are historically, culturally, and socially mediated, often challenging researchers’ abilities to orient themselves critically to this self-reflective undertaking. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach investigating how phenomena such as subjectivity are constituted in experience. This makes phenomenology an essential resource for understanding how complex subjective responses manifest differently depending on one’s orientation to the situation. This paper aims to familiarize qualitative research instructors and learners with a series of phenomenological activities that have proven helpful in disclosing multiple ways subjectivities are historically and contextually mediated, embodied, and technologically modified.

The Six Voices of Logue in Qualitative Inquiry: Prologue, Monologue, Dialogue, Polylogue, Metalogue, and Epilogue

“…Even libraries which are often viewed as simply repositories of knowledge beckon us to not simply read what others have written but to actively transform and construct our own stories. As far as the question of the generalizability/transferability of findings, I have come to think about this not primarily in terms of applying findings in other contexts and places but rather in terms of how these findings and ways of knowing help to spark other's own creative transformations of what they feel, hear, see, and read which is similar to a phenomenological approach in some ways yet different in others (see Freeman & Muhammad, 2023). To the extent that this occurs among readers is my fondest hope.…”