Show notes
SPEAKERSAlecia Jackson, Lisa Mazzei, Jessica Van CleaveJessica Van CleaveHello and welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast hosted by the qualitative research SIG of AERA, the American Educational Research Association. I'm Jessica Van Cleave, Chair of the Qualitative Research SIG and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Gardner Webb University. The Qualitative Conversations podcast doesn't have a regular host. Instead, each episode is organized by our podcast committee. Today I have the pleasure of hosting this episode, in which I interviewed Dr. Lisa Mazzei and Dr. Alecia Jackson about their recently published second edition of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. Lisa Mazzei is Professor of Education Studies and Alumni Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, where she is also affiliated faculty in the department of philosophy. She is a methodological innovator in post human inquiry, and her work is widely read and cited across disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, business and medicine. She is the author of Inhabited Silence in Qualitative Research from 2007. Alecia Jackson is Professor of Educational Research at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies program. Dr. Jackson's research interests bring feminist post structural and post human theories of power, knowledge, language, materiality and subjectivity to bear on a range of overlapping topics deconstructions of voice and method conceptual analyses of resistance freedom and agency in girls and women's lives and qualitative analysis and the posts. Her work seeks to animate philosophical frameworks in the production of the new and her current projects are focused on the ontological turn qualitative inquiry and thought. Together they are co-authors of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research, first and second editions, and coeditors of Voice in Qualitative Inquiry from 2009. Their forthcoming edited book, Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry, will be published in 2023. Lisa and Alecia, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Qualitative Conversations.Lisa MazzeiDelighted to be here. Thanks for inviting us.Alecia JacksonThank you for the invitation.Jessica Van CleaveAbsolutely. So some of our listeners may not be familiar with your work, or maybe new to your work. So would you be willing to tell us a little bit about yourselves, how you came to write together, and how you came to write Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research?Lisa MazzeiWell, Alecia and I say that we share an academic genealogy. We first met at AERA in 2005, I think I was presenting a paper on some of my voice work. Alecia came to attend the session. And she came and introduced herself at the end of the session. And I had just finished reading an article that she had written about subjectivity with new teachers. And so I was so excited to meet her and I had just been reading her work. And so we sat out in the hallway for about an hour. And we're talking about projects. And we said that we should propose a session for AERA the following year on voice because we were both looking at voice and challenging conventional understandings. And so that was right before I was moving to England, I moved to England in 2006, was attending the British Education Research Association Conference, started chatting with a book editor. And like a good editor, he always says, What's your current project? And so I told him about this idea that Alecia and I had for a session and he said, that sounds fabulous. Can you get a book proposal to me in a month? So I'm at this conference, emailing this woman that I've met in person once saying, can we put a book together, a book proposal, and that was the proposal we wrote for voice and qualitative inquiry. And the reviews were very positive for the book. But people who read the proposal didn't think that we could secure some of the authors that we had said we would put that would contribute. And they didn't know that I had studied with Patti Lather at Ohio State University, Alecia had studied with Bettie St. Pierre at the University of Georgia, and through these feminist networks, we had connections with some scholars who were doing some very interesting work. So that was the that was the beginning of our long and fruitful partnership.Alecia JacksonYeah, when we were working on the voice book, I traveled to Manchester. And so we had some writing time together. So one thing I do want to say is that Lisa and I have, ever since the collaboration began, we've never we've never lived in the same time zone. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's something that, you know, is really unique to the way that we've made things work. But we went to Manchester, we worked on the voice book, and then you came here, and we were working on Thinking with Theory. So we've had a couple of times that we've worked together, but in you know, Lisa has explained kind of the origin story. And then how Thinking with Theory came about is that after the voice book, we got really interested in we both were doing separately, we both were working on philosophically informed inquiry. And it didn't have that name at the time. Nobody was calling it that. Nobody was you know, calling it thinking with theory. It didn't have a name. And but it's what we were doing. And we started because we're reading each other's work and through the voice book, we realized is that, you know, what, what would it be like to, you know, to write something together, that was an alternative to, quote, data analysis. We were both talking about how to teach this way of doing this kind of analytic work and conceptual work. And there were lots of journal articles that people doing this kind of analytic thinking. But there wasn't anything that was out there cohesive, that we could use me, really to us in our teaching, that was kind of the impetus. So we were at the Congress. And we were out to dinner with Philip Mudd, who was our editor for the voice book. And we pitched this idea of taking, you know, one data set, and we will talk about how we don't really use that language anymore in a moment. But we talked to him about how to maybe conceptualize a book where we had one set of data that we looked at, that we analyzed across different theories. And he really loved it. And at that dinner, you know, he said, Yeah, let's put this together and see, see what it's like.Jessica Van CleaveThank you so much. It's really fantastic to sort of trace that process, obviously, briefly from that first meeting, until the beginnings of thinking with theory. So as you began the process of writing, thinking with theory and moving through to publication, what were your hopes for the book at the time?Lisa MazzeiI think I don't know, I don't know what our hopes were, I think our hopes were that it would be I mean, we've talked, we talked about our work when we started envisioning a new project as what kind of intervention do we want to make? And I remember extending what Alecia was saying, I remember being at the Congress, and we started talking about wanting something for our teaching and going to the book exhibit and looking at what was what was presented as analysis. And it was all about coding. And so our I think, you know, our initial hope was, well, this, this isn't what this is not representative of the kind of work that we do. This isn't how we teach our students. And so as Alecia said, We wanted something for our own teaching. And maybe I guess the hope was that it would be picked up by others and be useful to them. SoAlecia Jacksonyes, I think it was a matter of, of what Lisa said, the intervention, I think, is a really good word. We, as I mentioned, what we did there wasn't a name for what we were doing. And we said, we wanted that we you know, Bettie St. Pierre always says write something that people can cite. And so that was something that, you know, she's always said to, and you've probably heard it too, Jessica, write something that people can cite. And, and, and put something out in the world that people can, you know, can use, and I really have a big part of part of the impetus for both of us, I think was to give this alternative to the field and name it in some way and have it so that, you know, it was it would become something that was recognizable that people could use, and really to take the field into that direction. I think that we, you know, back in the early 2010 to 12 qualitative research was shifting. It was shifting away from, you know, interpretive work and even critical work. And it was just time, it was time to bring it all together and give it a name and give it a place. And there was just so much enthusiasm right away because I think people were really didn't feel like coding was really analysis. So, you know, we had already done some work on that talking, writing about pieces, we're writing about how coding is not analysis and, and I thought this was just a way to give it a place in in the in the in the fieldJessica Van CleaveWell, I mean, it's fascinating because as you said, Yes and that advice from Bettie it's definitely something that that I think all of us who have ever worked with her have heard, and it's so true. since y'all have published the first edition of Thinking with Theory, there's been an explosion of all of the you know, the methodologies without methodology, and concept as method and anti-methodology. You know, this sort of thing that you said there was a hunger for at the time. I mean, I think there's no better evidence than how much has proliferated since then. So in the years since its initial publication, Thinking with Theory has become a staple in qualitative inquiry. People are citing it not only in dissertations, but in articles across the field, across publications. Instructors are using your text in their masters and doctoral level courses, Thinking with Theory has really become part of the canon of what qualitative analysis can be and can mean. And one thing also from Bettie, that comes up for me a lot when I think about what work does, especially aside from what your hopes might have initially been, is Alcoff's, quote, to paraphrase, you never know where your work goes and what it does there. So what do you think about where your work has gone? And what it's done there? How it's been taken up and received, since you published?Lisa MazzeiDo you want to start Alecia or? No? Um, you know, I think, what do I think? This isn't about I remember the first time I was at AERA decades ago, and I had a piece that had come out in ED Researcher, and I was walking, like, from building to building and there was someone sitting on a bench. And I happened to glance and they were reading my article. And I thought, oh, my gosh, what, what? What a, what a validation, I guess, of one's work to know that someone would take the time to actually pick it up and read it. And so I think that the fact that people are talking about thinking with theory as a methodology is not something that I ever imagined would happen. I think one of the things that I'm most proud of in terms of the work that Alecia and I've done together is that people will say to us at conferences, or students will say to us how pedagogical the work is how, how much it helps them understand. And that was really a primary goal of ours was to, to extend the reach of this way of thinking, so that people would consider a new analytic, if you will. I'm not I don't feel like I'm really answering your question. I don't go ahead, Alecia.Alecia JacksonNo, I think it's, I think that Lisa and I are both very, I don't know, humble people, and we just didn't really write this book in order to, you know, do anything other than, I don't know, I think we kind of wrote it for ourselves, at first, you know, and then because we wanted to do something together. And then I think, I've been most surprised, I guess, at how it's not just in educational research, like when I've had to go through and do my, you know, annual reviews, and, you know, going up for promotion, and all that. And you pull up the, you know, the Google Scholar citations, and it's just surprising to me that all sorts of social science disciplines have picked up this work. It's not just educational research, but it's, you know, people in, in all sorts of disciplines that I never would have imagined. I think there was even some citations from a business journal. And I just thought, wow, you know, so I guess what's been most delightful is that it's crossed all kinds of boundaries, which I believe that's one of our missions in, you know, is reaching into other found, you know, do some do some deterritorialized thing through the book, in terms of qualitative research, but it moving across all these other fields, you know, anthropology, sociology, business, I mean, just, there's just a whole, a whole lot of other disciplines that have taken it up. And just the expansion of that has been really surprising. I would have never thought that the work would go there. But it's really, I think, it's exciting. It's humbling. It's very endearing for people, you know, on social media to, you know, make comments about that. They have it, they've read it. It's, you know, I had a colleague who did a Fulbright in Australia. And she got there and was working with a faculty member. And the first thing they said is, oh, you work with Alecia Jackson, look, I have the book, you know, do you know. And it's just so it's just wonderful that it's just connected us, to so many people. And it's been so useful and so helpful. So.Jessica Van CleaveSo then you get asked to write a second edition of this incredibly impactful book that has gone all of these places and done all of these things. When you were first asked to write that second edition, how do you approach that as a project, especially given how big Thinking with Theory is?Alecia JacksonIt was very difficult. And we've been working on the second edition for a while the pandemic hit us, and it slowed everything down as it did for a lot of people. We changed editors, in in the at somewhere in the middle of all this, but we, we wanted to do something because it will talk a little bit about how the book is different. But in the intervening years after this was published, we began to critique some of the things that we had done in the first edition. And we wanted to update some of the things that we had written in chapter one in particular, the way we were conceptualizing some different aspects of it. And we'll get into that, but the main thing we struggled with was, do we add more theoretical chapters? Do we keep them really, you know, they work? Why change them? Do we want to add? So it took us a while, a couple of years to really think about how we wanted it to look and what we wanted to say that would be different enough, so that people would, you know, find the second edition, you know, an actual extension of what we had done. Something different. So it, it took a while. It was a process, but once we really figured out what we were doing, it flowed pretty well, you know, we were able to really work with it. Quickly. So.Lisa MazzeiI mean, yeah, I think, I think initially, when we first started talking about the project, we thought that it would not, it would not involve as much new writing as it did. And when we st…
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