Qualitative Research: Challenging the Orthodoxies in Standard Academic Discourse(s)

I commend and celebrate the editors and authors for a remarkable book that engages the reader’s imagination, heart, mind, spirit, and body. Out of creative and courageous commitments to challenging orthodoxies by living and writing research that is personal, political, and poetic, these scholars invite the kind of vigorous dialogue that will continue to promote creative possibilities for inquiry in the social sciences.

Carl Leggo, University of British Columbia, From the Foreword

Evocative and provocative, this book presents the points of view of (often junior) scholars in the social sciences who used non-standard methods or writing practices to challenge the research-as-usual paradigm in the academy, while at the same time meeting the demands of quality and rigor set by their university examining committees and ethical review boards. The intent is to encourage new researchers who are also considering such a path. The authors discuss their lived personal experiences within and against traditional academic research and writing traditions, as well as their struggles and eventual successes. Chapters are written in dramatic form, in dialogue, in story, and include poetry, vignettes, testimonials and autobiographical accounts. Collectively, they form a unique, distinctive situated polyphonic case study of research in the social sciences from several perspectives, challenging the orthodoxies.