Qualitative Research Cafe

The SWIRL site is a decent web resource for working through what post modernism and post structuralism are, who the posties are, and seeing some examples.

This is a list of sociological thinkers that was created by Mike Goodman (with some input from Tom Conroy and Andrew Miller).

Karl Marx
Life’s not fair, let’s all share!
Emile Durkheim
You get the ankles, I’ll get the wrists.
Max Weber
All work and no play…
Georg Simmel
I feel like I am ze Country Mouse in ze Zitty, Ja?
Jurgen Habermas
Why can’t we all just get along?
Talcott Parsons
I have a diagram that explains EVERYTHING!
Pierre Bourdieu
Kids, stay in school.
Michel Foucault
Er… donnez-moi le gagball.
Erving Goffman
Where’s that #$@%!! waiter?
Jean Baudrillard
Real=fake; life=Disneyland
Robert Merton
Sometimes things happen for bad reasons and sometimes we can’t see the reasons right away.
Herbert Blumer
It’s all in your mind.
Louis Althusser
It’s not in your mind.
C. Levi-Strauss
Myths are cool.
Amitai Etzioni
C’mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, we’ve got to love one another right now.
Clifford Geertz
Ooh, look, a cock fight! How Shakespearean!
Rational Choice Theory
Choose, or lose.
British Cultural Studies
It’s not so bad to spend time in front of the telly.

From http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~psyc351/Images/DinosaurEpistemology.png

seeing is believing

Here is one of the Shepard Fairey statements currently cropping up around Vancouver (unfortunately the masterful superimposing of obey the giant over the MacDonalds billboard was gone by the time I got back to take a picture). I would describe his work as phenomenological as the appearance of obey in unlikely places challenges the taken for granted with an emphasis on disrupting images of capitalism, globalism and neo-liberalism. In this picture there is a blank billboard, but the juxtoposition with the Pattison sign is enough in and of itself.

crude overview of research methodologies

An excellent resource to explore Marxist perspectives is Bertell Ollman’s website. Lots of his publications can be found that, as well as links, and his scholarship is engaging and high quality. You will see a link to his book Dance of the Dialectics ~ the dance steps are below. So, when you need a refresher on dialectical thinking get up out of your chair, do the dance of the dialectics and then get on with your intellectual project.

For a more general treatment of what it means to do critical social science, take a look at Brian Fay’s Critical Social Science. This book may be out of print but can easily be found in the library or through booksellers.

A little detailed but worth taking a look at, especially to see that the various philosophical traditions that underlie contemporary educational inquiry developed across about the same historical time frame. Too often positivism, interpretivism and critical approaches to inquiry are presented as if their were an evolution from one to the next. Each of these traditions has evolved over the past two hundred plus years and although the ideas of Comte, Husserl, and Marx live on in our contemporary orientations to inquiry their ideas are not static and we continually reinterpret them in the present.

You will note in the Crotty readings that his emphasis is on constructionism, what he at times calls social constructionism (or sometimes social constructivism). While it may seem at first reading this is all about different words for the same or different things, these are indeed critical differences that matter. Constructivism, especially social constructivism, is the epistemological foundation for interpretative and critical research perspectives. Davis & Sumara in this article that refers more to teaching than research, is nonetheless excellent on these distinctions. Knowing whether you adopt a subject-centred constructivist epistemology or a subject object interdependent constructionist epistemology is an important step in finding a research orientation that is sensible.