What if……

1. an alternative research methodology What if……

2. Nothing is stranger than this business of humans observing other humans in order to write about them. Ruth behar

3. What if … researchers were partners in understanding their subjects?

4. What if… researchers participated in, related to, and co-created the subjective realities they study? Gablik, 1991, p.178

5. What if… researchers embraced the personal, the emotional, the embodied, and the spiritual aspects of knowledge and experience? Dobson, 2007, p.10

6. What if… dismissing and devaluating research methods that are more “sensitive” and “feeling”, we limit our relationship (as researchers) to knowing? Stasko, 2000, p.22

7. What if… researchers embraced our place in the unknown and seek connections, relationships, and understanding that are subjective, tentative, and sometimes even playful?, stasko, 2000, p.23

8. Down at the root end of things blind growth reaches astonishing proportions. Annie Dillard, pilgrim at Tinker Creek

9. Quantitative research, in an effort to grasp at what is essentially fluid, risks mistaking the container (knowledge) for the contents (understanding). Stasko, 2000, p.24

10. A desire to make knowledge static so that it can be measured undermines the wisdom and insights that can come out of movement, change, and transformation. Stasko, 2000, p.24

11. In recent years there has been an encouraging growth in scholarship that seeks to explore ‘ an intermediate space (that) we can’t quite define yet, a borderland between passion and intellect, analysis and subjectivity, ethnography and autobiographpy, art and life”. Behar, 1996, p.174

12. It is from this humble, inspired and authentic location that we can play at the edges of the known and unknown. Play enables us to “rearrange our capacities and our very identity so that they can be pursued in unforeseen ways”. Nachmanovitch, 1990, p.19 in stasko, 2000, p.23

13. A Definition(Orlikowski and Baroudi 1991) ‘Interpretive studies assume that people create and associate their own subjective and intersubjective meanings as they interact with the world around them. Interpretive researchers thus attempt to understand phenomena through accessing the meanings participants assign to them’

14. A Second Definition(Walsham 1993) ‘Interpretive methods of research start from the position that our knowledge of reality, including the domain of human action, is a social construction by human actors and that this applies equally to researchers. Thus there is no objective reality which can be discovered by researchers and replicated by others, in contrast to the assumptions of positivist science’

15. Interpretive View of Data(Geertz 1973) ‘What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to’

16. Interpretive Ontology(Walsham 1995) • Internal realism: Reality-for-us is an inter-subjective construction of the shared human cognitive apparatus • Subjective idealism: Each person constructs his or her own reality

17. Interpretive View of Knowledge (Orlikowski and Baroudi 1991) ‘Social process is not captured in hypothetical deductions, covariances and degrees of freedom. Instead, understanding social process involves getting inside the world of those generating it’

18. Theory and Practice(Orlikowski and Baroudi 1991) • ‘The interpretive research approach towards the relationship between theory and practice is that the researcher can never assume a value-neutral stance, and is always implicated in the phenomena being studied’ • ‘There is no direct access to reality unmediated by language and preconception’

19. …as a storyteller opens her heart to a story listener, recounting the hurts that cut deep and raw into the gullies of the self, do you, the observer stay behind the lens of the camera, switch on the tape recorder, keep pen in hand? Are there limits?

20. What if… researchers embraced the personal, the emotional, the embodied, and the spiritual aspects of knowledge and experience? Dobson, 2007, p.10