Conference presentation
Deciding what counts as research: How understandings of lived experience and academic selves give meaning and impetus to researching qualitatively
USC Research Week, 2015 (Sunshine Coast, Australia, 13-Jul-2015–16-Jul-2015)
University of the Sunshine Coast
2015
Abstract
Deciding what research is… 'It is the researcher who decides what research is or might be.' (Rhedding-Jones, 2005, p. 18) This presentation troubles what counts as research and it troubles what should and could be the work of researchers. Many academics feel significant pressure to produce research, receiving dogged messages about what counts as research, the impact of research, and preferred approaches, audiences and outcomes. This presentation considers the manoeuvring upon us to be producers of research. But, it does so with a deliberate and conscious appreciation that we cannot do this work without being who we are. And who we are cannot be separated from how we are being produced as researchers through our methodologies and the methodological choices we make. Aesthetic methodologies of story and image support my researcher [research/searcher] thinking, feeling and manoeuvring through the expectations and requirements of academic life and the everyday happenings of being human. They support my efforts to find, create and expand legitimate spaces for scholarly/personal/professional meaning-making. Poststructural writers and educational researchers like Jeanette Rhedding-Jones (1997), Laurel Richardson (2010), Jane Bone (2009) and Susan Finley (2014) - researchers who are using autoethnographic writing to question further 'the kind of researchers they want to be'- stir and inspire. Writing as research is helping me consider this question as I 'come out' as philosopher, and venture where Rhedding-Jones (1996) suggests researchers need to go: 'beyond simple description and into knowledge' (1996, p. 33) and into spaces where 'fluidity not seen in traditional academic writing' (Rhedding-Jones, 1995, p. 494) picks up speed. And so a second question emerges: 'how will we create the research conditions and spaces which value and allow such flow to happen?'
Details
- Title
- Deciding what counts as research: How understandings of lived experience and academic selves give meaning and impetus to researching qualitatively
- Authors
- Alison L Black (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast
- Conference details
- USC Research Week, 2015 (Sunshine Coast, Australia, 13-Jul-2015–16-Jul-2015)
- Publisher
- University of the Sunshine Coast
- Date published
- 2015
- Copyright note
- Copyright © The Author.
- Organisation Unit
- School of Education - Legacy; Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre; School of Education and Tertiary Access; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99449493002621
- Output Type
- Conference presentation
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