Pursuing Responsibility Writing and Citing Subjects in Qualitative Research

• Published in: Qualitative inquiry Vol. 20; no. 5; pp. 641 - 652
• Main Authors: Bridges-Rhoads, Sarah, Van Cleave, Jessica
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.06.2014; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Citation analysis; Citations; Cooperation; Humanism; Incitement; Methodology; Pedagogy; Poststructuralism; Qualitative analysis; Qualitative Methods; Qualitative research; Researcher subject relations; Responsibilities; Scholarship; Writing; poststructural theory; methods of inquiry; decolonizing the academy; writing as method of inquiry; new methods and methodologies; methodologies; pedagogy; reconceptualizing collaboration
• ISSN: 1077-8004; 1552-7565
• DOI: 10.1177/1077800413513724

Similar to qualitative researchers who have troubled and been troubled by the impossibility of representing subjects, in this article, we focus on how our attempts to write subjects to excess—to remain open to unforeseeable data that proliferated as we wrote—“radically de-naturalize[ed] what [we’d] taken for granted” as qualitative researchers. Specifically, the unraveling of the humanist subject initiated the rupture of what we thought of as a practice of responsible representation—citation. This rupture made visible how conventional citation could not hold the reconfigured, poststructural subject who remained in play during the research and even after. Rather than erase this complication, we saw it as an incitement to enact responsibility differently in relation to representation, and we draw upon our collaborative work with Sarah’s dissertation study to theorize citation as a necessary, useful, and impossible construct.