[P]ost-modernism involves the development of new rhetorics of science, new stories of knowledge ‘after truth’‥. The postmodern world is without guarantees, without ‘method’‥. All we can do is invent. We must construct and exemplify the rhetorics of the future … through … endless stories. Like this one. Tomlinson (1989), pp.44,57.

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FERTILE OBSESSION: Validity After Poststructuralism

This article explores the cultural genesis and meanings of the lives of three African-American women leaders/researchers and disrupts and unsettles the taken-for-granted notions surrounding the very goals and purposes of educational research. By examining the life notes of these women, the author develops an endarkened feminist epistemology, which embodies a distinguishably different cultural standpoint, located in the intersection/overlap of the culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppressions and resistance for African-American women.

The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership

Since the emergence of qualitative research in education, research interviewing has been naively accepted as a reasonably straightforward method for gathering information. Even Lincoln and Guba's ground‐breaking postpositivist work, Naturalistic Inquiry (1985), largely treated interviewing in this manner. More recently, other postpositivists, such as Mishler (1986), have criticized the traditional approach to interviewing and suggested new ways to conduct and understand the research interview. But these latter postpositivists still retain thoroughly modernist assumptions that they embed in their reconstructions of research interviewing. This paper presents, in contrast, a postmodernist perspective that critiques both positivist and postpositivist characterizations of interviewing. This paper also shows how one aspect of interviewing – the power relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee — might be reconceptualized within a postmodernist perspective. The paper ends with a call for appreciatio...

A postmodernist critique of research interviewing

(1993). Crosscurrents, crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the politics of location. Cultural Studies: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 292-310.

Crosscurrents, crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the politics of location

Postpositivists, such as Mishler (1990) and Lincoln and Guba (1985), have commonly claimed that there are substantial methodological and epistemological differences between their framework and that of the conventional or positivistic approach. On the face of it, this claim is indisputable. For example, Lincoln and Guba in Naturalistic Inquiry (1985) lay out five key differences in terms of ontology, epistemology, generalizability, causality, and axiology (p. 37). In contrast, it is argued here, as a result of a deconstructive investigation, that the conventional approach and more radical versions of postpositivism are, in a primary way, profoundly and disturbingly similar. This point is pursued by investigating the transgressive practices of validity across both conventional and more radical postpositivist research orientations and ends with new imaginaries of validity that make problematic conventional and postpositivist validity practices and celebrate the play of multiplicity and difference.

Wahneema Lubiano

Papers

Shuckin' off the African-American Native Other: What's "Po-Mo" Got to Do with It?