(originally presented at the thirteenth congress of qualitative inquiry,
university of illinois at urbana-champaign MAY 2017; UPDATED MAY 2018)
manifesto v. 2.0 coming 2022
Today, the members of the Literacies in Second Languages Project come together as a Legion, as a community of brothers and sisters learning to do research, as a group of teachers who believe in making a better world for those behind us, to share with the qualitative inquiry (QI) world the blueprint for what QI means to us and how we see ourselves doing research in the near future. This is a collective effort, we all believe in this and, as long as we are members of LSLP, we will work together (even if we sometimes do not agree with everything we all say) to reach these goals. In 2014, we came up with a question that identify us, “How big do we want to dream today?”
Today, we finally write a long answer to that question.
Today, the Legion shall rise:
If we intend to define QI, we will define it loosely to grasp its diversity across different types of studies and contexts. We believe that using key terms such as interpretive, experiential, situational, and personalistic is a good starting point. We also see QI is a catalyst to read, study, and analyze known and unknown phenomena in social fields in order to understand them. We consider QI is a multiverse that both makes visible the invisible and invites researchers not to take what they encounter at face value. QI is a curious vision of the world that validates important societal topics and that will lead us to a deeper understanding of the things we love and hate. It is about comprehending human beings from multiple realities, including those that the researchers bring with them. It means to go beyond and more deeply into what things look like. QI allows the researcher to be a significant part of the entire research enterprise, mainly in the data collection, which gives them more responsibility to interpret the findings.
Since QI, in many ways, entails eating, drinking and breathing research, we, as Legion, are willing to eat but never be satisfied, drink but never get drunk, and breathe until our lungs expire. QI is our tool and our craft. But, we must remember that we will need to read and discuss more before reaching any definitive conclusions or definitions about it. Also, if we think about QI as a way of seeing the world from different perspectives, we must acknowledge the varying degrees of truth and be willing to appreciate all these variations. However, we are also aware that such variations cannot simply be the end-result of unsubstantiated or unsupported opinions. Evidence, information, multiple sources, multiple readings always need to be the basis for the ideas we bring to the table. Doing QI without knowing what it is, theoretically speaking, is good. However, we also believe there needs to be a trial period for discussing theory and research as something rigorous and serious, an exercise that requires effort, teamwork, time, interest, responsibility, and courage.
As a Legion, we commit ourselves to work from and in the margins of research, always willing to learn and take risks. We believe that any efforts to conduct QI entail dynamism, commitment, as well as integrating different branches and approaches to it. Isolation is not a good strategy to conduct powerful QI. New ways of seeing the world imply new ways to show the world what we see. Our teams are committed to discovering and creating new methods of presenting our findings. At LSLP, we listen to everyone’s ideas, and some of our own researchers and partners have come up with great approaches and proposals to counter the traditional ways of presenting research results. We believe experimenting with videos and documentaries provide new alternatives to share our voices collectively, especially when our representation at events might be limited by travel constraints. Our incoming research will consider ideas from semiotics as literacies and multimodality as new ways to understand our multilayered reality. We envision the possibilities of hermeneutics as a research tool since it focuses on creating meanings by analyzing voices, images, text, and so forth as part of understanding truth. That said, since ethnographic approaches have seemed to be the most effective way to reach a deeper understanding in the topics LSLP has covered in the past, we will continue exploring ethnography, both as epistemology and method, in the foreseeable future. We will do so by looking at the principles of ethnography and expanding our boundaries. Future studies of ours will delve in ideas from visual and digital ethnography, as well as auto, duo, and collaborative ethnography to look more deeply into issues of communication, voice, and performance. As we continue our growth, we will also explore participatory, decolonializing, and deterritorializing methodologies that accentuate and promote our positionality as scholars in and from the South.
As we revisit our data collection and analysis frameworks, we must remember that we should conceive the world as different layers and not something apart from each other. This will entail, first, a constant reflection and revision of what we already have in place. The data collection and analysis procedures we have used in the different projects have been successful, so as we try to innovate, we need to perfect the ones we have, improve them, and build from them as we seek new ways of doing research. More specifically, we will continue to build our framework for polyangulation as a way to reflect multiple realities present in our inquiries and our team, also exploring how that will affect our data collection. In addition, we need to expand our analysis procedures involving multimodal audiovisual analysis, we must go deeper into the analysis of drawings and pictures as modes of representation, and we need to be even more systematic about how we organize our data. In addition, it is our goal to keep developing our writing strategies so that we can turn our frameworks into written papers.
As researchers, we believe the future of QI is in the continuous exploration of new ways of doing research and the moments of resonance and dissonance they have with our identities and affinities. Some of the areas where we see our legion moving include creating new conceptual frameworks for literacies, looking at issues of gender identity, social media, intercultural literature, all intertwined with our central topic of literacies in second languages. As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, polyangulation and multimodal audio analysis should definitely be two areas where we see ourselves expending more resources, along with interviewing methodologies and passive and participant observations.
Finally, as a Legion, we wonder about where the next frontier and the next arenas for our research should be. We believe that research should find and provide spaces that allow teachers and other community members to reflect on education and its connection to the general public. There also need to be spaces for people to become social agents and partake in the creation of literacy frameworks, evaluation and assessment processes. We should also venture in advocacy, exploring more about what is happening with minorities and the disenfranchised. It may be tricky, but if we are going to talk about social justice is to show what people are going through, we have the "power" to make them visible, especially when dealing with topics such as literacy and languages, topics that may either empower or marginalize.
That said, we also believe that academia and politics should remain separate, although academia should help make policy (EduPolitical Research). In terms of dissemination, we need to make a big difference, publishing, presenting and talking in different spaces, both academic and non-academic. We should reach out both to conferences and community centers, as well as local spaces where we can build organic academic communities. That will also lead us to fight for equity, related to research topics and the importance to look at qualitative inquiry as something that deserves more attention and interest from different areas of society.
Since QI, in many ways, entails eating, drinking and breathing research, we, as Legion, are willing to eat but never be satisfied, drink but never get drunk, and breathe until our lungs expire. QI is our tool and our craft. But, we must remember that we will need to read and discuss more before reaching any definitive conclusions or definitions about it. Also, if we think about QI as a way of seeing the world from different perspectives, we must acknowledge the varying degrees of truth and be willing to appreciate all these variations. However, we are also aware that such variations cannot simply be the end-result of unsubstantiated or unsupported opinions. Evidence, information, multiple sources, multiple readings always need to be the basis for the ideas we bring to the table. Doing QI without knowing what it is, theoretically speaking, is good. However, we also believe there needs to be a trial period for discussing theory and research as something rigorous and serious, an exercise that requires effort, teamwork, time, interest, responsibility, and courage.
As a Legion, we commit ourselves to work from and in the margins of research, always willing to learn and take risks. We believe that any efforts to conduct QI entail dynamism, commitment, as well as integrating different branches and approaches to it. Isolation is not a good strategy to conduct powerful QI. New ways of seeing the world imply new ways to show the world what we see. Our teams are committed to discovering and creating new methods of presenting our findings. At LSLP, we listen to everyone’s ideas, and some of our own researchers and partners have come up with great approaches and proposals to counter the traditional ways of presenting research results. We believe experimenting with videos and documentaries provide new alternatives to share our voices collectively, especially when our representation at events might be limited by travel constraints. Our incoming research will consider ideas from semiotics as literacies and multimodality as new ways to understand our multilayered reality. We envision the possibilities of hermeneutics as a research tool since it focuses on creating meanings by analyzing voices, images, text, and so forth as part of understanding truth. That said, since ethnographic approaches have seemed to be the most effective way to reach a deeper understanding in the topics LSLP has covered in the past, we will continue exploring ethnography, both as epistemology and method, in the foreseeable future. We will do so by looking at the principles of ethnography and expanding our boundaries. Future studies of ours will delve in ideas from visual and digital ethnography, as well as auto, duo, and collaborative ethnography to look more deeply into issues of communication, voice, and performance. As we continue our growth, we will also explore participatory, decolonializing, and deterritorializing methodologies that accentuate and promote our positionality as scholars in and from the South.
As we revisit our data collection and analysis frameworks, we must remember that we should conceive the world as different layers and not something apart from each other. This will entail, first, a constant reflection and revision of what we already have in place. The data collection and analysis procedures we have used in the different projects have been successful, so as we try to innovate, we need to perfect the ones we have, improve them, and build from them as we seek new ways of doing research. More specifically, we will continue to build our framework for polyangulation as a way to reflect multiple realities present in our inquiries and our team, also exploring how that will affect our data collection. In addition, we need to expand our analysis procedures involving multimodal audiovisual analysis, we must go deeper into the analysis of drawings and pictures as modes of representation, and we need to be even more systematic about how we organize our data. In addition, it is our goal to keep developing our writing strategies so that we can turn our frameworks into written papers.
As researchers, we believe the future of QI is in the continuous exploration of new ways of doing research and the moments of resonance and dissonance they have with our identities and affinities. Some of the areas where we see our legion moving include creating new conceptual frameworks for literacies, looking at issues of gender identity, social media, intercultural literature, all intertwined with our central topic of literacies in second languages. As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, polyangulation and multimodal audio analysis should definitely be two areas where we see ourselves expending more resources, along with interviewing methodologies and passive and participant observations.
Finally, as a Legion, we wonder about where the next frontier and the next arenas for our research should be. We believe that research should find and provide spaces that allow teachers and other community members to reflect on education and its connection to the general public. There also need to be spaces for people to become social agents and partake in the creation of literacy frameworks, evaluation and assessment processes. We should also venture in advocacy, exploring more about what is happening with minorities and the disenfranchised. It may be tricky, but if we are going to talk about social justice is to show what people are going through, we have the "power" to make them visible, especially when dealing with topics such as literacy and languages, topics that may either empower or marginalize.
That said, we also believe that academia and politics should remain separate, although academia should help make policy (EduPolitical Research). In terms of dissemination, we need to make a big difference, publishing, presenting and talking in different spaces, both academic and non-academic. We should reach out both to conferences and community centers, as well as local spaces where we can build organic academic communities. That will also lead us to fight for equity, related to research topics and the importance to look at qualitative inquiry as something that deserves more attention and interest from different areas of society.
!THIS IS OUR MANIFESTO!
This is our challenge to help the field of Qualitative Inquiry grow stronger. We invite you all to give us feedback, to fight with us, to be part of what we like to call the #BLACKANDGREENREVOLUTION.
If you heard this somewhere, if you read this here, and you feel this is you, we welcome you to our Legion. We embrace you as brothers and sisters in the revolution, we welcome you to be part of the resistance!
If you heard this somewhere, if you read this here, and you feel this is you, we welcome you to our Legion. We embrace you as brothers and sisters in the revolution, we welcome you to be part of the resistance!
It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a LEGION to build a field!
