With full awareness that criteria are mutable, the author argues that ethnography needs to be evaluated through two lenses: science and arts. The author suggests five criteria: substantive contribution, aesthetic merit, reflexivity, impact, and expression of a reality.

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New writing practices in qualitative research include evocative writing—a research practice through which we can investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices of social science unnecessarily limit us and social science. Evocative representations do not take writing for granted but offer multiple ways of thinking about a topic, reaching diverse audiences, and nurturing the writer. They also offer an opportunity for rethinking criteria used to judge research and reconsidering institutional practices and their effects on community. Language is a constitutive force, creating a particular view of reality and the Self. No textual staging is ever innocent (including this one). Styles of writing are neither fixed nor neutral but reflect the historically shifting domination of particular schools or paradigms. Social scientific writing, like all other forms of writing, is a sociohistorical construction, and, therefore, mutable.

This article presents three social‐science writing transgressions: writing an in‐depth interview as a poem, writing field notes as a drama, and the article, itself, which deploys diverse genres, personal experiences, and critical analyses. Through these examples, I challenge traditional definitions of validity and call for different kinds of science practices. The science practice I model is a feminist‐postmodernist one. It blurs genres, probes lived experience, enacts science, creates a female imaginary, breaks down dualisms, inscribes emotional labor and emotional response as valid, deconstructs the myth of an emotion‐free social science, and makes a space for partiality, self‐reflexivity, tension, and difference.

This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled “Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research,” which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their personal history with qualitative methods, epiphanies that attracted them to qualitative work or changed their perspectives within the qualitative tradition, ethical crises, exemplary qualitative studies, the current state of qualitative methods, and challenges and goals for the next decade. Panelists included Arthur Bochner (communication), Norman Denzin (sociology/communication/critical studies), Yvonna Lincoln (education), Janice Morse (nursing/anthropology), Ronald Pelias (performance studies/ communication), and Laurel Richardson (sociology/gender studies). Carolyn Ellis (communication/sociology) served as organizer and moderator.