This article explores epistemological awareness and instantiation of methods, as well as uninformed ambiguity, in qualitative methodological decision making and research reporting. The authors argue that efforts should be made to make the research process, epistemologies, values, methodological decision points, and argumentative logic open, accessible, and visible for audiences. To these ends, they discuss two ways of conceptualizing the role of epistemological awareness and instantiation of methods, including (a) a series of decision junctures and (b) a spatial conceptualization of epistemological decision making. Through an analysis of researchers' decision junctures drawn from studies published in high-impact education journals in 2006, the authors illustrate current methodological awareness and instantiation of methods in the field of education research.
This article seeks to demystify, through deconstruction, the concept of interdisciplinarity in the context of qualitative research to contribute to a new praxis of knowledge production through reflection on the possibilities and impossibilities of interdisciplinarity. A review and discussion of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity leads the authors to formulate and explore the following questions: What is interdisciplinary knowledge? What is it that researchers observe as interdisciplinarity? Why do researchers pursue it? In demystifying interdisciplinarity, the authors focus on the legitimacy of the sign interdisciplinary and the process of (interdisciplinary) knowledge production. After investigating the former, the authors explore the latter by metaphorically mapping the terrain of knowledge production and conclude by proposing that interdisciplinarity, as a sign, may have the function of enabling knowledge-producing organizations to leverage resources by symbolically alluding to desired characteristics of knowledge-production processes whereas, as an act, it may de facto reproduce and maintain the disciplinary organization of knowledge and knowledge production.
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