Stories of Methodology: Interviewing Sideways, Crooked and Crip

Abstract

In this article, written in a combination of collaborative and singular voices, we tell the stories of shaping an interdependent crip methodology while conducting a qualitative interview study with 33 disabled faculty members. Our central argument is that disability crips methodology. In other words, centering disability from the beginning of a research project, and committing to collective access, reveal specific ways that disability changes the assumptions and outcomes that ordinarily characterize-or are assumed to characterize-research situations. To illuminate those specific ways, we focus on three dimensions of qualitative research that emerged as particularly important to our interdependent methodology: time, gaze, and emotion. We've stressed reliability and significance. We've omitted the first person in (some of) our reports. We've toed (some of) the lines. KeywordsIn saying this, we don't mean we're complicit with ableist or otherwise reductive methodologies; on the contrary, we have learned a great deal about the creativity and grace required for activities such as conducting statistical analyses. But we have been steering away from speaking through first-person stories, because the audiences we've been working to persuade tend to listen to different kinds of language, a different understanding of how data signify.Ironically, at the same time that we've been arguing for the broad significance and (to a degree) generalizability of our work, we've been diving deep into individuals' stories. At this moment (summer 2016), we are in the final stages of data-gathering for an interview study with disabled faculty. With 33 interviews complete, we are saturated in stories. And we're bursting with our own stories, too, because we've learned that two disabled researchers conducting a collaborative interview study with disabled faculty is anything but simple. In other words, when disability is assumed to be an important part of the qualitative interview situation (rather than something external that "enters" the situation and then must be accommodated or compensated for), the interview's normative framework is both exposed and challenged. Crucially, our choices as researchers are not simply an effort to make the interview Price & Kerschbaum, "Stories of Methodology" CJDS 5.3 (October 2016) 21 space more "inclusive" by retrofitting previous interview methodologies. Rather, they compose a process of cripping the interview space itself-restructuring it and reconsidering the power dynamics that give rise to its normative structure.Our methodology draws upon grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006;Strauss and Corbin, 1994), narrative analysis (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000;Wolf, 1992), and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003;Gee, 2012), as well as the disability-studies researchers who have preceded us. Bringing together these approaches gave us some structure to work with. For example, we began as most grounded-theory projects do, with an open-coding process, through which themes emerged as we repeatedly revie...

Visual Embodied Actions in Interview-Based Writing Research: A Methodological Argument for Video

“…In "Stories of Methodology: Interviewing Sideways, Crooked and Crip," Price and Kerschbaum (2016) demonstrate how researchers can and should employ whatever methods and technologies best fit the access needs of interviewee and interviewer. In their collaborative research, this flexibility extended to instant-message exchanges, email correspondence over months, and videorecorded in-person interviews.…”

Beyond the Makerspace

“…For example, in her account of creating accessible, multilingual digital content, Laura Gonzales (2018b) brings together the disability studies framework of interdependence and the framework of intersectionality, as articulated by legal scholar and Black feminist theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. Drawing on the work of disability studies scholars Margaret Price and Stephanie Kerschbaum (2016), Gonzales explains that interdependent research methodologies "center 'care, commitment, and acting with others in mutually-dependent relationships,' where relying on others to access information is not a matter of choice but an intentional, necessary practice" (35). Gonzales goes on to explain that "the notion of interdependency as central to inclusive research practice also has a long, though differently-named, history in research on language and racial diversity," noting Crenshaw's work on intersectionality and the work of scholars of African American Language who show that "race, power, and language are always inherently tied and intertwined" (36).…”

Ableism in Academia

“…Living and working with chronic illness, with fluctuating energy and pain levels and uncertainty regarding the future, can be isolating. Usually such experiences enter discussions in the academic workplace only through acts of individual disclosure (Price and Kerschbaum 2016). The workforce is presumed able-bodied and able-minded until proven otherwise.…”