Postrepresentational Qualitative Research Writing

As qualitative researchers in art education, we should spend more time thinking, talking, and writing about writing. Inside the dissertation process, the perplexities of my own graduate students point this out. The many texts marketed for teaching introductory research skills, in their cursory discussions of writing associated with the qualitative project, point it out. Revealing too is the experience of a small group of art educators who, independent of one another, attended the second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (2006). There, we discovered one another filing into a presentation on altered booksamong other things. Throughout the days ofthat congress we reveled in the depth, the richness of alternative conceptions of new forms of inquiry. We felt invigorated, with our own interests in the conduct of critical qualitative inquiry reinforced. We noted too, woven throughout the proceedings was an emphasis on the processes and products of writing in the qualitative endeavor; there were scores of presentations, from writing performance texts, ethics in writing, rhizomatic complexities of writing, to Yvonna Lincoln's half-day workshop on new experimental writing. So, it was my own students-their anxieties and ambivalences; the short shrift allotted in research methodology textbooks; and the pervasive emphasis, the sheer zest for writing shared at that congress that provoked a realization of a void in my own discipline. A search for publications and conference presentations focusing on the inextricable ties between research and writing in art education accentuates an absence. What we need is more engagement-more thinking, talking and writing about these aspects of our research endeavors. This editorial, then, works toward stimulating more concerted conversation about the evolving theory, processes, and products of qualitative research writing.To begin, as postrepresentational qualitative researchers, we know the relationship between language and meaning to be fragile and thin, that tenuous connection made conscious through the linguistic turn. In Trinh's words, we must be ever aware of "language as language" (1989). From Richardson and St. Pierre, language is not a "transparent medium that mirrors, 'represents,' and contains the world" (2005, p. 968). As Denzin and Lincoln (2005) remind us, in the writing of research, we do not set out to encapsulate nor represent the meaning of an action, text, or intention. After the crisis of representation, we know that interpretation in the positivist sense is not our writing goal. We do not find meaning, then, in the end, write it up for consumption, a showing, an ossified representation of what we have learned. Instead, within the dynamics of reflexiviry, we conceive of writing as infused within the whole of the research endeavor. In the beginning, we are like poets, novelists, and essayists. From Joan Didion: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means" (1989, p. 31). Likewise, as researchers, we write to get ideas out in the open-in digital space, maybe, penciled on paper tablets. Thoughts, feelings, purposes, strategies are exposed to overt awareness. We use writing to collect/create data, ranging from notes on observations and text from interviews, to the recording of the researchers feelings, insights, and connections that come during research interactions-in St. Pierres words, "fugitive, fleeting data" that crop up "unexpectedly and fittingly," data that would be lost if it weren't for the habitual, generative process of writing throughout the project (2005). Writing, too, is an analytic, a tool that moves us in and out, fostering synergism between the researcher and a complex of data. The writing process clusters, maps, meanders around, wedges between/among data, exposing gaps in content and coherence, categorizing, creating relationships. Writing within the data opens spaces, affording insights that might be obscured via conventional practices of data management; e. …