1.+Qualitative+Scholarship+in+Communication+Research

=**The Basics:**=
 * Qualitative research stems primarily from an ontological stance of social construction and critical perspective. The research methods primarily used in this research method range from content analysis to interviews to observation to ethnographic approaches. Qualitative scholars generally appreciate the contributions that personal values contribute to research.**

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=**METATHEORY - still a good title for page, or reframe in terms of situating qualitative scholarship within the discipline of Comm Studies?**=


 * Although the text is referring to the role a journalist plays in reporting what he or she sees in the world (and Anderson Cooper is a journalist, not a scholar), I immediately thought of the text as one of the arguments qualitative scholars use in defending the use of value and perspective in scholarship.**




 * Consider reading it this way:**


 * Some scholars like to be strictly observers. They don't intervene, they don't participate. They just document what they see, even is what they see is terrible. But the way I see it, scholars don't exist in a vacuum. They are human beings, living and working in a very human environment. And that humanity is essential in relating to their stories. When you lose your humanity, you lose any kind (insert your academic jargon word of choice here) integrity you have left.**


 * -Posted by Sara**


 * __Mapping and Metatheory:__**

In her Ch. 1 “Introduction,” from //Cartographies of Knowledge: Exploring Qualitative Epistemologies//, Celine-Marie Pascale writes, “The use of cartography as a metaphor in the title, and throughout the book, alludes to geographies of power expressed in technologies for generating knowledge” (1). She's referencing the entanglement of cartography in the projects of colonization and imperialism: the technology of mapping new lands for colonizers to claim, deplete of resources, enslave, convert to Christianity, etc. Similar criticisms have been made of other techniques of knowledge production, like natural history and anthropology. However, Pascale also says that, “//Cartographies of Knowledge// explores the liberatory potentials of social research by contesting the conventional oppositional binary between the philosophical and the practical" (6). So I'm wondering about the liberatory potential of map-making: Here's a collection of bookmarks I've gathered in Delicious with the tag "map." Many of them are on the use of current mapping technologies for social justice and progressive causes. -- Posted by Trav

In her brief history of how binary dualisms are a fundamental structure of Western thought -- and a necessary structure for social inequalities, such as sexism, Orr cites the work of Thomas Laqueur. I've created a presentation deck uploaded here as a PDF summarizing his work on sex and gender. Laqueur present historical evidence that what we take as an empirical fact - biological sex, genitalia - has also been observed differently at different times and cultures. This shows how claims of the pure objectivity of science - merely observing objective truth, can be distorted by social factors, such as gender roles that are projected into the literal way early medical illustrators drew the genitalia they observed. -- Posted by Trav
 * __Deborah Orr, “Thinking Through the Body”__**