Quests for Questioners: Inventive Approaches to Qualitative Interviews

2024 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner

This edited book presents a range of quests for those who want to learn from others through asking questions in research interviews and conversations and attending to the more-than-human aspects of the world. Authors in this book explore how to talk to people in ways that are responsive to cultural contexts and the challenges faced by people in everyday life, how to think with concepts drawn from an array of theories, including Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action,” Rosi Braidotti’s work on “cartographies,” and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of the “fold” and “assemblage.” Authors discuss a rich array of interview practices used by contemporary scholars―including, how to

a. elicit verbal accounts from participants in culturally responsive ways;

b. think with theory in relation to the use of interview methods; and

c. integrate object, graphic, and photo elicitation methods and mobile and walking methods in research.

The book is designed to provoke and inspire readers’ creativity to take risks and integrate different approaches to doing interviews in their research―in other words, to undertake methodological quests to experiment with the art of asking questions. Understanding the breadth of practices entailed in qualitative interview research can invigorate any researcher’s practice. This volume seeks to encourage researchers to design studies that account for how they interact with others in culturally responsive ways; to consider how they can draw on theoretical concepts to re-think, re-theorize, and question conventional interview practices; and to re-imagine the generation of interview accounts using other ways of knowing, including visual, sensory, and mobile methods.

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