Exploring Data Production in Motion: Fluidity and Feminist Poststructuralism (Qualitative Inquiry)

Exploring Data Production in Motion facilitates the use of feminist critical qualitative methodologies. With open-ended methods and poststructuralist theory and analysis, this book will offer tools to approach and to examine challenging and controversial topics ethically. This book will argue that to examine data of ‘individual’ experience and aspirations requires examining the process of the data production in which these were ‘produced’. Therefore, this book will form an understanding of a data production as a process, which in its fluidity enables us also to form an understanding of difference and change as inevitable parts of social processes. Movement expresses here the dynamic forces in the data production (including its analysis), which produce ‘the life’ to the lines of the data. It welcomes change and uncertainty by allowing the data production processes, its intensities and fluctuations, to take the lead in the inquiry. This compels the methods to adjust to the requirements of the data production processes. The book demonstrates the use of feminist methodology and illuminates how the feminist critical inquiry is essential in examining issues of minority and difference. In this the focus is in the differences. As a feminist inquiry this book contributes to recognizing differences within while examining minority worldviews and perceiving difference as essential force in striving for sustainable ethics in the times of political polarization.

Perfect for Higher Education courses such as: Qualitative Research Methodology | Qualitative Research Methods and Analysis | Feminist Poststructuralist Methodologies and Qualitative Research | Qualitative Methods in Critical Social Research | Experimental Methodologies in Qualitative Research

Teija Rantala earned her Master’s in Education and Ph.D. in Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. In her doctoral study she explored the aspirations of religious women belonging to a minority movement in Finland and used feminist methods and poststructuralist theory to be able to examine the women’s controversial aspirations.//She has published her work mostly in feminist educational journals. The publications reflect her feminist, creative but critical approach to methodology and knowledge formation. She has a special interest in examining processes of gender, identity, aspirations and experience by experimenting with feminist poststructuralist and posthuman theory. She has given invited lectures at the University of Aberystwyth and University of Reading and reviewed for SAGE and Routledge.