Jasmine B. Ulmer

Wayne State University | WSU · College of Education

Although this is a simple message, the time for community and kindness is now. Competing with other inquirers can yield individual rewards, but such moves risk sacrificing our collective futures for both immediate and rapidly diminishing gains. A commitment to inclusive and welcoming qualitative communities, however, opens different paths. As such,...

Teaching matters. And there are many ways to teach, particularly when it comes to qualitative inquiry. Accordingly, we consider how qualitative pedagogical practices can attend to the ways in which we live and learn in our more-than-human world. To keep within a pedagogical frame, we write this introductory article through a pedagogical lens. We ho...

What is feminist transdisciplinary research? Why is it important? How do we do it? Through nineteen contributions from leading international feminist scholars, this book provides new insights into activating transdisciplinary feminist theories, methods and practices in original, creative and exciting ways – ways that make a difference both to what...

It is easy to feel small, powerless, and unable to spark any sort of change. Being only one person among billions can seem overwhelming indeed. So much is completely beyond our control. There are only a limited set of decisions that people are able to make in life, generally speaking. Given the circumstances, however, there are even fewer decisions...

Reorganizing our library during the pandemic, James secretly placed Jasmine’s copy of The Hundreds by his copy of Exercises in Style, the latter offering 99 different narrations of the same story. In our accidentally large archive of abstracts for which we never wrote papers, we had a collection of constrained writings, all iterations of our shared...

This brief essay engages with environmental stewardship and scale in the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Kees Boeke’s illustrated children’s book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps and Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten—a short film based on Boeke’s book—this photo essay illustrates how, through the production of eco-art, the practice o...

With a pedagogical aim, we offer an overview of some, though certainly not all, of the potential initial framing considerations in forced displacement research. We then engage with several of the key terms currently in use by international agencies before discussing how those terms can be (re)interpreted as they are taken up in transnational contex...

Writing operates on many of the same principles as dance. Taking place within the limited space of the page, writing similarly attempts to present several compressed storylines within a single composition. And as this occurs, writing and review processes work to produce publications that are intended to appear effortless, organic, and sustainably m...

In the book In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), Margaret Atwood asks: “What would a species-wide self-rescue effort look like if it played out in actuality?” Atwood poses this question within a compilation of essays published later in her career. But, contrary to what the title of the collection might suggest, we are not on other...

Narratives of migration can be without movement. When people are suddenly internally displaced, for example, they become non-citizens in their former home countries and are unable to move, much less leave. In instances such as these, we suggest that it may be a temporal – rather than spatial – displacement that has occurred. In so doing, we examine...

This practice-based article illustrates how dance education pedagogies can help refugee youth adjust to new settings. To support refugee youth in narrating aspects of belonging in their everyday lives, this article offers pedagogies for creative movement that unfold through multiple stages. As developed in the first author’s dissertation study and...

Photographic and citational practices tend to be approached as separate acts. Photography—the etymology of which involves writing with light—emanates from the materiality and spatio-temporality of a physical site. In this sense, given that photo- graphs make aesthetic reference to matter within a specific site in space and time, photographs could b...

In the process of bringing about the Anthropocene, humanity has become accustomed to taking up a considerable amount of space. This tendency can spill over into how we as humans take up space within our own photographs, too (such as selfies that fill the entirety of the image frame). As contrast, this minimalist photo essay offers alternative visua...

Rereading Walter Benjamin's often overlooked theme of preservation in his work, we offer an interpretation of an art installation that appeared in Detroit, Michigan, USA. By interpreting this installation and Benjamin's insights on preservation, we make recommendations on how to make readable rhetoric that might be used to positively shape digitall...

In putting ourselves on paper, we risk letting our papers become proxies for who we are. It perhaps is telling that scholars refer to collective papers as oeuvres, or bodies of work. The contributions, impacts, and lives of academics are repeatedly measured in units of paper. I am reminded of how, in his Nobel Prize lecture, author Gabriel García M...

In the current moment of social, political, economic and environmental disquiet, unprecedented numbers of children have been forced to leave their homes and settle in new communities. As schools worldwide receive increasing numbers of refugee youth, there is a pressing need for thoughtful educational research that inquires into the unique individua...

There are many ways to frame how and why we go about research, particularly when it comes to unsettling traditions. From the beginning of our studies, we can be encouraged (or even required) to situate our contributions within gaps, or deficits, in the existing literature. This teaches us to launch our work on the limitations of others. As an alter...

Transdisciplinary feminisms remain in motion. In moving across disciplines, they flow—fall—seep into different theories, methodologies, and practices. As the authors in this collection have expressed, there are many diverse and hopeful visions for how this can, and does, occur. Their writings are filled with rich endeavors that pose, perform, run a...

This article proposes a posthuman / materialist somatechnics approach which encourages a more nuanced, ethical, and embodied attentiveness to how humans, nature, and materialities are not separate, but actively emerge through entanglements and in co-constitutive relation with one another. Such an attentiveness recognises that we are shaped by the p...

In this visual essay we revisit a summer immersion, Ecologies of Girlhood. An array of women curators, storytellers, musicians, performers, artists, ecologists, scientists and scholars shared their practices in an intergenerational and interdisciplinary format with a group of girls between the ages of 7 and 10. The immersion unfolded through a seri...

Though the Anthropocene potentially is many things, a strategic plan is not one of them. Rather, it offers a warning, an important concept, an opening to rethink research methodology, and an opportunity for higher education to work toward better futures for (and with) the planet. The Anthropocene also asks difficult questions of how we might do dif...

The troubles of the world often seem big--sometimes in ways that can be enormously and overwhelmingly so. It does not help that, in comparison, I can seem so very small. On most days, I am at a loss as to what to do. At the same time, I find myself contemplating two particular questions: (a) How can I help make the world a better place? (b) How am...

In putting ourselves on paper, we risk letting our papers become proxies for who we are. It perhaps is telling that scholars refer to collective papers as oeuvres, or bodies of work. The contributions, impacts, and lives of academics are repeatedly measured in units of paper. I am reminded of how, in his Nobel Prize lecture, author Gabriel García M...

In that moment, Laurel Richardson had whispered an unspoken secret just to me. I waited to make sure no one was looking. Then I knowingly, yet surreptitiously, nodded back.

Writing can be a (playful) practice that develops through techniques. To illustrate, I draw from the works of Erin Manning to describe how I take up techniques in both writing and dance. I then suggest several potential techniques for fostering a postqualitative writing practice: following creative impulses, situating writing within concepts, and f...

This piece incorporates multiple forms of creative, arts-based research. Photographs are placed alongside a series of poetic statements: together they illustrate and build upon Erin Manning’s theoretical concept of the “minor gesture.” For Manning, minor gestures are subtle movements that occur around us as the world constantly continues to unfold....

Our aim in this chapter is to review and critically examine the status of 'data' in qualitative inquiry. As the title indicates, we suggest that this status is methodologically and theoretically problematic. Yet, because data (and their various versions, forms, and reversals) remains open to doubt, data also create productive problems and creative...

In the move toward a critical form of qualitative inquiry that realizes its transformative potential, this article encourages scholars to consider axes of need within research. A flexible framework suggests how researchers might respond to situated need through theoretically and contextually grounded inquiries. In first drawing from critical geogra...

This special issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology offers a series of curations and creations from emergent scholars within the equally emergent field of postqualitative research.

scape. 1 a brief ‘escape or means of escape’ 2 ‘a scenic view, whether of sea, land, or sky’ 3 ‘in its various senses’ 4 ‘a long flower-stalk rising directly from the root or rhizome’ 5 a theoretical approach to writing

In this article, the street is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art. Through a critical performance geography and a qualitative inquiry of the street, I photograph the movement of art across w...

The posthuman turn has radically–and rapidly–shifted what is possible in research methodology. In response, my aim in this conceptual paper is to suggest entry points into posthuman educational research methodology. I outline aspects of posthumanism while recognizing its multiplicity: there are many posthumanisms and each offers different twists, t...

What if we expressed critical qualitative inquiry is/as love?

As spacetimemattering, ‘data’ remain in perpetual motion. Within quantum contexts, therefore, the focus for qualitative methodologists becomes not how to capture, tame, or bestill moving ‘data,’ but how to address the movements of ‘data’ through space, time, and matter. Following Barad, this chapter turns to several international exemplars from the...

Abstract: Images can be photographs, but they also can be the visual surroundings of everyday life. As images shape our daily settings, they choreograph the thoroughfares and backdrops that shape us. In the process, images can influence what we think, how we feel, and when and where we act. To explore how, I return to photogeny (Talbot, 1839), a pa...

In this chapter, we examine how the discourses of education reform intersect with twenty-first-century policies that purport to prepare students to be productive members of a global economy. Through the example of a national reform organization that promises to deliver twenty-first-century skills and competencies, we demonstrate how discourse shape...

In the current moment of social, political, economic and environmental disquiet, unprecedented numbers of children have been forced to leave their homes and settle in new communities. As schools worldwide receive increasing numbers of refugee youth, there is a pressing need for thoughtful educational research that inquires into the unique individua...

What if—in light of the escalating pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology? Because this question moves beyond slowing the pace or volume of productivity to address underlying issues of ontology, it asks not how we can find a slower way of doing scholarship, but how we can find a slower way of scholarly being. A philosophy of S...

The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the language used by a 21st century skills-focused reform organization to promote its program alongs...

This study examines how participation in a US Department of Education policy fellowship influenced the career pathways of teacher leaders. This sample of teacher leaders is illustrative of teacher leadership development beyond the classroom and demonstrates challenges and opportunities. Notably, 64% of participants reported changing their work-rela...

Recent developments in critical policy analysis have occurred alongside the new materialisms in qualitative research. These lines of scholarship have unfolded along two separate, but related, tracks. In particular, the new materialist method of diffraction aligns with many elements of critical policy analysis. Both involve critical theory, complexi...

This writing is an experiment that extends and challenges rather than confirms or builds. This writing gets its energy from departures and it operates through surprise, movement, and the unexpected (see also Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2002). The writing is not collaborative, peaceful, univocal, or textual. This writing is not. When writing...

As the possibilities of hypermodal inquiry intensify against the boundaries of qualitative research, a hypermodal assemblage performs an unfolding–refolding of layers within the space of Deleuzian thought. By exploring a literary question asked by F. Scott Fitzgerald and later repeated by Deleuze, a Deleuzian lens transports the ontologically real...

Recent publications by major newspapers in the USA have reinforced the perception that teacher quality represents a national crisis. By releasing individual teacher evaluation data in online, searchable databases, several newspapers have influenced public perceptions of teachers and teaching. A framing analysis of selected media events and publicat...

This article examines Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity as a new materialist methodology. Given that plasticity simultaneously maintains the ability to receive, give, and annihilate form, plasticity and plastic readings offer material-discursive possibilities for educational research. This article begins by discussing the evol...

This article explores visual forms of writing through cartography and methodological events. As re-envisioned writing practices and textual methodologies potentially push boundaries of qualitative research, these new lines of inquiry also may respond to persisting educational challenges that confine occupational job design and career pathways in ed...

This paper seeks to examine how embodied methodological approaches might inform dance education practice and research. Through a series of examples, this paper explores how choreographic writing might function as an embodied writing methodology. Here, choreographic writing is envisioned as a form of visual word choreography in which words move, pau...

Clinical and research literature in medical education indicates a dearth of opportunities to adequately and competently prepare young pre-medical and pre-healthcare professionals to attend to the needs of dying patients, especially youths and their families. This study aimed to explore outcomes of an innovative palliative care program on 142 past a...

Legislative summary of Florida's 2013 session addressing issues affecting P-12 and higher education funding, funding priorities and trends, changes to the funding formula, and impact on local schools.