Jessica Nina Lester’s research while affiliated with Indiana University Bloomington and other places

Academic success is now coupled with social media engagement. Social media has become so normalized in the academy that absent a carefully curated social media presence, scholars risk being seen as unscholarly, unproductive, and unpopular. This article lays bare the pressures, mechanisms, and monstrosities of using social media to promote scholarship. We argue that the widespread adoption of social media outpaces critical attention to its ethics and wonder about the future of public scholarship and the monstrous scholarly selves we are becoming. Thinking of monstrosity, with Krecˇicˇ and Žižek, as the preontological domain that rests beneath society and constitutes alterity and otherness, we ask what kinds of #scholarfamousmonsters we want to be, become, and promote in the digital era.

The literature on qualitative research ethics is vast and longstanding. Many scholars have written autoethnographic accounts and methodological overviews of the ways that they navigate ethics in practice. Despite various definitions and categorizations of research ethics, to date, in relatively few empirical investigations it has been outlined how research ethics is applied in practice. Thus, we explored qualitative researchers' experiences with ethics and ethical decision-making using 30 semi-structured interviews, ultimately spanning geographic and disciplinary areas. In the data, we identified three themes: First, personal moral beliefs were described by participants as being central to navigating research ethics; second, social and cultural contexts were pointed to as shaping ethical practices; and third, institutional or regulatory ethical review boards were understood as impacting what comes to be understood as ethical practices. These findings contribute to the larger body of qualitative research ethics literature by offering an empirically driven understanding of the nuanced ways that researchers make sense of ethics procedurally and in practice.

This article explores the ways in which gender is produced in the historical romance film adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd (2015). Utilising a visually informed, critical discursive psychology approach, we found that hegemonic masculinities and femininities are richly constructed in manners that ultimately functioned to subordinate femininity to masculinity. Moreover, multiple societal inequalities (e.g., racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism) are reproduced through the construction of gendered characters, perpetuating the myth that the nineteenth-century English countryside was entirely culturally homogenous. Collectively, our findings reveal how historicised, gendered film characters are mobilised to reinforce present-day inequalities.

This article examines the role of memory and remembering in qualitative research, proposing a reflective practice where memories serve not only as a backdrop but as active participants in shaping inquiry. By revisiting and engaging in remembering, we, as qualitative inquirers, forge deeper connections with subjects, encompassing the human, the natural world, and the more-than-human. Drawing inspiration from Bridges-Rhoads et al.’s invitation to explore “readings that rock our world,” we extend this metaphor to memories that challenge and invigorate our academic and personal perspectives. We interrogate the types of memories that compel us to rethink our approaches to qualitative inquiry and recognize the often-excluded voices and narratives that emerge from personal and communal histories. Through a heartfelt compilation of love letters addressing people, objects, travels, and moments, this article champions the inclusion of marginal and overlooked memories within academic discourse. These narratives serve as points of departure for inquiry, challenging the boundaries of what is deemed academically valuable, legitimate, and legible. We extend this invitation to our readers to engage in a collective re-imagining and remembering of research practices, emphasizing the significance of memory work in shaping our way of being qualitative researchers and doing qualitative research.

Purpose The language that school professionals use to describe disabled students can reveal and perpetuate ableist assumptions. Professionals' language choices can also challenge ableist attitudes to help create more inclusive, equitable learning environments. This tutorial seeks to guide speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and other school professionals to identify ableist language, understand the ableist ideologies that such language reveals, and develop strategies to implement ways of communicating with and about disabled students that align with an anti-ableist stance. We offer a brief description of ableism in schools, describe models of disability and their varying alignments toward ableist ideologies, and identify ways in which language can reflect and perpetuate ableism. Using Individualized Education Program goals as an example, we examine the ways in which ableist language can manifest in school practices. Finally, we provide suggestions to guide SLPs and other school professionals to examine and change their language to better align with an anti-ableist stance. Conclusions School professionals' language use is not neutral and may reveal and maintain ableist assumptions about disability and disabled students. While dismantling ableism requires systemic change, we suggest that individual professionals can use language in ways that resist ableism and powerfully impact their students' educational experiences.

Purpose: Patient- and family-centered communication is essential to health care equity. However, less is known about how urologists implement evidence-based communication and dynamics involved in caring for diverse pediatric patients and caregivers. We sought to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability using video-based research to characterize physician-family communication in pediatric urology. Materials and methods: We assembled a multidisciplinary team to conduct a multiphase learning health systems project and establish the Urology HEIRS (Health Experiences and Interactions in Real-Time Studies) corpus for research and interventions. This paper reports the first phase, evaluating feasibility and acceptability based on consent rate, patient diversity, and qualitative identification of verbal and paraverbal features of physician-family communication. We used applied conversation analysis methodology to identify salient practices across 8 pediatric urologists. Results: We recruited 111 families at 2 clinic sites; of these 82 families (N = 85 patients, ages 0-20 years) participated in the study with a consent rate of 73.9%. The racial/ethnic composition of the sample was 45.9% non-Hispanic White, 30.6% any race of Hispanic origin, 16.5% non-Hispanic Black/African American, 4.7% any ethnicity of Asian/Asian American, and 2.3% some other race/ethnicity; 24.7% of families used interpreters. We identified 11 verbal and paraverbal communication practices that impacted physician-family dynamics, including unique challenges with technology-mediated interpreters. Conclusions: Video-based research is feasible and acceptable with diverse families in pediatric urology settings. The Urology HEIRS corpus will enable future systematic studies of physician-family communication in pediatric urology and provides an empirical basis for specialty-specific training in patient- and family-centered communication.

This chapter explores the benefits and possibilities of using Reflective Interventionist Conversation Analytic (RICA) for racial health equity projects. RICA foregrounds the meaningful participation and perspective of multiple invested parties to encourage reflection on practice, value collaboration, promote open-ended inquiry, and emphasize the importance of making research findings accessible to inform practice. RICA is not deficit- or problem-oriented but focuses on learning how participants in institutional settings work together to achieve their goals. We ask: “How can research findings from conversation analysis research serve to better advance racial health equity in clinical practice?” To explore this question, we situate our discussion of RICA into communication-based racial health equity research, conversation analytic approaches to studying race and racism, and the concept of a learning health system. We offer six considerations for designing and implementing RICA-based health equity research informed by our research on racially discordant interactions in pediatric contexts. While findings from CA studies have significant implications for informing practice, they have been under-considered for their potential to inform the development of interventions and training to address racial inequities in healthcare contexts.

In this chapter, I describe how I navigated a 2-year ethnography wherein I explored how autism was performed as an interactional event among children diagnosed with autism, the therapists who worked with them, and their parents. Thinking with critical disability studies, discursive psychology, and postcritical understandings of ethnography, I argue for the value of ethnographers engaging with critical conceptions of disability, where disability may even be imagined as desirable. I offer two descriptions of tension points in this work, drawing upon data, primarily fieldnotes and researcher journal entries to illustrate challenges I face in representing this work, and my engagement with crip horizons.