INTRODUCTION

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2 11INTRODUCTIONThe Discipline and Practice of Qualitative ResearchNorman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. LincolnThe global community of qualitative researchers is mid-way between two extremes, searching for a new middle, moving in several different directions at the same Mixed methodologies and calls for scientifically based research, on the one side, renewed calls for social justice inquiry from the critical social science tradition on the other. In the method-ological struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, the very existence of qualitative research was at issue. In the new paradigm war, every overtly social justice-oriented approach to research . . . is threatened with de-legitimization by the government-sanctioned, exclusivist assertion of positivism . . . as the gold standard of educational research (Wright, 2006, pp. 799 800).The evidence-based research movement, with its fixed standards and guidelines for conducting and evaluating qualitative inquiry, sought total domination: one shoe fits all (Cannella & Lincoln, chapter 5, this volume; Lincoln, 2010).

Chapter 1 Introduction: Disciplining the Practice of Qualitative Research–2–3 It is “implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism” (p. 1), with the ways in which “knowledge about indigenous peoples was collected, classified, and then represented back to the West” (Smith, 1999, p. 1). This dirty word stirs up anger, silence, dis ...

  Introduction, Chapter