Question 5: How Can Qualitative Researchers Produce Work That Is Meaningful Across Time, Space, And Culture
Markham reiterates the chapters question: “Is it posible to make one’s research more global and meaningful across time and cultural boundaries? […] should this be a primary goal?”
- Markham purports that global scope and universal mutual understanding are impossible.
- The author argues that no matter what, our research is grounded in cultural frameworks, invisible to us.
- Global scale does not entail global understanding.
- Markham suggests that key “global” ethnographies advocate work that is local in scale, and global in sensibility not scope.
- She asserts that the best we can hope for in our research is similar shared experience transcending audience and trans-cultural compatibility.
Markham advocates a deeply reflexive research process that locates the self in research, and searches for incompatibilities with other audiences.
- She argues that Internet research involves what is always intrinsically a local socio-cultural phenomenon. She continues that local contexts illuminate larger contexts.
- Internet Research:
Local Social Phenomenon vs. Research with global sensibilities
- Research reflexivity includes an understanding of what “global operation” one is hoping to achieve. (See the muddy list of global operationalizations on p. 137-138)
- The author also proposes praxis of othering one’s self (and locale) to gain clarity on personal location.
- Reflexivity as a defining force methodologically and rhetorically includes:
- Make the object of research situated in relation to other people places and things.
- Make work as accessible and meaningful to other cultures and locations as possible knowing that complete trans-cultural understanding is impossible
- Markham spends the rest of the chapter laying out valuable questions to help frame your research reflexibly with global sensibility.
Lally’s Response:
- We need to find rhetorical “tricks” to bring our preconceptions to the foreground
- Research is a creative process
Srinivasan’s Response:
- The personage of the researcher embodies a meaning, which is culturally and contextually created outside and in lieu of research
- Internet research must maintain its trans-nationality (global quantity) without sacrificing local reflexivity.
- We should consider trans-national 3rd spaces, social networks, and virtual worlds as part of the Internet global and local to understand the cultural context of phenomena.
- Srinivasan proposes that some aspects of research method building be participatory with users/audiences.
- What does global sensibility vs. global scope mean or entail in research?
- How would one go about othering one’s own approach and locale?
- How does creativity factor into research outside of pure methodology? (i.e. not simply what tools to use for research)
- What would participatory research method construction look like? How would this be implemented? How would this refine the researcher’s perception of self, local(e) and global?
