Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Something is happening: encountering silence in disability research

Something is happening: encountering silence in disability research Often, researchers view silence as antagonistic to equity-aimed projects. Because verbal, written, and textually agentive communications are presumed to be the most valid qualitative-research data, moments of silence are under-analyzed. Yet, we argue that silence holds meaning as data and that it is a valid, rich form of communication.Design/methodology/approachThrough this reflective analysis of silence, we invite readers to reconceptualize silence in research from a critical disability-research perspective with emphasis on crip willfulness. We introduce silence as an interpretive, agentive and relational gesture.FindingsWe attend to silence as necessary in all research because it helps researchers excavate able-bodied expectations about communication in qualitative-data-collection practices.Originality/valueWe demonstrate that silences in research can be an interpretive, relational, and agentive gesture that can teach us about taken-for-granted assumptions about research practices. Revisiting our research encounters with this framing of silence informed by critical disability studies allows us to question how traditional social science research methods value some modalities of expression over others. Rather than viewing silence in research as moments when nothing happens, we show that silence indicates something happening and is valid data. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Qualitative Research Journal Emerald Publishing

Something is happening: encountering silence in disability research

Jones, Chelsea; Cheuk, Fiona
Qualitative Research Journal , Volume 21 (1): 14 – Jan 19, 2021
Download PDF
14 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/emerald-publishing/something-is-happening-encountering-silence-in-disability-research-Sch3720vQH
Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
© Emerald Publishing Limited
ISSN
1443-9883
DOI
10.1108/qrj-10-2019-0078
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Often, researchers view silence as antagonistic to equity-aimed projects. Because verbal, written, and textually agentive communications are presumed to be the most valid qualitative-research data, moments of silence are under-analyzed. Yet, we argue that silence holds meaning as data and that it is a valid, rich form of communication.Design/methodology/approachThrough this reflective analysis of silence, we invite readers to reconceptualize silence in research from a critical disability-research perspective with emphasis on crip willfulness. We introduce silence as an interpretive, agentive and relational gesture.FindingsWe attend to silence as necessary in all research because it helps researchers excavate able-bodied expectations about communication in qualitative-data-collection practices.Originality/valueWe demonstrate that silences in research can be an interpretive, relational, and agentive gesture that can teach us about taken-for-granted assumptions about research practices. Revisiting our research encounters with this framing of silence informed by critical disability studies allows us to question how traditional social science research methods value some modalities of expression over others. Rather than viewing silence in research as moments when nothing happens, we show that silence indicates something happening and is valid data.

Journal

Qualitative Research Journal – Emerald Publishing

Published: Jan 19, 2021

Keywords: Silence; Disability; Data collection; Communication; Qualitative research

References

  • Whose ‘voice’ is it anyway?: giving voice and qualitative research involving individuals that type to communicate
    Ashby, C.E.
  • Analysing the significance of silence in qualitative interviewing: questioning and shifting power relations
    Bengtsson, T.T.; Fynbo, L.
  • Sounds of silence: narrative research with inarticulate subjects
    Booth, T.; Booth, W.
  • ‘He was a secret’: family narratives and the institutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities
    Burghardt, M.
  • Giving an account of oneself
    Butler, J.
  • Introduction: cripping the arts in Canada
    Chandler, E.
  • Asian American speech, civic place, and future nondisabled bodies
    Chen, M.Y
  • Conflicting paradigms: the rhetorics of disability memoir
    Couser, G.T.; Wilson, J.C.; Lewiecki-Wilson, C.
  • Decolonizing interpretive research: subaltern sensibilities and the politics of voice
    Darder, A.
  • ‘I hate my voice’:coming to terms with minor bodily stigmas
    Ellis, C.
  • Telling secrets, revealing lives: relational ethics in research with intimate others
    Ellis, C
  • Unspeakable offenses: untangling race and disability in discourses of intersectionality
    Erevelles, N.; Minear, A.
  • Toward an ethics of silence? Negotiating off-the-record events and identity in oral history
    Freund, A.; Sheftel, A.; Zembrzycki, S.
  • The absent presence of Elsie Lacks: hauntings at the intersection of race, class, gender, and disability
    Gill, M.; Erevelles, N
  • The epistemological bias of ethics review: constraining mental health research
    Holland, K.
  • Disability studies and the ties and tensions with arts-informed inquiry: one more reason to look away?
    Ignagni, E.; Church, K.
  • Cripistemologies: introduction
    Johnson, M.; McRuer, R.
  • ‘Wounds of regret’: critical reflections on competence, ‘professional intuition,’ and informed consent in research with intellectually disabled youth
    Jones, C.
  • The space between listening and storying: foundations for projects in humanization
    Kinloch, V.; San Pedro, T.
  • Feminist phenomenology and the politics of wonder
    Mann, B.
  • Compulsory able-bodiedness and queer/disabled existence
    McRuer, R
  • Ableism, ambiguity, and the anna stubblefield case
    Mintz, K.
  • The materiality of metaphor
    Mitchell, D.; Snyder, S.
  • On race and voice: challenges for liberal education in the 1990s
    Mohanty, C.T.
  • Feeling gender speak: intersubjectivity and fieldwork practice with women who prostitute in Lima, Peru
    Nencel, L.
  • Disability studies and phenomenology: the carnal politics of everyday life
    Paterson, K.; Hughes, B.
  • Bodies together: touch, ethics, and disability
    Price, J.; Shildrick, M.
  • Stealing the pain of others: reflections on Canadian humanitarian responses
    Razack, S.H.
  • Doing justice to intersectionality in research
    Rice, C.; Harrison, E.; Friedman, M.
  • Silence as shields: agency and resistances among native American students in the urban southwest
    San Pedro, T.J.
  • When good intentions backfire: university research ethics review and the intimate lives of people labeled with intellectual disabilities
    Santinele Martino, A.; Fudge Schormans, A.
  • Coming to claim crip: disidentification with/in disability studies
    Shalks, S.
  • On ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship
    Simpson, A.
  • Can the subaltern speak?
    Spivak, G.C.
  • Using their own stories: a culturally relevant response to intervention
    Struck, M.; Vagle, M.D.
  • My researcher friend? my friend the researcher? my friend, my researcher? Mis/informed consent and people with developmental disabilities
    Thompson, S.A.; Van den Hoonaard, W.
  • The not-yet-time of disability in the bureaucratization of university life
    Titchkosky, T.
  • The anguish of power: remapping mental diversity with an anticolonial compass
    Titchkosky, T.; Aubrecht, K
  • Decolonization is not a metaphor
    Tuck, E.; Yang, K.W.
  • R-words: refusing research
    Tuck, E.; Yang, K.W
  • The researcher and the beast: uncovering processes of othering and becoming animal in research ventures in the field of critical disability studies
    Vanderkinderen, C.; Roets, G.; Van Hove, G
  • Revisiting spivak's ‘can the subaltern speak’ through the lens of affect theory: can the subaltern be felt?
    Zembylas, M.
  • Project ReVision: disability at the edges of representation
    Rice, C.; Chandler, E.; Harrison, E.; Liddiard, K.; Ferrari, M.