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This article critically explores Harry Torrance's four-volume edited collection "Qualitative Research Methods in Education." The author argues that this text is an important intervention in the constitution of a meta-discourse on qualitative research today. Torrance pays particular attention to the field of education, providing much needed historical and genealogical perspectives on contemporary discussions in the field.

The arts are often seen as peripheral to the "real business" of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a "perfect storm" for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of "vulnerability" as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education--a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment. (Contains 1 note.)

The Right has done much of its work in the name of scientific "objectivity," wildly deploying a popular discourse around "the real world" to achieve o range of specific ends. Complicating this are the long-standing critiques of "objectivity" and "reality" itself among many on the Left. Although such critiques can help us unmask some of these agendas, they leave us little space to contest them in new ways, to offer our own counterclaims about the "the real world" and its demands. The author suggests here that progressives can usefully interrupt this Rightist discourse by revisiting "common sense" connections between research methodology and epistemological orientation-particularly those around quantitative methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article thinks through the implications of the 2004 elections and the continued erosion of the left. In particular, it argues that the left must begin to offer people compelling narratives for how to live their lives or progressive spaces will continue to shrink. Qualitative inquiry, it concludes, can be enormously useful in this project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues that the proliferation of conferences, handbooks, and journals in qualitative inquiry can be seen as part of a “pedagogical turn” in the field. Specific attention is given to the emergence of “coding” as a tool in applied fields such as nursing, and the implications for making these practices more widely available for more people. The author ends by contextualizing the discussion in terms of Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the “right to research.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]