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This introduction to the special issue titled, "Reading: The Long Preparation for Inquiry," asks why reading has not been as prominent as writing in educational and social science research. The authors suggest reading may not seem as empirical as writing and so has been assigned fairly limited roles in the research process—reading for the literature review at the beginning of a research project and reading to review research reports at the end. Reading, especially reading philosophy, which the authors encourage, can be considered speculative and ephemeral and bound more to the rational than the empirical side of the rational/empirical binary that structures empirical research's epistemological goals. Also, it can be difficult to control reading—who knows what a reader might read? The authors recommend that researchers commit to reading as a necessary, lengthy preparation for scholarship and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author begins to trace the concept "scientifically based research" in federal legislation, in the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, and in the reports of several National Research Council committees. She also discusses how this concept has produced a certain "scientism" that has been deployed to attempt to control the field of educational research. She points out, however, that scientifically based research treats methodology as if it can be separated from epistemology and thus forgets that different bodies of knowledge and thought make different sciences possible. Thus, science is not one thing, as those who support scientifically based research often claim. Finally, the author suggests that our task as education scholars, researchers, and policy makers in this age of accountability is to engage rather than exclude epistemologies not our own that may help us produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently.

Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) write that "the greatness of philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts" (p. 34). The author finds this one of those provocative Deleuzian statements that seems straightforward but is best considered askew. If one goes after it head on, it will unravel even as one's understanding increases. In this article, the author discusses the Deleuzian concepts for education. She describes how she thinks with Deleuzian concepts in a study of subjectivity that is characterized by "folding, unfolding, refolding" (Deleuze, 1988/1993, p. 137) and how they help her try to "free the art of seeing from its subordination to prior concept or discourse."

In this brief essay, I offer reflection on Norman Denzin's role as an academic activist in qualitative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, St.Pierre argues that the dualist Cartesian ontology of the human, social, empirical sciences, along with that ontology's Cartesian cogito and its research methodologies, has produced a dogmatic image of thought it is difficult to escape. To produce the new that is not recognizable in that onto-epistemological arrangement, she suggests reading philosophy and studying philosophical concepts that cannot be applied to the world but can re-orient thought and force thinking in thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry on "new approaches to inquiry" questions the need for preexisting social science research methodologies for inquiry that aspires to produce the "new," that which is unrecognizable and incomprehensible in the Cartesian onto-epistemological arrangement that enables those methodologies. Quite a few contemporary scholars encouraged by the lure of the new have found "old" philosophies promising in dislodging that dogmatic image of thought and its concepts that weigh us down. Whatever the "new" is, it will be different every time, so the articles in the special issue cannot be models of new approaches to inquiry that can be copied and repeated but, instead, are bursts of intensities that have not yet been rendered ordinary. New inquiry, then, is always not-yet, to-come, a force of pure difference pushing through what has been normalized and stratified as it comes into existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A preface is presented for this issue of the "International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education."