SPEAKERS Alecia Jackson, Lisa Mazzei, Jessica Van Cleave Jessica Van Cleave Hello and welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast hosted by the qualitative research SIG of AERA, the American Educational Research Association. I'm Jessica Van Cleave, Chair of the Qualitative Research SIG and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Gardner Webb University. The Qualitative Conversations podcast doesn't have a regular host. Instead, each episode is organized by our podcast committee. Today I have the pleasure of hosting this episode, in which I interviewed Dr. Lisa Mazzei and Dr. Alecia Jackson about their recently published second edition of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. Lisa Mazzei is Professor of Education Studies and Alumni Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, where she is also affiliated faculty in the department of philosophy. She is a methodological innovator in post human inquiry, and her work is widely read and cited across disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, business and medicine. She is the author of Inhabited Silence in Qualitative Research from 2007. Alecia Jackson is Professor of Educational Research at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies program. Dr. Jackson's research interests bring feminist post structural and post human theories of power, knowledge, language, materiality and subjectivity to bear on a range of overlapping topics deconstructions of voice and method conceptual analyses of resistance freedom and agency in girls and women's lives and qualitative analysis and the posts. Her work seeks to animate philosophical frameworks in the production of the new and her current projects are focused on the ontological turn qualitative inquiry and thought. Together they are co-authors of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research, first and second editions, and coeditors of Voice in Qualitative Inquiry from 2009. Their forthcoming edited book, Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry, will be published in 2023. Lisa and Alecia, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Qualitative Conversations. Lisa Mazzei Delighted to be here. Thanks for inviting us. Alecia Jackson Thank you for the invitation. Jessica Van Cleave Absolutely. So some of our listeners may not be familiar with your work, or maybe new to your work. So would you be willing to tell us a little bit about yourselves, how you came to write together, and how you came to write Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research? Lisa Mazzei Well, Alecia and I say that we share an academic genealogy. We first met at AERA in 2005, I think I was presenting a paper on some of my voice work. Alecia came to attend the session. And she came and introduced herself at the end of the session. And I had just finished reading an article that she had written about subjectivity with new teachers. And so I was so excited to meet her and I had just been reading her work. And so we sat out in the hallway for about an hour. And we're talking about projects. And we said that we should propose a session for AERA the following year on voice because we were both looking at voice and challenging conventional understandings. And so that was right before I was moving to England, I moved to England in 2006, was attending the British Education Research Association Conference, started chatting with a book editor. And like a good editor, he always says, What's your current project? And so I told him about this idea that Alecia and I had for a session and he said, that sounds fabulous. Can you get a book proposal to me in a month? So I'm at this conference, emailing this woman that I've met in person once saying, can we put a book together, a book proposal, and that was the proposal we wrote for voice and qualitative inquiry. And the reviews were very positive for the book. But people who read the proposal didn't think that we could secure some of the authors that we had said we would put that would contribute. And they didn't know that I had studied with Patti Lather at Ohio State University, Alecia had studied with Bettie St. Pierre at the University of Georgia, and through these feminist networks, we had connections with some scholars who were doing some very interesting work. So that was the that was the beginning of our long and fruitful partnership. Alecia Jackson Yeah, when we were working on the voice book, I traveled to Manchester. And so we had some writing time together. So one thing I do want to say is that Lisa and I have, ever since the collaboration began, we've never we've never lived in the same time zone. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's something that, you know, is really unique to the way that we've made things work. But we went to Manchester, we worked on the voice book, and then you came here, and we were working on Thinking with Theory. So we've had a couple of times that we've worked together, but in you know, Lisa has explained kind of the origin story. And then how Thinking with Theory came about is that after the voice book, we got really interested in we both were doing separately, we both were working on philosophically informed inquiry. And it didn't have that name at the time. Nobody was calling it that. Nobody was you know, calling it thinking with theory. It didn't have a name. And but it's what we were doing. And we started because we're reading each other's work and through the voice book, we realized is that, you know, what, what would it be like to, you know, to write something together, that was an alternative to, quote, data analysis. We were both talking about how to teach this way of doing this kind of analytic work and conceptual work. And there were lots of journal articles that people doing this kind of analytic thinking. But there wasn't anything that was out there cohesive, that we could use me, really to us in our teaching, that was kind of the impetus. So we were at the Congress. And we were out to dinner with Philip Mudd, who was our editor for the voice book. And we pitched this idea of taking, you know, one data set, and we will talk about how we don't really use that language anymore in a moment. But we talked to him about how to maybe conceptualize a book where we had one set of data that we looked at, that we analyzed across different theories. And he really loved it. And at that dinner, you know, he said, Yeah, let's put this together and see, see what it's like. Jessica Van Cleave Thank you so much. It's really fantastic to sort of trace that process, obviously, briefly from that first meeting, until the beginnings of thinking with theory. So as you began the process of writing, thinking with theory and moving through to publication, what were your hopes for the book at the time? Lisa Mazzei I think I don't know, I don't know what our hopes were, I think our hopes were that it would be I mean, we've talked, we talked about our work when we started envisioning a new project as what kind of intervention do we want to make? And I remember extending what Alecia was saying, I remember being at the Congress, and we started talking about wanting something for our teaching and going to the book exhibit and looking at what was what was presented as analysis. And it was all about coding. And so our I think, you know, our initial hope was, well, this, this isn't what this is not representative of the kind of work that we do. This isn't how we teach our students. And so as Alecia said, We wanted something for our own teaching. And maybe I guess the hope was that it would be picked up by others and be useful to them. So Alecia Jackson yes, I think it was a matter of, of what Lisa said, the intervention, I think, is a really good word. We, as I mentioned, what we did there wasn't a name for what we were doing. And we said, we wanted that we you know, Bettie St. Pierre always says write something that people can cite. And so that was something that, you know, she's always said to, and you've probably heard it too, Jessica, write something that people can cite. And, and, and put something out in the world that people can, you know, can use, and I really have a big part of part of the impetus for both of us, I think was to give this alternative to the field and name it in some way and have it so that, you know, it was it would become something that was recognizable that people could use, and really to take the field into that direction. I think that we, you know, back in the early 2010 to 12 qualitative research was shifting. It was shifting away from, you know, interpretive work and even critical work. And it was just time, it was time to bring it all together and give it a name and give it a place. And there was just so much enthusiasm right away because I think people were really didn't feel like coding was really analysis. So, you know, we had already done some work on that talking, writing about pieces, we're writing about how coding is not analysis and, and I thought this was just a way to give it a place in in the in the in the field Jessica Van Cleave Well, I mean, it's fascinating because as you said, Yes and that advice from Bettie it's definitely something that that I think all of us who have ever worked with her have heard, and it's so true. since y'all have published the first edition of Thinking with Theory, there's been an explosion of all of the you know, the methodologies without methodology, and concept as method and anti-methodology. You know, this sort of thing that you said there was a hunger for at the time. I mean, I think there's no better evidence than how much has proliferated since then. So in the years since its initial publication, Thinking with Theory has become a staple in qualitative inquiry. People are citing it not on
