Innovation, Ocular Ethics, and Disruptive Qualitative Research

How to begin again. How to approximate the intimacy and immediacy I want. What form? A letter, of course. (Anzuldúa, 1981) Dear SQIP Members, Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s Open Letter for Women Writers of Color (Anzuldúa, 1981), we write to you from a place of “equal hope and fury” (Casper & Moore, 2009, p. 4). Writing in solitude and resistance, we reflect through poetry and letter writing on ethical insights and dilemmas in disruptive qualitative research (Brown, Carducci & Kuby, 2014). Our letters and poems are direct and immediate in style, a language Anzaldúa tells us academic writing doesn’t attain. So we invite you to join us, to speak with plainness. How do you use reflexivity, theory, and method and to make visible that which is hidden, sometimes deliberately so? Might we find some solidarity in speaking from these genres? Drawing on the work of Casper and Moore (2009), we are informed by “ocular ethics” as a way of conceptualizing research that attends to the stratification of bodies, material objects and relations through visibility and erasure. Weis and Fine (2012) offer critical bifocality as a way of “documenting at once the linkages and capillaries of structural arrangements and the discursive and lived out practices” reflected in our research, teaching, and being (p. 176). There are complications in revealing the invisible, of it being obscured once again, of struggling between visibility/invisibility in our own bodies, of straddling the border of insider/outsider. We hope to engage each other in ethical and epistemological yearnings, inspired by bell hooks’ writing on homespace as a space of safety and subversion, with an eye for the alchemic as we trace what is and imagine what could be (hooks, 1990/2015). Sincerely, Members of SQIP Ethics Task Force