Meetings

MQHRG meets approximately every six weeks during the Fall and Winter sessions of the academic year. Meetings are generally held in the Division of Oral Health and Society. Please note the change of address: 2001 McGill College Ave., suite 500.

The meeting time slot is usually 3-5pm; the room and day of the week shifts frequently.

Email updates are sent to all members prior to each meeting.

Meetings are two hours, and include a selection of the following:

  • A critical review of a research project, protocol or student proposal (students, or researchers on tight time lines, are always given priority)
  • A seminar on an issue in qualitative methodology (chosen the meeting prior). Usually there is a short reading for homework, sent out via email, to ground these discussions.

 

 

Post Qualitative Inquiry

Post-Qualitative Inquiry (PQI) is an emerging field in Qualitative Research informed by poststructuralist theories. Critical of taken-for-granted assumptions regarding ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics (what Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, has coined “conventional liberal-humanist qualitative research”), PQI invites qualitative researchers to (re)ignite a foundational critical standpoint to channel the innovative approaches of ‘new materialisms’ and ‘new empiricisms.’ Inspiration from these approaches can yield important ethical considerations for the design of qualitative inquiry and the production of ‘good’ knowledge.

Specifically, PQI argues that new materialisms and new empiricisms reveal blind-spots within qualitative research. Qualitative inquiry has become overly procedural (i.e., analysis reduced to coding techniques and frameworks). Theory is increasingly pushed aside. Data is often taken at face-value, as if ‘out there,’ ‘raw,’ and awaiting collection and interpretation. Interpretation itself is often framed within (post-)positivist standards of data validation measures and quality. PQI urges qualitative research to engage critically the ontological and epistemological assumptions of post-positivist standpoints.

PQI suggests that context must be returned (re-situated [Haraway 1991]) in qualitative methodologies; methodologies and methods have evolved in response to specific needs, at specific times, places, and scholarship. Methods and methodology were designed, created PQI reckons, and should not be taken as “transcendental Truths”, or immutable designs. Desirous to review our ethical mission, PQI challenges qualitative researchers to “go back” to theory, i.e., to thinking and imagining with theory. PQI thus challenges qualitative research to think anew, i.e., to renew our imaginative capacities, to cultivate new imaginary practices, notably by inviting the uncertainty, unknown, and vulnerability that emerges from doing research in light of the new ontological, epistemological and ethical insights.

 

 

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