Attend QUAL Lab Speaker Series with Jessica Van Cleave on Nov. 6
- Date: Thursday, Nov. 6
- Time: Noon-1 p.m.
- Location: Zoom (register today)
- Presenter: Jessica Van Cleave, professor, Gardner-Webb University College of Education
Join the UGA qualitative research program for the last UGA QUAL Lab Speaker Series of the semester, “Cultivating ‘Useless’ Connections: Collaboration, Community, and Living Theory,” presented by Jessica Van Cleave.
As qualitative researchers, much of the work we do is relational, yet it can be challenging to create and maintain community, particularly in contexts other than research-intensive institutions. Sometimes as qualitative scholars, we are the “only one.” This presentation takes up the notion of qualitative community from a variety of perspectives. Based in my experiences as a researcher in non-research-oriented positions and institutions, I discuss the ways in which I have leveraged my training as a qualitative researcher to stay engaged, stay connected, and maintain an active research agenda while also foregrounding the relational aspects of qualitative inquiry to develop community. That work has helped me to resist what Manning (2016) called ressentiment, a resentment towards a way of being that “drags its feet in the same ruts day after day” and that we can experience as “a loss of intensity, a kind of apathetic anxiety that keeps us in our place” (p. 204).
Bolstered by the notion that there are other “way[s] of thinking value…beyond use-value” (Manning, 2017, p. 6), I specifically explore formal and informal networking as a way to build connection, resulting in collaborations that began without specific use-value—those collaborations in which criteria for what was valuable or useful were not set in advance—and others that did have explicit outcomes or deliverables. This presentation draws on multiple ongoing qualitative research engagements to position community building as a vital part of ongoing inquiry and situate the academic life as part of a broader enactment of living theory.