Working Title: “Basic assumptions. Grappling with the (supposed) dichotomy between phenomenological and discursive approaches”
We are a group of researchers who are engaged in a long-term, open-ended project of methodological exploration. Our group (Bipasha Ahmed, Glasgow Caledonian University, Virginia Eatough, Birkbeck, University of London, Maya Lavie Ajayi, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and Julianna Challenor, Martina Gerada, Aylish O’Driscoll and Carla Willig all of City St George’s, University of London) was set up in 2019 with the aim of developing qualitative research strategies with which to gain a better understanding of the phenomenological-discursive interface in the production of subjective experience. Inspired by Memory Work, we use written accounts of our own experiences in response to a specific ‘trigger’, thus dissolving the distinction between researcher and researched. Our approach to analysis contains an element of analytic pluralism in that our first round of analysis involves each member of the group conducting an individual analysis (using an analytic method of their choice including phenomenological and discursive approaches) before sharing and discussing these with the rest of the group. Further analysis is then conducted by a series of analytic integrations and finally an amalgamation of analytic insights at group level.
Having recently completed our analysis of accounts produced to the trigger ‘feeling at home’, we have become aware that despite our best intentions our analysis has much more to say about the phenomenological aspects of the experience of ‘feeling at home’ than about its discursive dimension. When writing up our study, we noticed that our discussion of the role of discourse in constructing the experience felt somewhat ‘bolted on’, as an after-thought rather than an integral part of our analysis. Our intention had been to gain a better understanding of how the experience of ‘feeling at home’ comes into being, under what conditions it might arise and how it might manifest experientially. The use of analytic pluralism was designed to enable us to pay attention to a variety of dimensions of the experience including its phenomenological, discursive, material and social aspects. However, when looking at our results, there is an imbalance in the attention paid to these various aspects. Therefore, we would very much welcome an opportunity to explore why and how our analysis ended up being weighted towards the phenomenological, and to think about ways in which to fully integrate the discursive dimension into our analytic work in the future. We would love to receive feedback, guidance and suggestions from other researchers on this question.