ABSTRACT

While qualitative research is a well-established disciplinary research orientation unto itself in education-related research (Hornberger, 2003; Hornberger & Johnson, 2007; King, 2001; Kramsch, 2000; McCarty, 2002, 2005; Norton, 2000; Shohamy, 2006), with scholars addressing everything from the “how-to” aspects (Holliday, 2002) to those relating to its political nuances (Canagarajah, 1997; May, 2001; McCarty, 2002), it has, thus far, refrained from adequately and openly addressing texting tensions that the researcher has to contend with in the production of qualitative research texts. 1 This is somewhat surprising, since such research texts – the writing and grafting of them and the reading and interpreting of them – are fraught with sociopolitical and cultural mores that we need to actively engage. In an effort to move the discussion about ethnographic research to this other realm – of the production of research texts – this chapter offers a discussion of particular textual concerns and tensions that I as researcher am able to speak about as I critically revisit aspects of the sociopolitics of English- and vernacular-medium education in postcolonial communities such as India. There were a number of issues that I could not openly write about, and the present endeavor allows me to open up and interrogate issues around my previous textual, meaning-making practices, the “presences” that governed them, and the entailing “absences” that I can now openly text (Derrida, 1981; Norris, 1987; Ramanathan, 2007; Sturrock, 1979).