ABSTRACT
For qualitative researchers, the turn to experimental ethnographic texts poses the problem of performative criteria-namely, how these texts and their performances are to be critically analyzed in terms of epistemological, aesthetic, and political criteria. Building on recent discussions of interpretive criteria, aesthetics and pedagogy, this chapter examines performative criteria in the Seventh and Eighth Moments (Alexander 2005; Atkinson and Delamont 2006; American Education Research Association 2008; Finley 2005). I foreground subversive, resistance narratives-dramatic, epiphanic performances that challenge the status quo.2 My topics: reading, writing, and judging performances, producing performances that move history.
