ABSTRACT
Different presents with different histories that have enabled different approaches to social science inquiry that do not look like conventional humanist qualitative methodology. Some of those are now moving into the mainstream. The identity politics that dominated much conventional humanist qualitative research for decades had insisted we study and use, for example, feminist epistemologies, Chicana epistemology, various race epistemologies, queer epistemologies, and so on. Epistemology seemed to have sidelined ontology as we focused on the marginalized knowledges of oppressed groups. The chapter argues that studying the history of a discursive and material formation such as conventional humanist qualitative methodology, several decades later, should be de rigueur in order to demystify its truth claims by calling into question the foundational assumptions it has laid down.
