ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies transgressive data, such as emotional data, dream data, sensual data, and response data, that are out-of-category and not usually accounted for in qualitative research methodology. It suggests that if data are the foundation on which know ledge rests, it is important to trouble the common-sense understanding of that signifier in postfoundational research that aims to produce different know ledge and to produce know ledge differently. Ethics is not abandoned in poststructural critiques but rather demands a specific reinscription. The simple task of troubling one signifier, data, has foregrounded an ethical relation, the relation between the researcher and those who provide response data, that generally escapes scrutiny. The chapter also suggests that ethics is invented within each relation as researcher and respondent negotiate sense-making by foregrounding their theoretical frameworks, by risking confusion, by determining to read harder when the text begins to seem inaccessible, and by being willing to attend to the absences in their own work.
