ABSTRACT
Introduction: rethinking qualitative texts Qualitative researchers have long struggled with the question of how to represent social reality through the academic text. While researchers historically have been bound by a limited template in terms of scholarly writing, recent decades have seen a challenge to the accepted format of academic manuscripts. Such challenges offer new research outcomes, but also expand the ways in which data are conceived and pursued (Richardson, 1997). Debates across the fi eld have led to the development of innovative textual structures and alternative forms of representation, including a wide variety of presentation styles and strategies (Fine and Weiss, 1996; Lather, 1992; Tierney, 1997). Many of the chapters in this volume offer non-traditional ways of imagining the research process and its products. At the centre of these discussions is the text itself, a document that refl ects the many choices researchers make, as well as the fi ndings they seek to articulate.
