ABSTRACT
While the current post-qualitative, post-humanist turn in interpretive research has focused on the ongoing impacts of the ruins of positivism within the field of qualitative research, little theorizing/thinking has been done in relation to the writing up of qualitative research. The linguistic turn of the 1980s raised critical issues regarding the “crisis of representation,” suggesting that culture/human experience can never be captured, only represented in writing (Bakhtin, 1981; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1977). And yet, within a short time, the field of qualitative research was subjected to the “gold standard” of science resulting in the hyper-methodization of qualitative research in which writing was reduced to mechanical reporting of “data” (Barone, 2007). The chapter will briefly revisit the history of the role of writing in qualitative research, as well as what I see as the purpose of qualitative writing. I maintain that the primary work of qualitative researchers is writing. Writing is traditionally portrayed as the culmination of fieldwork, collection of data, and analysis, for the purposes of producing a product/findings/knowledge. Alternatively, I see writing as the way in which we make non/sense of the complex, unrepresentable, more than human ways in which we are always already embedded in inquiry. I engage writing in this chapter to examine the process of writing as qualitative research.
