ABSTRACT
I wrote this book because I thought it might be of some use to people who are first encountering qualitative methods or who feel their creative research practices might benefit by reading another qualitative researcher’s account of the endeavor. My aim is to help readers see the range of possibilities of creative scholarship, a form of scholarship that I find has considerable affective and cognitive power. I use the phrase “creative qualitative researchers” to identify the scholars who call upon their literary skills to evoke the emotional and intellectual complexity of their subjects; who deploy their vulnerable, relational, and reflexive selves to expose and change problematic cultural practices; and who engage their embodied ideological and ethical sensibilities as researchers and cultural members to guide their scholarship. That’s the door I worked to open. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I’m walking through a door many other creative researchers have opened. You will meet many of those scholars in the chapters to come.
