ABSTRACT
Using qualitative and post-structural approaches, we embarked three-years of study together framed as encounters that open up problems that reject mechanistic models of data collection and analysis. In this chapter, we describe the people who participated in the study, our theoretical touchstones, and establish our methodological commitments. We review each of the three phases of the study and model what we do when we “code.” Our effort to maintain complexity and context means that we respect the stories participants tell as valid and real in their worlds with accompanying material effects. We also realize that in the process of navigating our ways through hundreds of pages of transcripts, we cannot claim to have exhausted all other possibilities. The thickness of our process moderates our truth claims. In turn, this tension animates the symbiotic relationship between theory and method that we employ.
