Laura Ellingson

Making Data in Qualitative Research offers a generative alternative to outdated approaches to data collection. By reimagining methods through a model of data engagement, qualitative researchers consider what is at stake―ethically, methodologically, and theoretically―when we co-create data and imagine possibilities for doing data differently.

Ellingson and Sotirin draw on critical, intersectional perspectives, including feminist, poststructuralist, new materialist, and postqualitative theorizing, to refigure methodological practices of data collection for the contemporary moment. Ellingson and Sotirin's data engagement model offers a vibrant framework through which data are made rather than found; assembled rather than collected or gathered; and becoming or dynamic rather than static. Further, pragmatism, compassion, and joy form a compelling ethical foundation for engaging with qualitative data reflecting the full range of critical, postpositivist, intepretivist, and arts-based research methods. Chapters illuminate creative possibilities for engaging fieldnotes, audio/video recordings and photographs, transcription, digital/online data, participatory data, and self-as-data.

Making Data in Qualitative Research is a great resource for researchers who want to move past simplistic approaches to qualitative data collection and embrace provocative possibilities for engaging with data. Bridging abstract theorizing and pragmatic strategies for making a wide variety of data, this book will appeal to graduate (and advanced undergraduate) qualitative methods students and early career researchers, as well as to advanced scholars looking to update and expand the scope of their methods.

Embodiment in Qualitative Research connects critical, interdisciplinary theorizing of embodiment with creative, practical strategies for engaging in embodied qualitative research. Ellingson equips qualitative researchers not only to resist the mind-body split in principle but to infuse their research with the vitality that comes from embracing knowledge production as deeply embedded in sensory experience.

Grounded in poststructuralist, posthumanist, and feminist perspectives, this innovative book synthesizes current interdisciplinary theorizing and research on embodiment; explores research exemplars from across the social sciences, education, and allied health; and features embodied ethnographic tales and evocative moments from everyday life for reflexive consideration. Each chapter offers flexible starting points for doing embodiment actively throughout every stage of qualitative research. An awareness of and an active engagement with issues of embodiment enhances scholars' ability to produce high quality research and enlarges scholars' capacity as  public intellectuals to spark positive social change, particularly within marginalized communities. The strategies offered relate to methodologies from across the methodological continuum, from traditional qualitative methods—including grounded theory, critical/theoretical analysis, and discourse analysis—to arts-based research—including performance, autoethnographic narrative, poetry, and documentary film making.

Embodiment in Qualitative Research is designed as a resource book for qualitative researchers who want to explore the latest trends in critical theorizing. The writing style will appeal to researchers who seek a bridge between abstract theorizing and pragmatic strategies for producing outstanding qualitative research, as well as critical scholars who want to integrate embodied ways of knowing with their theorizing. Graduate (and advanced undergraduate) qualitative methods students and early career researchers, as well as to advanced scholars seeking to enrich the scope and texture of their work, will find the text inspiring and engaging. 

The aunt is a familiar and well-loved figure in popular narratives about family, femininity, and kinship: Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffin Show; Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter books and movies; Dorothy's Auntie Em, breakfast icon Aunt Jemima, Bewitched's Aunt Clara, eccentric Auntie Mame, to name a few. Each offers a particular narrative of feminine identity and agency and a particular model of aunting relationships and practices set within—though often obscuring—their highly specific social, historical-political, and cultural contexts. Sotirin and Ellingson argue that the contingent and transgressive potential of the aunt figure in the popular imagination offers an important feminist resource for challenging and rearticulating conventional understandings and practices of family, care, and kinship. Accordingly, the project opens new possibilities for alternative configurations of feminine identity and domestic life.

Given current public discussions over women's roles, inequities in domestic arrangements, changing family configurations, lesbian/gay marriage and parenting, and the fate of feminism, it is timely to offer a hopeful and progressive rearticulation of women's possibilities in the guise of a familiar family figure: the aunt.

Whether related by biology, marriage, circumstance, or choice, aunts embody a uniquely flexible familial role. The aunt-niece/nephew relationship—though often overlooked—is critical and complex, one that appears at the core of a resilient, healthy family life.

In this engaging book, Laura Ellingson and Patricia Sotirin construct a consideration of "aunts" that moves from noun to verb. "Aunts" is more than a group of people or a role; instead, "to aunt" is a practice, something people "do." Some women "aunt" as second mothers, friends, or mentors, while others play more peripheral roles. In either case, aunts nonetheless significantly impact their nieces and nephews' life choices.

Drawing on personal narratives that represent a rich cross section of society, Ellingson and Sotirin construct a cohesive story of the diversity of aunting experiences in the contemporary United States. Skillfully written, Aunting recovers the enormous potential of this dynamic kinship relationship and offers a model for understanding and supporting the variety of families in society today.

The concept of crystallization was introduced in 1994 by Sociologist Laurel Richardson in her landmark essay, Writing as a Method of Inquiry. She proposed a postmodern alternative to enhancing methodological validity through triangulation, the traditional process of using multiple methods of gathering and/or analyzing data into order to achieve more trustworthy findings. In contrast, crystallization embodies a postmodern awareness of the indeterminacy and partiality of all truths and the inevitable influence of researchers' standpoints on all aspects of research design, data collection, analysis, and representation.

In Engaging Crystallization, Dr. Laura Ellingson builds on Richardson's work to develop a framework for practicing crystallization in qualitative and mixed methods research projects in the social sciences, education, and allied health fields. Crystallization takes seriously the opportunities for not merely using multiple methods of analysis but also embracing multiple genres of writing (such as report, poetry, narrative, essay) along with visual arts (such as photography, painting, collage) and live performance to share research findings in both social scientific and artistic genres. Multiple genres not only enable researchers to reach across academic disciplines but also to engage stakeholder audiences such as practitioners, policymakers, and community organizations. At the same time, a set of diverse genres engenders a postmodern form of validity through which research findings become both richly illuminated and problematized as multiple and partial.

A growing community of researchers are embracing crystallization. Check out the creative uses of crystallization in research on Google Schoiar.

Communicating in the Clinic presents the results of an innovative ethnography of communication on an interdisciplinary geriatric oncology team. This book goes beyond existing research on the correlations between team interventions and desired patient outcomes and on communication in formal team meetings by exploring the “backstage” regions of the clinic where team members communicate without patients present. Fluid communication patterns in the backstage of the clinic embody the dynamic enactment of teamwork in daily medical practice. Teams pervade contemporary healthcare organizations of all kinds, making attention to the effectiveness of their communication critical to successful patient care and smooth organizational functioning. Despite established correlations between use of teams and favorable outcomes, the effectiveness of the actual communication among team members is often in doubt. Much of the research on teams is “anecdotal, exhortatory and prescriptive. . . there is an absence of research describing and analyzing teams in action” (Opie, 1997, p. 260).

Communicating in the Clinic analyzes a real team in action. To thoroughly explore communication patterns on a “bona fide” (authentic, pre-existing) interdisciplinary health care team, I conducted an ethnography of geriatric team at a regional cancer center. I drew upon fieldnotes, transcripts of patient-team member interactions, clinic notes and dictations, and team member interviews to demonstrate the integral nature of the clinic backstage to cross-disciplinary collaboration and teamwork, and to document the direct and indirect effects of the backstage on communication with patients.

Throughout the book, I develop a model of embedded teamwork grounded in an inductively derived typology of backstage communication processes. This holistic model reflects the complexity, dynamism, and multiple sites of cross-disciplinary communication in the everyday enactment of teamwork. Embedded teamwork acknowledges the discourse between dyads and triads of team members in which disciplinary (or professional) lines are blurred and redrawn; hierarchies are subverted and reinscribed; significant variation in teamwork practices occurs; team members’ beliefs, values, and attitudes are expressed and change over time; and contextual constraints are reproduced, resisted, and negotiated through communication among team members. Moreover, the study addresses the opportunities and limitations of the current organization and ideology of the medical establishment as a context for cross-disciplinary teamwork.