Facilitators

Fernando Sánchez, St. Thomas University (Friday, September 11 from 2-3pmET)

Sarah Singer, University of Central Florida (Friday, September 11 from 5-6pmET)

Hub Description

RHM affords scholars a wide range of methodologies, methods, and practices to guide their work. Because of this, conversations are always welcome to help scholars understand the differences in approaches to research. In addition, research study design–the systematic and deliberate approach to studying a phenomenon or artifacts that is framed by a methodology, invokes specific methods, and is guided by an ethical practice. RHM has long embraced mutable methodologies for sustainable research practices. But, there is always room to push our research identity by challenging and reconsidering our current approaches. The overall goal of this hub is to gain a better understanding of terminology and common methods, while also challenging those same ideas.

Generative questions

• What do you consider as the heart of a methodology? Is it theoretical? Practical? Disciplinary? Interdisciplinarity? 
• How might we engage with questions of ethics more specifically as related to method and practice? 
• What suggestions do you have about how best to combine methodologies? Or doing mixed methods research?
• As we consider questions of expertise and authority, how can deconstruct methods to ensure the most vulnerable and under represented voices are present in our research? 
• What ways can RHM address citational politics and decolonizing method/ologies?

Discussion Hub Synthesis

The synthesis below was created from notes taken during the two hubs, from the Zoom chats, and (when available) the live captioning. Thank you to Justiss Burry for the work on creating this synthesis.

Main Takeaways

• Methodological diversity is a strength for all of us because we learn from and complement each other; this is why collaboration is so important.
• There’s not just one method that’s tied to the field; the diversity of the RHM community is a strength that leads to richer methods.
• It is crucial to pay attention to who we’re citing in our work.
• Conversations about methods and participatory methods are important because that push and pull often comes from within the field.
• Occasionally, you have to slow down your work and consider the scope of your work and how it may affect others.
• We should ask ourselves, not what we can or want to do, but what we should do.
• Takeaways
• IRB is great and a bar to work with, but we all need to think about how to better protect our participants and move ethics beyond the IRB.
• All methods contribute to the field in some way, but it’s how you define and explain them that matter the most.
• The reciprocity about methods, though, is that it’s hard to communicate the precision of the methods to others. No one should be embarrassed, or we can all be mutually embarrassed.
• Let’s all be methodology sluts.
• You can’t divorce theory from method, and you have to consider your audience when writing.
• Methods is the ‘why’ we are doing the thing that we’re doing and why it is valuable and to whom it is valuable to.

Ethical Considerations

• Thinking about: is research really needed to address the problem that’s happening? Making sure it’s not doing harm.
• Mixed methods are valuable, but scope is so important for diss work. What is manageable and possible is a question worth returning to over and over
• Ideally, ethics is at the heart of everything we do, and included explicitly within our methodological descriptions
• IRB isn’t there to make sure participants aren’t protected, but there for the university. It’s a bar we should aim for, but we need to think about how we can protect our participants beyond the IRB.
• IRBs differ dramatically institution to institution, which in turn affects what methodologies are available.
  • IRB and the implications therein for our research is something that should always be considered.
• Methods get murky due to the nature of intentionality and the RHM considerations around the kind of data you’re getting with how you present it. It matters how you present the data.
• There is a real struggle of imbalance in any of our work between being pragmatic, but also trying to pay attention to the ethical obligations that we have.
• Even if there’s a significant delay in your work, one thing to consider is how to ethically include those who are participating in your study.
• You have to be clear about intentionality and how that affects your work and the actual lives of other people.
• A lot of our work involves your positionality and, if you’re authorized to speak within that demographic in that population for the work that you’re aiming to contribute.

Transdisciplinary Methodologies

• In the field of RHM, we have to understand the methods and be able to explain the method (Lisa advice). We should all want to get diversity for our studies, but it’s hard to get diverse groups and populations in all studies.
• How does one do this transdisciplinary work?
  • A suggested first step is to connect with groups such as those like “black women with breast cancer.” Then ask to see if they will help you. You may have to look up a bunch and then see if you get some responses from a few.
• When considering how to approach work, think about the following: What is your purpose? What’s the reason for doing the work that you want to do? What’s the purpose and the grounding research?
  • Theory will come out of it. It’s an ecology, or from a particular ideology we have in the field, so you will probably be drawn into a research problem.
• Scott G. – http://sscottgraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/gregs-grid.pdf Greg’s grid. Think about how the things are related when starting your work.
• Why textual analysis isn’t really looked at as great in the field.
  • It could be that content analysis/textual analysis is the method, not the methodology—and the study needs to be driven by some kind of foundational theory that leads to that analysis
(this makes the work more complex).
  • If someone is doing historical research, they will have textual analysis and this is usually the case with most historiography work.
  • Most in the field do some work around textual analysis anyway, so think about its purpose in tandem with other theories.
• Our work is more of a critical rhetoric approach rather than just doing like close reading rhetorical criticism, and this is helpful when explaining our work to other rhetoricians.
• It seems like a lot of pressure to conduct work across disciplines, but rhetoricians are okay with thinking about these kinds of intertwined relationships. How, though, does one then frame this work in a different text, when people might not be engaged in the RHM way of thinking?
  • In other words, how do you kind of negotiate this information so that other people understand why you’re doing and what you’re doing?
    • One strategy proposed is handing copies of your research back to participants and asking, “Could you read this and tell me what you think?”
  • We need to remember to include conversations about those participating in our work and where they are situated within the field.
  • One of the things to keep in mind is that, you know, rhetoric of health and medicine kind of borrows from a lot of different fields and disciplines. And so, we each come to it with our own methods and methodologies that we’re comfortable with that we’re used to. We learn a lot from applying those lenses and that is helpful because there’s a lot of a lot of research being done that incorporates community work.
  • Being in this field forces us to attach ourselves to other fields.
  • Culture is really important, and cultural symbology changes a lot for what’s acceptable in one context and one time and when it’s not acceptable.

Future Considerations

• What can be done to be more inclusive with our methods?
• What happens if we have access to documents but they’re not the most inclusive corpus?
  • Do we have access to them, and should we have access?
• What ideas do we have about how to represent different languages such that those voices don’t get lost in translation?
• What about privacy concerns around collecting data, what you can include and observe, etc. How you can conduct interviews. Anyone have recommendations (not necessarily IRB)?
• Should we, as a field, question positionality and intentionality?