Who are the participants? Rethinking representational practices and writing with heterotopic possibility in qualitative inquiry

Abstract

This paper draws on Foucault's notion of heterotopia to ask a series of questions about the important link between the crisis of representation in qualitative research and new theorizations of the 'subject' within poststructural feminist research. Reiterating Foucault's question, 'what is it impossible to think and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here,' the authors wonder how naming practices that mobilize social categories determine what is visible and thus analyzable to educational researchers. How might research writing understood as a representational practice be made to perform as a heterotopic space: a reflection on writing practices and representation itself? In engaging with these questions, the paper juxtaposes two different research projects in an attempt to set in motion readings that are—for the authors as well as for readers—self and cross‐interrogating. Each project engenders different problematizations of the ways in which identity categories are represented in research.