Responsible Methodologist: Inquiry, Truth-Telling, and Social Justice [Paperback]

What does it mean to be a responsible methodologist? Certainly it is more than being a research middle-manager who ensures that the tools used in a thesis or dissertation are of the right gauge. In The Responsible Methodologist, leading education scholar Aaron Kuntz uses the latest movements in social theory to challenge qualitative researchers to reconceptualize their work away from the technocratic toward an intervention, an ethical disruption of the norm, an activist stance toward progressive social change. Inviting creativity and vision, he insists that the responsible methodologist become a force leading the discourse toward social justice. His book
-challenges the technocratic role given to qualitative methodologists in university settings;
-urges them to become a force for change through Foucaults parrhesia, risky truth-telling;
-includes research projects that have incorporated this vision.

Aaron Kuntz challenges qualitative researchers to reconceptualize methodological work away from the technocratic toward an intervention for progressive social change. Inviting creativity and vision, and featuring studies that have incorporated these characteristics, he insists that the responsible methodologist become a force akin to parrhesia, Foucaults risky truth-tellers.

“Aaron Kuntz has written a stunning critique of technocratic social science methodology that ignores both its historical and political entanglements as well as its theoretical commitments. He reminds us that methodology is thinkable (or not) only within specific onto-epistemological formations and cannot be applied willy-nilly from one study to another as has become all too common in educational research.”

—Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia

"Finally we have something to cite when discussing methodologists’ responsibilities and qualitative inquiry as a political act! This book offers well-structurelã5