Modelos y Enfoques que permiten cambiar la escuela

Good qualitative research requires thought about the purposes of inquiry, intended audiences of findings, guiding questions, data that will answer or illuminate inquiry questions, available resources supporting the inquiry, and criteria used to judge the quality of findings (Patton, 2002). Qualitative inquiry often depends on the skills, training, insights and capabilities of the researcher(s). According to Patton (2002), the inquirer(s): “acts as catalyst on raw data, generating an interaction that synthesizes new substance” (p.432). Patton (2002) also asserts: “Thick, rich description provides the foundation for qualitative analysis and reporting” (p.437). Qualitative research methods enable the study of issues in depth and detail. In this study, I sought to draw on mad and

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disabled students perspectives to critically examine, analyze, and describe how academic accommodation and access issues socio-spatially impact these students.

Patton (2002) claims that good qualitative research helps readers experience and understand the setting and phenomena where interpretations provide significance to particular results by examining patterns in an analytic framework. Moreover, Denzin and Lincoln (2005) note: “Qualitative researchers stress the socially constructed nature of reality, the intimate relationship between the researcher and what is studied, and the situational constraints that shape inquiry” (p. 10). These scholars further add that multiple perspectives and the use of multiple empirical materials add rigor, breadth, depth,

complexity and richness to qualitative inquiry. Thus, I drew from a range of materials, including university access and accommodation policy documents and photographs in the field, and gathered data from multiple participants’ perspectives to add depth and

richness to this research thereby providing a more detailed, nuanced and complex account of disabled students’ socio-spatial experiences.

5.2.1

Issues of Voice and Representation

Coffee & Atkinson (1996) point out that qualitative inquiry “can be used to relay

dominant voices or can be appropriated to ‘give voice’ to otherwise silenced groups and individuals” (p.78). In this study, I highlighted the voices and knowledges of mad and disabled students in ways that challenged dominant and existing discourses on mental health and disability. According to Traustadóttir (2001) marginalized groups may challenge ways dominant groups have silenced them, and spoken for and about them. Shakespeare (2008) calls approaches that individualize disability flawed since they ignore wider societal social and environmental contexts. Thus, researchers and actively engaged

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participants may open spaces for mad and disabled students to express their ideas and opinions. Together with participants I sought to unpack the ways disability is discursively understood through open interview dialogues. I asked participants about how they

understood, experienced, and defined mad and disabled subjectivities. Furthermore, Mad and disabled subjects were also invited to constitute themselves through providing participant profiles.

In this research, I highlighted the subjugated knowledge(s) of mad and disabled students to counter individualizing models of disability and challenge the ways dominant ableist discourses construct madness and disability in the academy. I examined mad and disabled students’ views offering triangulated accounts. By examining the views and voices of these multiple actors in the academy increasingly complex and nuanced accounts of mad and disabled students’ socio-spatial experiences was revealed.

However, while acknowledging the importance of ‘voice’, I was committed to interrogating its limits, troubling notions of the free and authentic voice, understanding voice research as messy, and challenging the coherent speaking subject and subjects’ ability to speak for themselves and others (Lather, 2009). I sought multiple voices that “escape easy classification” non-normative and “transgressive and productive voices” (Mazzei & Jackson, 2009, p.4). Thus, I understood voices to be discursively mediated, enabled and constrained as speaking subjects, particularly given the constraints of material and institutional forces and their historical and socio-spatial, embodied

contingencies, as explicated in previous chapters. I understood the subjugated voices of mad and disabled subjects as potentially disruptive, offering counter-hegemonic

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(2007) attests, these often “sidelined voices” in reference to subjugated voices, are of “great importance”, as they may interrogate accepted truths, relationships and structures of rationality and “mechanisms of subjugation” (p.56). I thereby drew on participants’ voices as a way to understand the relationships between their own subjectivities, material-embodiments, and how they understand, constitute, know, and govern themselves in relation to complex institutional knowledge-power relations.

In representing complex voices of my participants I found it hard to edit or cut back their verbatim quotes. I wanted to include the unaltered subaltern voices of my participants, while weaving analysis, counter perspectives, and my own interpretations. As data, voices did not solely “speak for themselves” (Mazzei & Jackson, 2009, p.4); rather I aspired to work at the discursive edges of how voice happened, where, and why. To do so, I drew on Foucault and socio-spatial theorists such as Soja and Lefebvre to unpack, interpret, and contextualize what these voices might be uttering about complex discursive subjectivities-spatialities. Working at the limits of voice entailed critical thought about disciplinary knowledge-power relations and discursive grids of

intelligibility, and the spaces and realms from which voices originated and could find listening audiences, theoretical matters which I have addressed in chapters 1, 2 and 3. Disabled and mad students’ voices need to be understood in their potential to trouble dominant ableist and sanist discourses circulating in university settings. Voices of participants were articulated in various ways, speaking face-to-face, mobile interviews, through email correspondence, and via telephone. Voices are mediated and dialogically produced through relationships in the research process. I met participants where they wanted to meet, often conversed on their turf, and asked them to teach me about their

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socio-spatial experiences. Voices were situated in place and emerged in dialogues with researcher and participant in various spatial realms. Some participants chose to meet at the university site, outside, in a hallway, office, at their home, open leisure space, library; some chose not to meet in person, and email and telephone enabled conversation across distance. In solidarity with participants, I recognized their silences as powerful moments of resistance that troubled my speaking function as author giving voice to participants or speaking on their behalf. Participants entrusted me to tell their accounts. I viewed my role as a cartographer; sketching and outlining powerful nonconformist perspectives to better map an understanding and representation of disabled and mad students’ socio-spatial university experiences. In instances of silences, I chose to sit with participants in these silent moments.

Voices troubled notions of ‘fit’, working the edges of subjects-objects in their capacity to utter ideas from various vantages and modalities. Voices rub against other voices, bash up, mould and intermingle together (Mazzei & Jackson, 2009). Hence, this dissertation represents a platform for disabled and mad voices to be heard which involves disseminating knowledges and finding listening audiences and places where voices may be heard and legitimated. Sharing findings with participants hopefully enables new conversations, connections, and actions and contributes to building counter-hegemonic discourses that challenges current disabling and sanist truths and their circulation in university settings.