Symposium: "Habits of Thought and Work": The Disciplines and Qualitative Research

Abstract

As George Marcus notes in Ethnography through Thick and Thin, the academic disciplines are built on particular "habits of thought and work."¹ While Marcus was referring specifically to anthropology, the same can be said of other disciplines: each has its own epistemology, conventions, and sets of questions.

Among the many disciplines influencing the study of education are anthropology, pedagogy, linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Each has brought rich perspectives and methodologies, including qualitative methodologies, to educational research. Their intersection and their entry into the mainstream of educational research at varying points can lead to a complex and ongoing conversation about the past, the present, and the future of qualitative research on education.

Our goal as editors of this Symposium is to encourage and spark that conversation among those who read, write, and do qualitative research. To do so, we posed the following questions to five researchers, each of whom represents one of the above disciplines: What has been your field's most important contribution to the general area of qualitative research? How has your field influenced the methods of qualitative research? How has your field influenced the central questions of qualitative research? Because qualitative research is an evolving area, how do you see that evolution occurring? Where do you see that process of change leading? We also invited a response to these articles, which reaches across the disciplines with a conversation we hope continues among you, the readers, writers, and doers of qualitative research.