We present a framework to describe the process of conducting community-based qualitative research. Qualitative research activities are presented as a series of interrelated acts called asking, witnessing, interpreting, and knowing. Each act in the research process is described in terms of current qualitative research practices, and illustrated with examples from our own research projects on families with schizophrenia and men's mutual support and batterer intervention groups. We critically examine the assumption that qualitative research serves to reveal or amplify the voices of participants. We examine connections between qualitative research and social change and describe the use of qualitative research to not only empower marginalized groups, but also to critique and transform privileged groups. The framework is intended to help community researchers to more fully conceptualize, understand, and engage in the practice of qualitative research.

Asking, witnessing, interpreting, knowing: conducting qualitative research in community psychology

is much more basic than our competence with immaterialization and abstraction? What is most important for cultural creativity is not simply the ability to distil ideas and meanings, but rather to embody the ideal and the meaningful and thus make possible a somatization of the senses, a concretization of the abstract, an incarnation of the intellect. The mediological perspective leads from the idea to its objectif ication and reif ication: Debray thus begins where traditional symbolic-hermeneutical analysis ends. The result of this reversal of perspective is an altered view of the ideal. In the traditional semiological approach the ideal exists behind the material; the material signif ier functions as a sign that stands for the signif ied – and thereby becomes transparent – but it is not the signif ied. However, when the material is conceived as materialization, then the ideal exists not beyond but rather in the material. The concept of materialization thus shows that the corporeal and the intellectual are no longer disjointed; rather, the intellectual exists in the form of the corporeal. What Debray achieves with this approach is that he does not need to pit matter against ideas, as Kittler does with his strained media-technological approach, but rather he is able to trace the interconnection of both. Wherever culture is found there is obviously both and – if you will – the traditional, hermeneutic-semiological dematerialization, which proceeds from the tangible to the intangible, is thereby put in its relatively proper place. The funny thing about this mediological reversal, which consists in transforming things and objects into ideas, is precisely that it thematizes a movement that lies at the heart of any transmission and even constitutes its very logic. To transmit something means to embody the immaterial.141 A misunderstanding of this incorporation approach immediately suggests itself: must it not be accepted that ideas precede their materialization, so when one speaks of the ‘materialization of an idea’ the primacy of the ideal is thereby nevertheless restored? This question leads to a conceptual hinge of the mediological concept of transmission. The ingenuity as well as the diff iculty of this concept lies in the fact that the immaterial is actually created by the mechanism of its embodiment: ‘The object transmitted does not preexist the process of its transmission.’142 How is this possible? Debray provides the answer to this question with his concept of the dual character of materiality: it is technological and sociological, material and organizational, medial and institutional, in short: ‘organized matter’ and ‘materialized organization’.143 The Christian religion always serves as a reference point for Debray: the idea of the ‘resurrection of Jesus’ can be explained psychologically out of the disciples’ sorrow over his irretrievable loss. However, the fact 66 MediuM, Messenger, TransMission to be explained is not whether such a resurrection actually took place, but rather how such a belief could be preserved for centuries in Christian congregations. This cannot be explained without taking into account the networks of Christianity, in whose chain of transmission Paul became a key f igure. Paul never met Jesus personally, yet he saw the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus. What he saw thus embodied what he believed, and Paul subsequently became an apostle or mediator. He was subjected to a radical metamorphosis that transformed him from the Jewish Saul into the Christian Paul, and this metamorphosis in turn led to the conversion of others. As a convert and missionary he established Christianity as a church and became part of a chain that continuously reproduces embodiments over time, which naturally includes texts, relics, and practices as incarnations of Christian ideas. In this sense, it is the institution of the church that f irst made ‘Christ’ out of Jesus of Nazareth.144 Mediation So what does it mean to be a ‘mediator’? I will begin with a distinction that is pivotal for Debray: it does not involve ‘media’ but rather ‘mediations’. Debray’s concept of media already incorporates a systematic perspectives insofar as the term ‘medium’ refers to the interaction between (i) symbolization procedures, like words, writing, and images, (ii) communication codes, like English or German, (iii) inscription materials and storage devices, like papyrus, magnetic tape, and monitors, and (iv) recording dispositifs as dissemination networks like the printing press, television, and informatics.145 Nevertheless, this is only one side of the ‘program’ of mediological circulation, for media are a necessary but not suff icient condition for such circulation.146 The other side consists of the environment or milieu. Only the causal circularity between medium and milieu can become a source of cultural dynamics. Only this socio-technical complex of medium and milieu constitutes the historical object of mediology, which avoids an overemphasis on the medium as well as an underestimation of the milieu.147 The distinction between medium and milieu thus makes sense precisely because it focuses on the intersection of both sides, which can only become culturally productive through this interaction. What applies to mediology in general also pertains to the mediator in particular. The mediator must be conceived as a f igure at the intersection between the material and the immaterial. A further distinction becomes relevant here: for Debray, the mediator is precisely not a messenger, but rather it displaces and replaces the messenger.148 How so? Debray recalls Michel Serres’s commentary on Lauretti

Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy

Trans people are increasingly stepping out of the shadow of pathologization and secretiveness to tell their life stories, share information and to connect with like-minded others, using YouTube as a platform. Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube explores the digital revolution of trans video blogging, addressing ’trans’ in its many meanings and configurations to examine the different ways in which the body in transformation and the vlog as a medium intersect. Drawing on rich, virtual ethnographic studies of trans video blogging, the author sheds light on the ways in which the video blog (or ’vlog’) as a multimodal medium enables trans people to tell their stories with the use of sound, text, music, and pictures - thus offering new ways to construct and archive bodily changes, and to revise the story endlessly. A groundbreaking study of the intersection between trans identity and technology, Out Online explores the transformative and therapeutic potential of the video blog as a means by which trans vloggers can emerge and develop online, using the vlog as a site for creation, intervention, community building and resistance. As such, it will appeal to social scientists and scholars of cultural and media studies with interests in gender, sexuality and embodiment.

Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube

Only a decade ago, the notion that museums, galleries and heritage organisations might engage in activist practice, with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises, was met with scepticism and often derision Seeking to purposefully bring about social change was viewed by many within and beyond the museum community as inappropriately political and antithetical to fundamental professional values Today, although the idea remains controversial, the way we think about the roles and responsibilities of museums as knowledge based, social institutions is changing Museum Activism examines the increasing significance of this activist trend in thinking and practice
At this crucial time in the evolution of museum thinking and practice, this ground-breaking volume brings together more than fifty contributors working across six continents to explore, analyse and critically reflect upon the museum’s relationship to activism Including contributions from practitioners, artists, activists and researchers, this wide-ranging examination of new and divergent expressions of the inherent power of museums as forces for good, and as activists in civil society, aims to encourage further experimentation and enrich the debate in this nascent and uncertain field of museum practice
Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics It will be a source of inspiration to museum practitioners and museum leaders around the globe

Museum Activism (Edition 1)

The contemporary German author W. G. Sebald was a master of the fiction of recollection and observation, often exploring the reverberations of World War II on the personal and collective memories of Germans and Jews. His rich body of work earned him legions of fans across the globe, but in the wake of his death in 2001, Sebald also became the subject of extensive critical study. Literary scholars have identified a number of subjects that frequently appear in Sebald's novels: the Holocaust, trauma and memory, melancholy, photography, travel, intertextuality, and the nature and meaning of home, but they have yet to locate an overarching narrative that ties these topics to the broader historical trajectories with which Sebald's work is also fundamentally concerned. In W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, J. J. Long identifies a wider "meta-problem" in Sebald's work--the problem of modernity. The numerous archival institutions and processes that lie at the heart of modernity are repeatedly explored in Sebald's novels. Photography, museums, libraries, and other institutions for producing and preserving knowledge are among Sebald's main obsessions. Following Foucault, these systems are seen as central to the exercise of power and the constitution of subjectivity, themes embodied in Sebald's melancholy search for autonomous selfhood in an increasingly impersonal and bureaucratized age. Considering the evocation of wonder in the prose narratives of Vertigo, family albums in The Emigrants, the ambulatory narrative in The Rings of Saturn, and the archival subject in Austerlitz, Long advances a highly original interpretation of the author's oeuvre, arguing that Sebald's project needs to be understood as a response not merely to post-Holocaust trauma but to the longer history of modernity.

W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity

In my interpretation, what this young vagabond was doing with the
photograph of his mother was, precisely, creating his first witness,
and the creation of that witness was what enabled him to survive his
years on the streets of Krakow. This story exemplifies the process
whereby survival takes place through the creative act of establishing
and maintaining an internal witness who substitutes for the lack of
witnessing in real life.

An Event Without A Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival

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An Event Without A Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival