Book Review: How to do a Research Project: A Guide for Undergraduate Students, by Colin Robson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007

Abstract

A deep exploration of what the term "critical" implicates in critical theory and critical ethnography takes us much further than the practice of social and cultural critique. It reveals profound implications with respect to issues and themes long treated primarily within spiritual traditions. These make a long list, including the nature of consciousness, the self, self-other relations, meaning, knowledge, truth, certainty, love, self-realization, paradox, the limits of reason and representation, and much more. This talk will explore such connections, arguing that spirituality is deeply and necessarily entailed within the core philosophical structures of contemporary critical theory and related research practices. Of course, "spirituality" is a term used in diverse ways within diverse traditions. Certain aspects of theistic traditions can be understood and appreciated, with some reinterpretation, through contemporary critical theory. But the closest connection that this philosophical and methodological orientation has with extant spiritual traditions is found with the Chan and Zen Buddhist schools of China and Japan, some of the philosophies associated with yoga in India, and some of the teachings we find in Sufism and Western mysticism. These are spiritual traditions that emphasize practices rather than beliefs. The spiritual content in critical theory can be uncovered in a variety of ways, but in this talk the role that narratives play in the construction of self, other and world will be emphasized. Narratives are chronic to everyday human life and thought. Narratives are, and must be, primary objects of study in qualitative research projects. Yet narratives ultimately fail to fulfil those features of human desire that drive their chronic construction and reproduction. Nietzsche called this aspect of human motivation the "figurative drive." The figurative drive is related to Hegel's writings on consciousness in which the desire for recognition is a constituting structure of self-awareness. It is related to the concept of self-actualization as promoted by the humanistic and transpersonal schools of psychology. The ultimate and necessary failure of the figurative drive to realize its telos through the very production of "figures"-narratives and pre-narrative structures in thought-is well illustrated in de-construction, poststructural writings on signification, and the philosophy of repetition. These streams within Western thought provide mirrors, representational mirrors, of spiritual practices whose goals include freedom from representation. "The narrative horizon" is an expression meant to signify where knowledge as representation ends, where explicating the implicit toward the explicit terminates, where reason stops but points ahead. Its sense will be explained more precisely in this presentation. It is deeply implicated in the concept of "critical" core to critical methodological theory and it is something with which all people, in everyday contexts of life, must implicitly come to terms. What lies beyond the narrative horizon cannot be articulated for essential reasons, yet this is a good time, historically and culturally, to start talking about it, to include it in our methodological theories. Doing so requires use of words like "spirituality" which should be reinstalled within legitimate academic discourse. Understanding others as deeply and openly as possible, acknowledging what we cannot understand about them, and doing research with ethics, morality and empathy all invoke the question of what lies beyond the narrative horizon. Currently there are two parallel universes in which we as qualitative researchers find ourselves working in. The first is a universe that is expanding. This is one in which qualitative research continues to push methodological and substantive boundaries thereby moving into new and exciting spaces. This enables the exploration of a vast array of substantive foci in many different discipline and practice areas. The second universe, by comparison, is one that is contracting. This is the universe where we find increasing prominence of neo-liberal influenced audit cultures. In this universe rhetoric about, and emphases on, evidence and "hard" numeric data has permeated the communities and contexts in which we research for example government departments, educational institutions, service providers and business. Tensions emerge for qualitative researchers when these universes touch, intersect or at times collide! There is a danger that the gains made by qualitative researchers will be eroded by the need to survive the often competing demands emanating from such tensions. In this sense, qualitative research faces a very uncertain future. Choices that we make both individually and collectively as qualitative researchers about how to navigate such tensions are critical. Making these choices, and even more crucially, ensuring that there is the possibility of being able to make and have such choices, is one of the greatest challenges for qualitative researchers with respect to ensuring a future for qualitative research.