Chapter 3: What Is The Role of Relationship in Critical Qualitative Research?

How does the world change for the better? Toward the good? Force is certainly a change agent, and a powerful one, but only toward ends that are more restrictive and less healthy, less vibrant. What about knowledge? Knowledge cuts both ways. Technological advances, for example, have certainly improved the lives of millions of people around the world, from better sanitation to mobile phones that drive micro-economies. But knowledge, as history shows, can also lean toward fascism, killing millions in its cool, detached efficiency.

This question about change lies at the heart of both social education and critical qualitative research, for both are focused on change toward the good. According to White (2011), social education is about “social efficacy, empowerment, and emancipation” (p. 42). Similarly, Kincheloe and McLaren (2003) claimed that “inquiry that aspires to the name critical must be connected to an attempt to confront the injustice of a particular society or public sphere within the society” (p. 453, original emphasis). Confronting injustice, what some critical researchers call “advocacy research” (Shields, 2012), is critical research’s main approach to change toward the good. This confrontation is attempted through knowledge. As Carspecken (1996) put it, “We use our research, in fact, to refine social theory rather than merely to describe social life” (p. 3).