Mirka Koro-Ljungberg
Data noise and educational gossip
At the times of post-qualitative research data can serve various functions beyond description, understanding, or other ways to manipulate, collect, or disseminate participants’ knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to extend data beyond their normative explanatory or representational functions toward data that intervene, participate, and provoke pedagogies and learning outside formal schooling. I draw visuals and fictional examples from various data extensions specifically ‘data noise and data as educational gossip’ that I encountered in my work with undocumented students. For example, I focus on ‘between data’, data that disturb expected content and form, data that connect with unanticipated and potentially unknown elements of individual’s lives (e.g., cultural silences, institutional anomalies, and disturbing practices), data that extend beyond themselves, and illusive and widely spread gossip data that reproduce or generate complex and potentially fictional diversifications of individual or collective educational experiences. I believe that data noise and data as educational gossip carry within themselves a capacity to cause trouble to the conceptual architecture of qualitative research and normative pedagogical practices, and, in so doing, can open new directions for experimental methodology, public pedagogy, and critical educational research practice.
Bio: Mirka Koro-Ljungberg (Ph.D., University of Helsinki) is a Professor of qualitative research at the Arizona State University. Her research and publications focus on various conceptual and theoretical aspects of qualitative inquiry and participant-driven methodologies. In particular, Koro-Ljungberg’s scholarship brings together theory and practice, the promotion of epistemology, and the development of situated and experimental methodologies.