Representing representation

Abstract

What can be known and how to render what we know are perpetual quandaries met by qualitative research, complicated further by the understanding that the everyday discourses influencing our representations are often tacit, unspoken or heard so often that they seem to warrant little reflection. In this article, I offer analytic memos as a means for addressing the subject of representation in qualitative research, its philosophical and ethical dimensions, grounded in one of my own formative experiences as an academic, writing the dissertation.

Keywords:

• representation
• ethics
• philosophy