July 30-31

This 2-day workshop focuses on what “lived experience” means for qualitative researchers. We will introduce strategies that prepare us to study the world as it is lived, not the world as it is measured, transformed, represented, correlated, and broken down. In paying close attention to lived experience, we are interested in the felt and sensed aspects of our participants’ and our own experiences, as well as the contextual aspects in which these experiences take shape.

Four commitments help us expand and enrich our qualitative minds as we learn from lived experience:

1. Listening to and making sense of this significance and using it in our qualitative research
2. Treating theorizing as an active and generative process of exploration
3. Putting this theoretical process to use in our data collection processes
4. Practicing data analysis using the theoretical tools we have learned

To learn about and ground these commitments, we will spend time exploring how a wide array of qualitative data such as interviews, observations, visual, and popular media can serve as data for studying lived experience. With data from Vagle’s current studies of yoga and mindset work, we will further practice data analysis using the theoretical processes and tools we have learned. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own data and/or research ideas so they can apply these processes, tools, and techniques to their work.