Interviewing and the production of the conversational self

The author argues that conventional humanist qualitative inquiry took up both paths Foucault identified logical positivism and structuralism as well as theories and practices that emerged from the interpretive and critical turns in the social sciences. Students who may have read deeply in those theories may well experience a disconnect between a theory's assumptions and those that structure conventional humanist qualitative inquiry. But that truth and that real are chimeras, fictions, and neither can ever be outside human being but can only ever be human being the contingent, chaotic, impoverished limit of our imaginations and practices. Subjectivity implies the ongoing construction of human being, human being in flux, in processat every moment being disciplined, regulated, normalized, produced and at the same time, resisting, shifting, changing, and producing. Qualitative researchers use the two face-to-face methods to go deep, to interview repeatedly in order to get closer and closer to the center, the core of participants' being.