CRITICAL + CULTURAL RESPONSIVITY
My research sits at the intersection of critical theory and culturally responsive research. Across my work, I ask how power, ethics, culture, and positionality shape what counts as knowledge and who gets to produce it. I approach methodology as a political and relational space.
A central thread in my work is the examination of what “responsivity” makes possible, while also asking what it can obscure when treated as a technique rather than a deeper ethical and epistemological commitment. Through this work, I challenge deficit-oriented approaches to research and make space for more reflexive, plural, and accountable ways of knowing.
PROFANING AS ARTFUL INQUIRY
This paper unsettles the easy optimism and moral aesthetics that can domesticate arts-based research into consumable, uplifting products. Drawing on profane methodologies and artists who have jolted us, we embrace irreverence, obscenity, and the “fuck it” aesthetic—not as nihilism, but as a method to question what is obscured when inquiry is aestheticized as moral good, empowerment, or evocative transformation. We argue that arts-based research risks becoming methodological word-art—superficially disruptive yet institutionally safe—where beauty substitutes for ethics and aesthetic cues replace accountability. Profaning becomes a methodological stance that refuses tidy resolution, resists redemptive outputs, and remains with mess, failure, and unresolved tensions. Profaning artful inquiry is an ethic of discomfort, an invitation to fuck around and find out what research might be when stripped of redemptive sheen.
Jordan, L. S., Wolgemuth, J. R., & Dunn, M. B. (2026). Profaning as artful inquiry: Fuck around and find out... the seductive lure Into the sublime. Qualitative Inquiry, Advanced Online. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800426142020
RADICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY
Building on McKittrick’s framing of the algorithm as a racializing apparatus of containment, we examine how algorithmic governance functions as a tool of epistemic control in the contemporary academy. In this paper, we interrogate the entropic condition of academic life, where institutional chaos conceals a calculated stasis designed to preserve colonial, white structures. Against a backdrop of institutional chaos, political retrenchment, and disciplinary policing, we introduce the concept of algorithmic entropy, a calculated stasis masked as disorder. We explore how this algorithmic logic curates knowledge through fear, legibility, and prophylactic obedience. In response, we theorize radical interdisciplinarity not as a methodological novelty, but as an act of insurgent, relational, and embodied refusal that evades capture and thrives in the fissures of dominant structures. We suggest that radical interdisciplinarity offers a mode of becoming otherwise that centers story, sound, and entanglement to imagine academic life beyond the algorithm’s grasp.
Jordan, L. S., Smith, S., Piontak, R. R. (accepted). Becoming and troubling otherwise: Radical interdisciplinarity in the algorithmic academy.
CULTURALLY DISRUPTIVE RESEARCH
Culturally responsive research (CRR) posits that culture is always present and should thus be a fundamental organizing principle in all facets of inquiry. However, within whitestream research cultures this work can be assimilated into the white, colonial logics it seeks to resist. In this paper, I offer a loving critique and critical reimagining of CRR by tracing its genealogy, situating contemporary research within whiteness and coloniality, and identifying three contraindications for researching while white—defining cultures, engaging in reflexivity, and employing cultural competence. Building on these critiques, I explore the potential of shifting from cultural responsivity to cultural disruption. Drawing from my experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand and Cambodia, I discuss culturally disruptive research as one method to dismantle the cultural foundations of research that perpetuate white supremacy. Cultural disruption invites researchers into spaces of desire, dynamic dissonance, and relational negotiations to foreground creative, critical, and capacious knowledge generation.
Jordan, L. S. (accepted). Culturally disruptive qualitative research: Troubling cultures of whitestream science. Submitted to International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
TRUSTWORTHINESS IN STATEMENTS OF SUBJECTIVITY
Given the intricate relationship between knowledge and subjectivity, reflexivity has become crucial to demonstrating trustworthiness in qualitative inquiry. This reflexive process is then subsequently communicated to readers through various statements of subjectivity. In this paper, we critically analyze the evolution and role of these statements in qualitative research, tracing their evolution from a radical attempt to dismantle post/positivist ideals to their current status as an (at times) stale convention. We problematize statements of subjectivity as a measure of trustworthiness, examining how we use these declarations to legitimize qualitative methods, assert our expertise, and affirm our positionality vis-a-vis our participants. We argue that current practices may inadvertently perpetuate the conditions we seek to disrupt, from wrapping ourselves in the confines of objectivity by disclaiming it to recreating hegemonic power positions in the quest for exoneration. To illustrate our thoughts, we share our statements of subjectivity published in the quest for trustworthiness.
Jordan, L.S., & Wolgemuth, J. R. (2025). “You can trust me…honest”: Claiming trustworthiness in statements of subjectivity. Qualitative Inquiry. Advanced online. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004251387085
SPECIAL ISSUE ON CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE RESEARCH
The articles in this special issue emphasize the evolution and impact of culturally responsive research in health settings. They illustrate the methodological shift from viewing culture through a Western-centric lens to instead critically analyzing dominant cultural “norms,” intersectional identities, and the power of narratives. These contributions advocate for integrating culturally informed methods to respect all peoples' dignity and identities, aiming for more inclusive, equitable, and transformative health outcomes. The publication of this issue comes at a time when there is a global backlash against diversity, health promotion, and research, making the need for culturally responsive qualitative health even more critical. By continuing to develop and implement these methodologies, the health research community can play a crucial role in addressing and overcoming the persistent systemic and cultural inequalities in healthcare.
Jordan, L.S. & Hall, J. N. (2025). Culturally responsive methodologies: Addressing the special issues in qualitative health research. Qualitative Health Research, 35(4-5), 395 – 402. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323251322298
PODCASTS AS DISCRIT METHODOLOGY
Due to the dominance of ableist narratives, there is a distinct lack of diversity of participants and geographies in education research with students with disabilities. To address this lack, we developed podcasting as a method for DisCrit-informed
qualitative research in the form of a pilot project for the first author’s doctoral study on the experiences of acquired disability as intersected with policy, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and nationality. Using writing as method of inquiry, in this paper, we reflect on moments of questioning, tensions, challenges, and ethical ponderings that we encountered throughout the creation of the podcast project. These tensions include questions about what digging deep means in DisCrit research, the challenges of negotiating power, ethics, and care, questioning whose stories are worth telling and who gets to tell them and, finally, the
epistemological provocations we rubbed against. Specifically, we argue that the creative, digital, and culturally specific properties of podcasting offer a counterstorying approach to ableism, by generating situated knowing about living with a disability. Podcasting, as a DisCrit-informed qualitative approach, may enable researchers’ abilities to develop rich, nuanced, and detailed understandings of experiences of disabilities, across geographies, identities, and contexts
Treco, K., & Jordan, L. S. (2024). Decentering and rezoning: Podcasts as a DisCrit method for doing disability research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 23,1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069241263682.