Dancing with Data: A Collaborative and Critical Qualitative Inquiry

This paper contributes to the literature on collaborative scholarship by bringing together data from two different critical qualitative dissertation projects in order to better understand the way power complexly flows through communities in both academic and non-academic contexts. The metaphor of dance is used throughout this piece in order to capture the embodied and messy process of being in collaboration with one another as researchers, as scholars, and as people that experience the material consequences of structures of power. We offer insight into our process and provide various examples of how our data danced with one another. We conclude with a discussion that adds to the conversation of collaborative, critical qualitative scholarship and the politics which shape our research commitments.