Live Discourse Analysis

Like many papers, I honestly cannot remember where I first encountered Canagarajah (1996). I imagine it was a TESOL Quarterly paper about reflexivity or the presence of authors within interview data (e.g. Kasper & Prior, 2015). What I do know is: Suresh is one of my favorite professors at Penn State. He taught me many valuable lessons on the activity of research and writing. First, by regarding research, writing, and language as an activity rather than an accomplishment. Here are a couple of my favorite other Canagarajahisms:

• If something is important in your data, it will come back to you. So don’t worry if you don’t write every single thing down.
• The best writing is a little bit risky. It is acutely aware of expected discourse conventions, while also being smart enough to follow them unfaithfully.
• Language; meaning; identity; it is all negotiated and relational. Diversity is the norm.

So, I probably picked this paper up as my interest in qualitative methodology grew. And I appreciate the opportunity to return to it today. Let’s kick off with the first randomly selected Kindle highlight.

Critical research calls for a more sustained and rigorous exploration of the ways the researcher’s subjectivity influences the research process. Boxing this concern into a single section in a largely detached, univocally authored, realist text is unsatisfactory (Canagarajah, 1996, p. 325).

In this passage I imagine Suresh addressing the emergence of positionality statements in TESOL scholarship. It makes this sentence quite prescient for 1996, considering we talk about the problem of research reflexivity and its representation 30 years later (e.g. Consoli, 2026, King, 2024). In a way, Suresh was perfectly positioned to author this critique of authorial reflexivity and representation. His original graduate training in rhetoric and composition studies already featured ongoing conversations about reflexivity in the domain of writing. I think about, for example, Thomas Newkirk (1992) or Linda Brodkey (1987), who both argue that researchers are not realist reporters, but storytellers – storytellers with split loyalties between a storytelling organization of scholars and participants. Researchers aim to represent, respect, protect, and produce scholarship with the help of participants. As I write this now, it sounds like a conflict of interest if one is not very careful – especially as the academic landscape grows more competitive and top-heavy.

I appreciate authors like Monroe (2018), who write about conducting incredible interviews only to throw them out when ambiguous ethical conundrums arise. But it also becomes tiresome to hear older, tenured, established scholars advocate for slower research, to worry less about publication, or to represent the interests and needs of participants above all else. Early career academics are often beset by financial or economic vulnerabilities alongside their participants, and to advocate for selflessness feels disingenuous coming from those scholars who have already “made it.” This is not to say that early-career scholars ought to throw ethics out the window. But it does warrant the welcome conversation emerging in applied linguistics about how researchers also bring vulnerabilities to their project, that power dynamics are relative, and that on a world system scale, the power of researchers has endured steady decline.

But returning to Canagarajah’s passage, I agree that researchers need to be more transparent, even vulnerable, in discussing how their subjectivity influences the research process. I would, however, also reframe such a question from “Who am I?” to “What did I do?” This adopts Canagarajah’s focus on research as an activity rather than an identity. It also acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge. Most of us may only guess at the nature of our subjectivity, or constrain such discussions of subjectivity to privileged axes of identity like race, gender, or nationality. Yes, these can be important, but their salience can be contingent more than omnipresent.

Recognizing researcher subjectivity as an activity also affords aesthetics to join the reflexivity conversation. For example, I cannot articulate a rationale for preferring audio data over video data. I cannot rationally explain why I prefer a storytelling approach of antenarrative over the conceptual-based thematic analysis. Some decisions can boil down to “my style.” And I have yet to see reflexive positions that state this. In other words,

“I chose this analytical technique because I enjoy analyzing data this way.”

We often talk about how methods ought to fit the research questions. This is a postpositivist, quantitative method frame. In the qualitative domain, research questions are malleable and liable to change as the research process unfolds. This may be a hot take, but analysts can often create research questions that frame analysis – especially if that analysis takes the shape of a story, which many qualitative researchers advocate for (Braun & Clarke, 2020).

What most researchers do not have the time or money to do is to go learn analytical techniques just to fit a question. What if, in other words, researchers developed an analytical fingerprint, and thereby the perspective they can stand behind and defend (Braun & Clarke, 2006), and allow the research questions to flow from there? Because, as Canagarajah writes, every choice that we make as researchers, from the discourse level to the word level, infuses with researcher subjectivity that positivist ideologies target and weed out of our qualitative analyses.

For all practical purposes, the researcher is absent from the report, looming behind the text as an omniscient, transcendental, all knowing figure. This convention hides the manner in which the subjectivity of the researchers — with their complex values, ideologies, and experiences — shapes the research activity and findings (Canagarajah, 1996, p. 324).

I partly agree with this sentiment. It feeds back an ongoing sentiment emerging among applied linguistics qualitative methodologists: researcher reflexivity is not something one can establish or silo off within a method section. It ought to appear continually without becoming a navel-gazing narcissistic screed. Quarantining researcher reflexivity into a positionality statement adopts the positivist position that accounting for one’s identity can reduce or calibrate bias in an analysis. But by ethnomethodological definitions, all research writing – all writing period – is reflexive. And it is to our peril to believe otherwise.

Suresh often writes about the rhizome, a concept from Deleuze and Guattari, which challenges the linear, hierarchical, and chronological relations between ideas, beings, and bodies. The image he often chooses to represent the rhizome is a fungus (e.g. Canagarajah, 2018). I like to think about reflexivity in qualitative research papers as a mushroom. Reflexive qualitative research papers entail the author’s subjective analytical process appearing periodically but not systematically. To systematize reflexive surfacing is to subordinate a researcher’s “complex values, ideologies, and experiences” into rote procedure. If such surfacings are frequent and spaced enough, however, readers can trace the shape of a larger subterranean, often indecipherable network of affects, cognitions, and becomings that come to constitute the analysis generated from participant data. I call this the paradox of transparency: reflexive revelations increase transparency but also reveal heretofore unthought opacities – facets of subjectivity opaque even to the researching self.

But I also have to question: What are we hiding when we say that the researcher is absent, looming behind the text as a mission-transcendental all-knowing figure? Canagarajah writes as though this positivist veneer that prescribes burying the researching “I” to perform objective distance is not how applied linguistics qualitative researchers think. Or, put otherwise, few qualitative papers in applied linguistics and TESOL convince me otherwise. When a researcher writes as a distant, omniscient, transcendental figure, I believe them. Or at least I believe this is how they see the role of the researcher in the construction of knowledge. Applied linguists can borrow a famous adage from fiction writers: Show, don’t tell.

I notice this homogeny of researcher reflexivity and style even within papers that I would uphold the highest standards and expectations of positionality and reflexivity. I’m thinking about the surge in papers discussing Indigenous ways of knowing or land-based pedagogies (e.g. Kubota & Motha, 2025). I think particularly about Dovchin et al., (2026) and Meighan and Hammine (2026). Both papers bring new terms to applied linguistics to describe methods inspired by Indigenous knowledge systems. For Dovchin, it’s yarning. For Meighan, it’s dùthcas. For Hammine, it’s Yuntaku. Yet if we omit these terms from the paper, it is difficult to distinguish these methodological terms from pluri-autoethnographic Western counterparts. Dovchin even writes about how yarning roughly translates to a conversation. It therefore gets me questioning beyond how researchers can make their subjective analytical processes more visible. Because we also bump up against disciplinary constraints of the academic article. A scholar can write about doing “yarning” as a methodology, but academic article structures seem ill-equipped to handle such methodological diversity. There are limits to how Dovchin, Meighan, or Hammine can articulate (or represent) Indigenous ways of knowledge-making within dominant Western modes or representing knowledge. It raises interesting questions about who conceals researcher subjectivity. Research is relational and negotiated. It is therefore not researchers alone who conceal their values, ideologies, and experiences. It is also the discipline itself; a discipline (more like a multidiscipline) driven by educators who want clearly translated and transparently applicable findings; findings that wash away the ineffable qualities that make diverse ways of knowing diverse. In other words, how do we think beyond the peer-reviewed journal article and its associated rigid conventions to live up to the promise of welcoming and embracing non-Western or indigenous ways of creating and sharing knowledge? Canagarajah shares one example:

Kevin Dwyer’s (1982) Moroccan Dialogues attempts to build into the text the complexity of the fieldwork/research situation and the polyphony of voices in the research context to encourage readings from multiple points of view. Through a series of lightly edited interview transcripts, Dwyer dramatizes the exploratory, hypothetical, recursive, cumulative interpretive process of the researcher (Canagarajah, 1996, p. 326).

Quotes like these make me realize how far applied linguistics must go to theoretically catch up with other education-adjacent disciplines. Applied linguistics discipline came out of second language acquisition studies before later loosely merging with other subfields such as sociolinguistics or discourse analysis. We have many powerful tools to share our research more creatively. We must get more creative than the traditional monologic, recontextualized utterances of participants juxtaposed against the analytical, interpretive voice of the researcher. We can include transcripts where researchers and participants are co-present, co-storying, and co-constituting the knowledge produced (Kasper & Prior, 2015).

This is why I now deeply value antenarrative theory in my own research practice. Antenarrative comes from organization scholar David Boje, who wanted to find an alternative conceptualization of narrative beyond the traditional beginning-middle-ending framework that dominates narrative research – particularly at the organizational level. According to Boje, there is no such thing as a single, unified organizational story. There are organizational narratives — power-laden, reductive, clean narrations of pasts, presents, or futures, that coerce shared meaning, commitment, and purpose. But within an organization, everyone’s epistemic and affective orientation to that shared narrative produces different living stories — different variations of grand narratives infused with the lived experience of individual bodies — which contribute to a fragmented, polyphonic storyscape onto which coherence is imposed, not emergent.

Thirty years after Canagarajah published this paper, applied linguists seem to be asking themselves the same questions (e.g. Consoli, 2026; Prior, 2025). In most top journals, the introduction-methods-research-analysis-discussion structure (IMRAD) still persists. Deviations from it often get desk rejected, shelved, or otherwise peer reviewed out of the light of day. That is not to say that anything goes. But rather than telling researchers alone to exercise transparency in their reflexive analytical process, it is worth considering how applied linguistics constitutes its own storytelling organization. As an organization, we can see the stories that editors, reviewers, participants, researchers, and students all bring to the conversation of reflexivity (e.g. Pratt, 2008).

We can see that from different points of view, different vulnerabilities shine. But in vulnerabilities, we can also see strengths. Early career researchers might have vulnerability in dependence on publishing in top-tier journals to secure future research opportunities. But early career scholars also benefit from an absence of sedimented knowledge and experience. They are fresh to research and thereby less burdened by habit or tradition. They can push qualitative analyses in fresh directions — directions that later-stage academics might foreclose upon, not due to malice or ignorance but through habit.

I treat this blog as my own form of reflexive innovation – a forum to share ideas as unfinished, unclean story. Here we can discuss methodological development in a real-time unfolding story — full of splashes of mud and its flecks of dirt. Or, as one anonymous author once wrote, we can appreciate “the unwashed electrons” of the knowledge-making journey.

References:

Brodkey, L. (1987). Writing ethnographic narratives. Written Communication, 4(1), 25–50.

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101.

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2020). One size fits all? What counts as quality practice in (reflexive) thematic analysis? Qualitative Research in Psychology, 18(3), 328–352.

Canagarajah, A. S. (1996). From critical research practice to critical research reporting. TESOL Quarterly, 30(2), 321–331.

Consoli, S. (2026). Reflexivity and positionality in TESOL research. TESOL Quarterly, 60(2), 923.

Dovchin, S., Gower, G., Oliver, R., & Steele, C. (2026). First knowledging, first languaging: Australian teacher education. TESOL Journal.

Dwyer, K. (1982). Moroccan dialogues: Anthropology in question. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kasper, G., & Prior, M. T. (2015). Analyzing storytelling in TESOL interview research. TESOL Quarterly, 49(2), 226–255.

King, K. A. (2024). Promises and perils of positionality statements. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 44, 118–125.

Kubota, R., & Motha, S. (2025). Decolonial and antiracist teacher education practice: Challenges and alternatives. Modern Language Journal, 109, 686–695.

Meighan, P. J., & Hammine, M. (2026). Land and water pedagogy in TESOL: Centering Indigenous knowledges. TESOL Quarterly.

Monroe, K. R. (2018). The rush to transparency: DA-RT and the potential dangers for qualitative research. Perspectives on Politics, 16(1), 141–148.

Newkirk, T. (1992). The narrative roots of the case study. In G. Kirsch & P. A. Sullivan (Eds.), Methods and methodology in composition research (pp. 130–152). Southern Illinois University Press.

Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Prior, M. T. (2025). Contemporary applied linguistics research: Between reflection and reflexivity. In P. Habibie & R. D. Sawyer (Eds.), Reflexive and reflective research approaches in applied linguistics (pp. 248–266). John Benjamins.