Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Content, Conversation, Discourse, Multimodal, Narrative, Rhetorical, Stylistic, Thematic…Analysis. You might have encountered a few of these approaches to qualitative data in educational research already, perhaps also in studying English language, literature or linguistics. They imbue activities such as reading (and re-reading) a policy document or interview transcript with an appealing air of empiricism, even positivism. They can seem like a lifesaver if you’re working in an environment that favours such epistemologies. But how far can you get in the social sciences, particularly educational research, with close reading? … that ill-defined activity at the core of English studies. I will answer this drawing on my educational research that pairs close-reading with other methods, such as survey, or combines close-reading literary and non-literary texts. These include picturebooks, television, theatre reviews, websites, YA literature and YouKu videos. I will offer tips for explaining what you’re doing and how, when you put close-reading at the heart of your project. Difficulty with articulating this, rather than doing the close-reading, is arguably what makes undertaking close-reading as an educational research method most perilous.
