Multivocal Critical Qualitative Inquiry as an Avenue for Public Policy

Abstract

Nowadays, multivocality has been discussed as if it were a criterion for evaluating the quality of qualitative research, as well as if it were the practice, style, or format of narrative research itself. Grounded in Bakhtin’s legacy, the need to incorporate multivocality as a key element of critical qualitative inquiry as a whole is raised. Thus, multivocal critical qualitative inquiry (MCQI) is proposed as an opportunity to build democratic possibilities for a practice that operates on the threshold of new realities that emerge through the conjunction of alternative interpretive methodologies and emerging social movements of protest. MCQI is then outlined as an avenue for the gestation of public policies despite the fact that the real links between citizen actions of protest and government responsiveness have hardly been rigorously explored. Sympoiesis and pluriversal politics are the theoretical and epistemological perspectives of such conjunction nourished by inquiry practices such as creative subversion, creative activism, and militant research. To exemplify the ways in which MCQI practices can be thought, seven projects were selected from a worldwide production: two projects on ecological issues and environmental care, three in the area of urban planning and democratization, and two around the sensitive problems of refugees, exiles, and migrants. MCQI may constitute a crossroad for the best and most committed inquiry practices nurtured by the interpretive traditions of the social sciences in its ties to struggles for the destruction of all kinds of epistemic, social, political, racial, economic, ecological, cognitive, and legal injustice.