Witnessing: Critical inquiry in a poststructural world

This work uses examples from a qualitative research project on interagency collaboration to propose witnessing as a metaphor to guide research practice. Using critical and poststructural perspectives to provide a theoretical scaffolding, the discussion suggests obligations that researchers who are interested in working for social justice might consider. These six obligations include: recognizing our engagement in active and partial meaning-making, recognizing that our research actions will change others, and understanding that we too must be open to change. Further, these obligations propose the necessity of positioning ourselves in our work, when we act as witnesses, by telling others about our experiences and perspectives, while also listening to the interpretations of other participants. A final obligation asserts that witnessing carries with it a responsibility to explore multiple meanings of equity and care while acting to promote our situational understandings of those concepts. These obligations provide a metaphorical understanding that researchers who are new to qualitative methods, critical theory, or poststructuralism could use to approach their research contexts, especially if compelled to consider the ethical dimensions of research theories and practices. Throughout, critical and poststructural research approaches complicate each other while heightening the possibilities for renewal within the discourses in which witnessing operates.