Festschrift in Honour of Kathy Charmaz: Volume 56

I write my way into Kathy Charmaz' biography, offering an ode to her life-long, to project bring the mind, body, and self of the researcher, OT therapist and the chronically ill person together in the interpretive process.

This contribution argues that Kathy Charmaz's career did not burst into full intellectual bloom until the last 25 years of her life – from 55 to her death at 80. I examine why and how this scholarly blossoming happened so late in her life and the nature of its many manifestations, especially research on a wide variety of social justice issues. After her initial focus on medical sociology, specializing in chronic illness, Kathy became an innovative and renowned qualitative methodologist, developing constructivist grounded theory (CGT) method taken up in many amazingly heterogeneous scholarly fields transnationally.

Kathy Charmaz, who survived against all odds and eventually to become an internationally acclaimed qualitative researcher, demonstrated extraordinary resilience and intellect. In this chapter, I describe the ways she lived through her early life, her beginning research as a student, and how she managed the trials of academic life while making an international contribution to understanding the experiences of the chronically ill. In the process she developed Constructivist Grounded Theory, refining her qualitative methods, making them accessible to all, and producing findings that changed the course of qualitive health research.

Kathy Charmaz, a developer of constructivist grounded theory (CGT), advocated the use of grounded theory as a tool to attain social justice through research. We developed the grounded text mining approach (GTxA) method by integrating Charmaz's CGT with text mining. This technique is aimed at facilitating the systematic and comprehensive understanding of textual data. GTxA helps researchers engage in abductive reasoning by encouraging them to transition between CGT and text mining analyses. This chapter illustrates an example of how GTxA was utilized when a group of researchers analyzed depositions and semi-structured interview data of a defendant in an actual criminal case in Japan and, thus, detected the possibility of a coerced false confession. The chapter concludes by encouraging researchers to utilize GTxA for attaining social justice.

History as leisure allows for the creation of identity and identification among those who care about the past and treasure the memories that knowledge provides. Through a multiyear ethnography of American Civil War enthusiasts, I propose the concept of “Wispy Selves.” These selves are embedded in awareness of an historical past but are wispy in that their presentation is limited to particular times and places where they are described and enacted with the support of a like-minded community. Through lectures, tours, and other gatherings, leisure participants imagine themselves linked to consequential figures in the American past through their voluntary commitments. A sense of “selves in time” extends Kathy Charmaz’s illness identities by recognizing that meaningful personas are not only linked to trauma, but to communal pleasure as well.

By reconstructing the meanings, contexts, interests, and topics of conversation held over the years with Kathy Charmaz, this short tribute conceptualizes the indigenization of the Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) from a position of methodological innocence. The main question is about the existence of a global methodology useful for and applicable to all cultures regardless of local epistemologies, theoretical developments, conceptual histories, and methodological legacies existing in each nation. Acknowledging the development of American pragmatism and its effects on the construction of GTM, the way in which divergent epistemological perspectives can affect the research practice conducted by using this methodological approach is explored here. The originality of Charmaz's contribution on the internationalization of GTM is explored from our conversations imbued with my vision as a Spanish-speaking thinker. Arguing about cover-science was productive in opening paths toward the recognition of a virgin field that demanded our attention. This short tribute is an invitation to continue a journey of discovery on the geopolitics of science and on the local or global application of knowledge generated through specific research methodologies. Indigenous grounded theory research can still be a point of axial tension between different options that need to be explored soon to choose the most appropriate one for today's troubled times. During the years to come, the brilliant presence of Charmaz will illuminate the necessary critical reflection on the particularities of practicing GTM in different societies and cultures other than the American one.

Couched within the author’s memories and correspondence with Kathy Charmaz, this chapter considers the philosophical nature of Constructivist, or Charmazian Grounded Theory, and contrasts it with the philosophical underpinnings of Critical Grounded Theory. Using an autopoietic framework, this chapter sees Charmazian and Critical Grounded Theory as interconnected, complementary, but distinct in the way they each approach research participants and interpret social processes. The chapter ends with reflections on Kathy Charmaz's contribution to critical grounded theory and where she had hoped the next generation of grounded theorists might expand the methodology.

As a tribute to Kathy Charmaz, the author discusses the fundamental role that Charmaz's work played in her development as a sociologist and qualitative researcher. The author notes that Charmaz's most prominent contributions are constructivist grounded theory, the notion of methodological self-consciousness, and discussions of the body and emotions as significant to substantive and methodological considerations. The author further describes how the synergy between Charmaz's key concepts and Black feminist perspectives have been relevant to how she leveraged and negotiated her positionality as a Black woman and transnational researcher. Ultimately, the author concludes that Kathy Charmaz's legacy reinforces the importance of equity-minded research and provides a model of how to extend concerns about social justice to activities that also disrupt structural barriers faced by underrepresented researchers.

Using a life story approach, I explore Kathy Charmaz's research journey marked by her profound motivation to utilize the humanizing potential of human sciences research as she developed the constructivist version of grounded theory (CGT). The experiential and social divides that she observed since her own childhood between the ill person and medical professionals or other stakeholders remained etched in her consciousness. They generated a silently but firmly held moral responsibility toward creating humanizing spaces for the voices of ill persons as well as for people marginalized by social injustice or inequity. The ontological shift Charmaz introduced in CGT enabled recovering the heretofore silenced voices of participants from the clutches of a claimed “objective truth” in the research findings of positivist research.

In her subsequent works, Charmaz also advocated and illustrated the need to use critical reflexivity to more meaningfully understand the hierarchies within and between social worlds as well as how researcher-participant relationships often shape participants' experiences. In doing so, she also demystified the colonialist nature of qualitative research methodologies, including grounded theory (GT) approaches. In such practices, implicitly individualist ideology is used to legitimate neoliberal globalization to help sustain the geopolitical economic power of a few countries over the rest of the world.

Student learning takes many forms depending on variables such as context and desired goals. Learning social justice concepts involves a reframing of one's values through observation and participation in real-life scenarios. A relationship with my mentor gave opportunities to see beyond superficial aspects and the physical body. Communicating valued concepts through research and writing is a gift of Kathy's legacy.

In this Festschrift, written and shared to celebrate the life and work of Dr Kathy Charmaz, I draw upon both personal reflections and Kathy's extensive writings to showcase Kathy's contributions to my personal research journey and to the field of qualitative research methodology. I examine the intersection of constructivist grounded theory and social justice research, an important theme of Kathy's work and research. I discuss three components of constructivist grounded theory that support social justice research: researcher reflexivity, prioritizing participants, and the importance of context. I share examples from my own work showing how these three facets of constructivist grounded theory contributed to an unintended yet much appreciated social justice thread in my research. My hope is through my reflection, other researchers, who were not able to meet and interact with Kathy, will be able to understand and appreciate her influence and impact, and her view of research as a responsive, flexible, and meaningful process.

In this chapter honouring Professor Kathy Charmaz, her scholarship and her mentorship, I explore the impact of her work on my thinking and research. Specifically, I focus on the translation of her constructivist principles into my, and others', grounded theory methodological practice. Following the introduction, the chapter commences with a reflection upon coming across constructivist grounded theory (CGT) for the first time almost 20 years ago, and my excitement at finding a methodology that so well aligned with my social justice-oriented research. Already ‘seduced’ by (classical) grounded theory, I had been uncomfortable and wrestling with its problematic philosophical underpinnings, and Kathy's work provided an intriguing solution. This section also briefly reviews CGT's main features, including Kathy's central emphasis on critical reflexivity, interpretation and context, the researcher–participant relationship and the co-construction of knowledge with participants, whilst maintaining a focus on conceptual development. In Section Three, I examine the ‘translation’ of Kathy's constructivist principles into my and others' reflexive grounded theory methodological practice, focusing particularly on issues of researcher positionality/ies and participant involvement. I also consider the ways in which I am further extending these ideas in my ongoing CGT research, including in relation to researcher self-disclosure. In the concluding section, I observe that Kathy's scholarship not only put grounded theory on a new epistemological basis but also established constructivist GT's axiological foundation. I end with a reflection upon the legacy of her ‘curiosity and wonder’ as a scholar of the social world, her legendary mentorship and her generosity of spirit.

Constructivist grounded theory method (GTM) as outlined by Kathy Charmaz has its explicit roots in the American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism primarily developed at the University of Chicago during the early and mid-twentieth century. Symbolic interactionism considers people as active and interpretative agents who co-construct selves, identities, meanings, social actions, social worlds, and societies through interactions. Charmaz argues that symbolic interactionism is an open-ended theoretical perspective that fosters studying action, process, and meanings, with a focus on how people co-construct and negotiate meanings, orders, and actions in their everyday lives. In this chapter, I argue that constructivist GTM, including its theory-method package built upon symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School tradition, can be further combined with the new sociology of childhood to study children's social worlds and negotiated meanings, orders, and actions.

My initial writing and critique of grounded theory (GT) was undertaken in complete ignorance of Kathy Charmaz's work. Subsequently, I made contact with her and was delighted to receive a warm and collegial response, something I came to understand was an essential part of her nature. In our ensuing collaboration, which included the two Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) Handbooks, my understanding of the method increased, thanks to her deep insights and extensive knowledge and familiarity with those writing about the method far and wide. But far more important was the way in which our friendship and partnership helped me appreciate and understand the depth and value of her significant contributions to ideas about camaraderie, research and social justice.

Politeness rituals can be understood as socially facilitative, performative speech acts that operate at the meso-level of Goffmanian interaction order, translating macro-level cultural scripts into micro-social action. Whereas previous research has focused on individual face-saving, this chapter examines the implications of politeness for the group face of speech communities, demonstrating the concept of collective facework. Taking Swedish culture as an example, I observe a tension between two sets of rules: the Nordic code of Jante Law, which frowns upon boasting and encourages humility, and the values of honesty and conversational directness. This is dramaturgically resolved through polite forms of talk, such as strategic reticence and sanctioning verbal domination. These interaction rituals perform collective facework to address negative and positive collective face needs.