Getting Lost

Patti Lather is Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education at the Ohio State University. She is the coauthor (with Chris Smithies) of Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS and Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern.

• PrefaceAcknowledgments1. Shifting Imaginaries in the Human Sciences: A Feminist ReadingInterlude: (Excerpted) Interview with Patti Lather2. Methodology as Subversive Repetition: Practices toward a Feminist Double(d) ScienceInterlude: Naked Methodology3. Double(d) Science, Mourning, and Hauntology: Scientism, Scientificity, and Feminist MethodologyInterlude: If We Held a Reunion, Would Anyone Come?4. Textuality as Praxis: With Ears to Hear the Monstrous TextInterlude: E-mail Updates (Excerpted)5. Applied Derrida: (Mis)Reading the work of Mourning in Social ResearchInterlude: Déjà Vu All Over Again: Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Educational Left6. Fertile Obsession: Validity after PoststructuralismInterlude: Dear Elliot, August 1996-November 19977. Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist EthnographyInterlude: The Angel to Philosophy of ScienceAfterwords: Still Lost: The Summons of the Archive as ProcessChart 1: Postpositivist New Paradigm Inquiry, 2005, Patti Lather and Elizabeth St. PierreChart 2: Major Interpretive Paradigms Chart, 2006, Wanda Pillow and Annel Medina, eds.NotesBibliographyIndex

"The gift of this text is the seriousness with which Lather brings feminist poststructural thinking to bear on urgent issues of knowledge creation as they relate to actual lives. Who wouldn't love a book that asks for a 'less ascetic, pious science,' gets naked methodologically and otherwise, and draws on theological writings?" — Susan Talburt, author of Subject to Identity: Knowledge, Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education"Lather opens up to full scrutiny her own work as an ethnographer, including stuck places, false starts, and dead ends. This deconstruction allows the reader to see the usefulness of working the ruins. She puts 'post' ideas to work in terms of what research means and does, and posits 'getting lost' as a way of knowing and thus enriches feminist methodology, critical ethnography, and philosophy of science. This book made me hopeful, for the first time in a long while, that social science after the critique of science is possible." — Mary Margaret Fonow, coeditor of Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research