Engaging with Humanist Qualitative Research as a Community Journalist

Terrence Fraser
Nov 7 · 3 min read

Lisbeth Barbary worked with an artist to create a comic book that’s relevant to the lives of bi women. I appreciated that the comic followed one person’s narrative, instead of trying to tackle bisexuality in the abstract — or through the lens of multiple characters. The story was easy to follow.

This makes me think about my own and goals. In addition to tackling hard news stories impacting the Caribbean community, I hope to incorporate personal stories and narrative profiles of people in the Caribbean and the Caribbean-American community.

I’m a video producer and I think about Great Big Story (a subsidiary of CNN) a lot. Great Big Story create short (less than 6 mins) web videos that follow unique characters. I hope to do that work in my community and spotlight people who are making an impact or people who are up-and-coming. I want Caribbean people to see themselves reflected in non-fiction media consumption.

As a black gay male from a working class background, I’ve already internalized many of Barbary’s points about questioning objectivist foundations of truth. I often draw from black queer, indigenous and feminist traditions that she discusses, and have implemented them in my ideas and work. It’s useful to see how Barbary’s work navigates and pushes against patriarchal and white supremacist foundations of her academic field. At the same time, I’m much more keen to recognize the work of black radicals during the 50s to 80s, who laid the theoretical conversation for these conversations. People like Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Kimberley Crenshaw, bell hooks Cathy Cohen just to name a few — many of whom Brbary mentions in her section on theory.

These are women who identified and railed against ideological structures of white supremacy — specifically normality and objectivity as it relates to how we decide what is truth and justify it to others.

I also find my inspiration from women like Claudia Jones, a Trinidian-American immigrant who was deported from the U.S. for her communist political organizing, who founded a Caribbean newspaper called the West Indian Gazette.

I did appreciate Barbary’s intervention of elevating the need for small sample sizes and in-depth interviews to understand the nuances of people — especially as a big part of the job of journalists is to connect with, deeply understand and accurately convey the stories of others.

I also learned a lot about some best practices for collecting data through the interview process. It really puts into focus the subjective process of ethnographic study. A story may be co-created, but is being transmitted through the lens of the author’s experience and process.

  • Personal reflections (personal experiences, reflections, insecurities)
  • Procedural memos (collection procedures, organizational strategies)
  • Analytic memos (informal analysis, categorizations, themes, topics for future inquiry)

One of the most salient of Barbary’s interventions to the type of storytelling and community building work I want to do is the creative analytic approach. As a methodology and easy checklist to reference, it will be really helpful for me:

Substantive Contribution: Does it help us gain deeper understanding?

Aesthetics: Is it interesting? Enticing? Unique?

Reflexivity: Is it clear this is my interpretation?

Impact: Does it make the audience more curious? Do we care about the characters?

Expression of A Reality: Is it credible to the participants’ experience? Can outsiders feel or identify with the emotions?

Rigorous: Is it grounded in rigorous/ systematic data collection?

    Terrence Fraser

    Written by

    Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
    Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
    Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade