Conference Agenda

My dissertation inquiries into Palestinian-American high school students’ perceptions of self. I wanted to capture how they expressed their vibrancy, complexities, and nuance, Yet, I encountered a methodological problem as I couldn’t adequately contextualize their cultural, social, and even religious backgrounds, “many scholars often struggle to conceptualize or articulate that problem and complexity” (Tesar, 2020, p. 224). Present methodologies, I found, didn’t capture the complexities weaving throughout and in-between the spatial, temporal, physical, and emotional contexts between their global and local connections.

The wobble spurred by this problem nudged me. Wobble “is a calling to attention, a provocation of response” (Fecho, 2011, p. 70). This impulse can “lead to creative insights or activities” (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 122). I believed I could expand narrative methodologies, but I felt I was flying to close to the sun. My ambition to create conflicted with my ability to execute. As Hackett et al., (2018) claim, “good academic research should push boundaries, and experiment with ways of thinking that have not been thought” (p. 486). My initiation to create qissas as a methodology responds to the invitation for “scholars to create their own unique, creative paths based on the issue at hand, in relationship with ourselves and others, interanimated with dialogic thought” (White & Janfada, 2025, p. 45).

I will present how qissas invokes a Bakhtinian dialogical philosophy of an ‘ideological becoming’ that explores the multiplicities and diversities of Arab-American individuals. This dialogic impulse also extends, diversifies, and adds range to research on Arab Americans that has so often portrayed them through narrow perspectives. Furthermore, as a narrative methodology, qissas implores critical researchers to examine how Arab individuals are continuously shaped, reshaped by the social world and other context they live in through its storytelling function.