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Originality and Knowledge Reproduction in Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research: Doing Cross-Cultural Ethnography of East Asian Students in South-Central Appalachia

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Despite growing concerns about originality and knowledge production in interdisciplinary qualitative research (IQR), persistent challenges to publishable scholarship have been associated with the deferral of research projects, alongside rapid shifts in research trends, paradigms, and agendas. Notable concerns include ethnographers’ temporal cessations of fieldwork, dissatisfaction with the inconclusive results, and potentially limited theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications during the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition to the post-pandemic era. The two co-authors from the United States and China in this paper also encountered these challenges. Thus, they revisited their data from a long-term cross-cultural ethnographic project on East Asian students in South-Central Appalachia in the U.S. as an exemplar. The authors consider liberal practicality, pragmatism, and co-constructivism, as well as transnational identity, positionality, and knowledge reproduction, as philosophical assumptions and interpretive frameworks. They present specific procedures for adding a missing chapter to their long-term IQR. They contemplate ways to bolster cross-cultural ethnography, promoting scholarly conversations about the roles of reflexivity, reciprocity, and layered accounts, alongside available data sources, recontextualization, and emergent themes. Overall, this paper offers methodological implications for adding the missing chapter in publishable scholarship. The authors also suggest actionable agendas for follow-up research that culminate in the most overarching findings by recontextualizing their ethnographic data.
DOI: 10.1177/16094069261458979
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,650
OpenAlex ID: W7165045952
FWCI:
Cites: 39
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