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2023 Annual Conference of the Asian Qualitative Inquiry Association: Post-Oriental Qualitative Research and Lives of Asian Peoples, Suncheon, South Korea, 13 - 14 October 2023, pp.1-4
This essay inquiries specific questions about post-orientalism paradigm and the
emergence of qualitative research in Asian academic circles. In many
scholarship of the Eastern societies, positivist and modernist theories of the
18 th and 19 th centuries have been adopted because of national and cultural
transformation efforts as well as a recognition response to the scholarship of
the West. In social, cultural and history studies documentation and recording as
a method of building Orientalist discourse have been largely used and
legitimized. The British Travelogues’ recordings about Turkey, for example, was
one of the prominent records legitimizing the Orientalist way of seeing and
speaking about the Orient. Late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however
have witnessed other modes of responses from the intellectuals especially in
the non-Western communities. This study examines theoretical and
methodological approaches of qualitative research advocated to post-
Orientalist thoughts and works. Selected theories and scholarly works from
Iran, Turkey and India were compiled to make an analysis about post-
Orientalist surge in the Eastern intellectual world. Beginning from Edward Said,
Hamid Dabashi, Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha’s theories of post-Orientalism,
particular inferences and critics were made on the post-Orientalist research
produced in the Eastern academics, especially to those center immigration,
social justice, feminism, curriculum studies and knowledge production and
others. Criticism was put on the approaches that somehow reduce post-
Orientalism into anti-Western ideologies or replace it with one type of national
ideology or religious conviction.