My name is Zed Zhipeng Gao; I am assistant professor of psychology at the American University of Paris. I was humbled to receive the Distinguished Early Career Contributions in Qualitative Inquiry, knowing all the ground-breaking intellectual heritages that I am indebted to. In this short essay, according to the kind invitation of The Score’s editor, I briefly introduce my research related to the award. In the meantime, I discuss a few advantages of qualitative inquiry in my opinion, hopefully without being self-indulgent. The central message I would like to convey is that qualitative inquiry sustains a creative, interdisciplinary space that enables cross-pollination between psychological research and other fields, such as philosophy, history, sociology, and politics (Teo, 2017).
I first came into contact with qualitative inquiry when studying “reflexivity,” namely psychologists’ critical self-reflection on how his/her subjectivity might impact the research process (such as the choice of research topic and the interpretation of data). To a certain degree, this research responds to Leary’s (1979) call for re-establishing the link between psychology and philosophy. On the one hand, my project is rooted in social epistemology, especially feminist standpoint epistemology, to disrupt the ideal of objectivity which requires the researcher’s subjectivity to be screened out from the research process. On the other, my project draws heavily on qualitative findings about subjectivity to feed back to the philosophy of science.
My doctoral dissertation was on the history of psychology in China’s communist movement. I examine how Chinese psychologists, under political pressure, repudiated American and Soviet schools before developing their own revolutionary brand toward the goal of creating a new generation of socialist human. As known to those familiar with China’s history, the idea of “new socialist human” was a utopia turned into dystopia. My historical project resonates with qualitative inquiry in several ways. Historiography aims to investigate how events of the past were contingent on contextual factors, such as, in the case of my research, the influence of Chinese traditional culture and the political urgency brought by the Cold War. Instead of relying on generalizable models or laws, as a historian, I am interested in specific phenomena in the local milieu. This is why I choose to focus on a particular leftist university located in Beijing that champagned the radicalization of academic research nation-wide. These research strategies reflect qualitative thinking. Further, at the micro level, I find qualitative research skills, especially those from discourse analysis, useful in decoding archival texts which tend to be shrouded in ideology and censorship. Extending from my doctoral research, I studied China’s post-communist transformation: such as how different generations’ memories of a communist hero drastically differ from one another in reflection of China’s rapid social changes; and how the Chinese assessment of “truth” in relation to “propaganda” differs from the Western liberal-democratic perspective. I would not have been able to make inroads into these topics without collaboration with sociologist Katherine Bischoping (Bischoping & Gazso, 2016). Through working with Bischoping over years, I learned how to use fieldwork, interviewing, and narrative analysis to approach social issues from a psychological angle. Most importantly, I learned about sociologists’ branch of social psychology, which, in contrast with the experimental tradition in psychology, tends to situate psychological phenomena more aptly in interactional contexts, symbolic systems, and social structures.
Next, I studied Chinese immigrants in relation to politics, such as nationalism, racism, and neoliberalism. I find qualitative thinking helpful in explicating the richness of texts and situating them in political contexts. It enables me to analyze, for example, when Vancouver’s Chinatown was described as an “ulcer” that was “lodged like a piece of wood in the tissues of the human body” and when coronavirus was dubbed as “communist virus,, how these metaphors animate political discourses and to what end. Qualitative analysis also permits me to unpack the complexity of Chinese immigrants’ circumstances. For example, I argue that Chinese immigrants have been recently experiencing “double unbelonging.” That is, in addition to Sinophobia fuelled by trade war and pandemic, Chinese immigrants also face exclusion from an increasingly nationalist China.
Bringing together these varied research themes – China, Chinese immigrants, the Cold War, and globalization, I recently started exploring the capacity of qualitative inquiry in addressing geopolitics. I edited a special issue in the Journal Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science. The interdisciplinary contributions conceptualize Chinese psychology as a “glocal” phenomenon, namely that it displays both global and local characteristics at once (Gao, 2022). On another front, my colleague Thomas Teo and I are in the process of wrapping up a special issue in Theory & Psychology on the psychology of deglobalization. This special issue covers a number of topics such as Brexit, the U.S.-China trade war, xenophobia and nationalism. In both projects, qualitative inquiry plays an indispensable role in providing the conceptual frameworks and analytic strategies needed for understanding geopolitics. In working on these projects, I am tremendously grateful of the outpouring support from the qualitative inquiry community and look forward to more collaboration in the future.