Contributors to this Critical Intervention forum turn to lived and envisioned sexual experience and desire to theorize sexual potentiality. Collectively, we perform what we term “critical erotic/a.” Informed by Audre Lorde, the erotic is a unit of measure engaging the space between what is , as a result of structural constraints, and what can be through the envisioned removal of the same. The erotic serves as a critical theoretical means of focusing the sexual experiences and desires we narrate and perform in what is commonly termed “erotica.” Conjoining the two, critical erotic/a provides a narrative platform for theorizing and performing lived and envisioned sexual experience and desire.

In this essay we share a musical performance ethnography, titled Under One Roof , as an example of one approach to critical arts-based research. The piece stems from commissioned research that took the form of an ethnography of an urban-supported housing scheme for people over 50 years of age. We discuss some tensions of conducting radical democratic performative work within a political climate characterized by the commodification of knowledge and marketization of science. This context provides a backdrop to subsequent reflections around performing praxis through a critical political and cultural engagement. Specifically, we consider how Under One Roof challenges dominant stories about homelessness, poverty, discrimination, alcohol and drug misuse, marginalization, and aging through privileging personal stories. We consider how students’ participation through readings of the script during lectures made it possible, in Henry A. Giroux’s terms, to “connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems.” 1

In this essay, I work with the stories and artwork generated by a small group of visual art therapists who came together in a collective biography workshop. All of the participants, including the author, specialize in end-of-life and palliative art therapy. As a collective, we worked to bring our experiences back to our bodies through stories, art-making, and writing, to explore how working with people in the last days, weeks, or months of their lives affects us. In this essay I ask: What happens when stories paint pictures, and when pictures paint stories, to make visible our experiences of death, vulnerability, and love—experiences that might otherwise have been impossible to know?

By highlighting a collaborative praxis between performative interviewing and affect theories, this essay theorizes interpretive discernment as an orientational and conceptual foundation that paves the way for performative interviewing. Interpretive discernment—the process of sensing and interpreting affective registers—encompasses both a methodological orientation and an analytical heuristic. We argue that interpretive discernment builds an interpretive architecture that expands our vocabulary, heightens our ability to listen for the affective in interviews, homes in on methodological nuances that enrich critical qualitative approaches to interviewing, and provides a structure to performative interviewing analysis.

This essay explores our journey to a new comparative qualitative data analysis and writing method. In attempting to compare our separate qualitative youth work-life research, our analysis was stymied by traditional qualitative coding, writing conventions, and comparison norms. Our comparative research literature review revealed restrictions for our goals and ultimately inspired our new analysis and writing method called a “comparative constructed focus group.” We use a post-coding approach to connect participants in communication via a retrospectively constructed focus group and subsequent researcher dialogue. Our method enriches qualitative analysis and comparative writing by surfacing richer nuances and departures in participants’ communication and creates future potential for intersectional analysis.