Jessica Nina Lester

Jessica Nina Lester (she/her) is a Professor of Qualitative Methodology in the Qualitative & Quantitative Methodology Program in the School of Education at IUB. Having been trained in cultural studies and qualitative research methodologies, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to much of her work, including both the methodological and substantive foci in her research program. In Jessica’s methodological work, she publishes in areas related to critical approaches to qualitative method/ology, with a particular focus on discourse and conversation analysis methods, digital tools/spaces in qualitative research, and disability in critical qualitative inquiry. In her substantive research, Jessica has sought to examine and illustrate how everyday and institutional language use makes visible what and who becomes positioned as normal and abnormal in relation to the oft taken-for-granted normality-abnormality binary. Most recently, she co-authored the book, Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World (Sage, 2022), and co-edited the volume, Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021). She teaches qualitative method/ology courses and mentors graduate students in qualitative inquiry from a range of disciplines.