I hear voices in Paul and Marfo’s article

I am reading Mazzei’s “Following the Contour of Concepts Toward a Minor Inquiry” (2017, Qualitative Inquiry) and cannot help but think of Paul and Marfos article as a performance. Theirs is not a plea to their fellow professors and scholars to prepare a new generation of educational researchers ready for interdisciplinary research and well versed in philosophies that undergird their own work as well as the others. Their voice sounds like a voice of parents burdened by the inevitable pull of age-appropriate generativity. They are clearly made into who they are with voices of all our shared scholarly ancestors, as evident from their excellent historical background overview. We all belong to the same bloodline, that much is clear.  I hear them concerned with their legacies, though not in a vain, superfacial fashion. They see their place in history of research as active participants with moral and ethical responsibility to pass the flame of their labors to new hands. May they be worthy. Yet, Paul and Marfo are also observers, slightly off center, with an excellent vantage point:  were they always there, or did they move to this spot later in their careers? They did not admit to their own folly of unchallenged obedience to their disciplinary traditions, but they did not deny committing acts of methodological loyalty, either… were they ever blindly loyal, or were they always interdisciplinaries at heart, and how did they resolve their risks? Funny how suddenly my own fears of finding a job and my discussions of risks (both real and imaginary) that sour my postqual ideas seem old.  The very fabric educational research is weaved with risks and experimentation. I fedl connected to Paul and Marfo, and to others…

Paul and Marfo’s are voices of self designated drivers who witnessed an academic brawl between the members of qual or quant camps.

They are two citizens exercising parrhesia in a troubled Greek city state, warning of their fellow citizens’ follies.

Who are Paul and Marfo? Why did they write what they wrote? Who was their target audience? How does their voice meet with our collective voice of present day students and professors in COE? Is there a dialogue? An agreement? A disapproval? A generational disconnect?