In the Prelude I mentioned that this book is not the one I envisioned when I began this project. This is not the first time in my research career that I had an inkling of a certain kind of project that morphed into something else. Indeed, the same could be said of all of my past work about inequality and education: without fail, the process of reflexive qualitative research has led me to rethink and reshape my questions, my interpretations, and my understanding of my roles and responsibilities as a researcher. In this “Postlude,” I offer a personal meditation on these issues, which veers at times into the biographical as well as the methodological, the ethical, and the aesthetic. By doing so, my hope is to more thoroughly account for the choices I’ve made in the present work, but also to offer a portrayal of reflexivity in action over time—a process that is necessarily particular, but also intersubjective, permeable, and continually evolving.

Style, not speed: a resonant theme

It is a fair question to ask whether or not the early life of a researcher is of interest to readers of an essay on methods. But the shaping influence of youth exerts itself in uncountable ways, and as the data and characters in this book suggest, the imagery of childhood offers powerful tools for reflexive analysis. My aim in this section is not so much to relay a memory as it is to describe the earliest appearance of a theme that has come to characterize my work in what has come to be known as slow sociology. (Skeptical or impatient readers may find it preferable to skip to the next section.)

In the summer before I started fifth grade, my family made one of our many moves, this time from Texas to New Jersey. To help us meet new kids and make friends, my mother signed my younger brother and me up for the swim team at the town's public pool. I did not know what to expect—in Texas we had learned to swim in a nearby lake, which I found preferable to a swimming pool's closed walls and chlorinated water. But I loved to swim, and I dutifully attended swim practice every morning.