Deconstructing dissemination: dissemination as qualitative research

This article offers a critique of dissemination models
that are based on technical rationalist ontologies. We argue that
such models privilege a particularly narrow set of meaning and in
consequence preclude other ways through which we might imagine
dissemination acts. Our article therefore seeks to deconstruct
dissemination in order to illuminate the ethical, political and
communicative issues that lie at the heart of dissemination practices
and to offer a range of alternative ways that dissemination might be
conceptualized. These issues are illustrated through a series of
vignettes that are drawn from research in the fields of education,
health and social care. These focus on the everyday features of
qualitative research that are more usually discussed in relation to
substantive issues of methodology rather than dissemination per se.
These vignettes are designed to demonstrate how dissemination is
present at the very moment of conceptualizing research and that it
continues in ways we have yet to explore well after the formal stages
of research are complete.