Resistant Reading
Also known as: Reading Against the Grain, Resistant Reader
A critical reading method, originally articulated by feminist literary theorist Judith Fetterley, that refuses the interpretive framework an author invites the reader to adopt and instead reads texts for what they silence, marginalise, or explain away. In HCI and accessibility research, resistant reading is used as a meta-analytic technique to extract participant quotes and behaviours from published studies as primary data, independent of how the original authors framed them — surfacing "archived resistance": testimony that was recorded but misread through deficit paradigms.
Category: Research Methods · Research Methodology · critical disability studies · critical theory
Related: Testimonial Injustice · Feminist HCI · Critical Gerontology