This book provides guidance and lessons from when research doesn't go as planned. It includes narratives from researchers that provide real world experiences of how they navigated challenges, as well as their considerations in doing so.

Todd Ruecker is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA.

Vanessa Svihla is Associate Professor with appointments in Organization, Information & Learning Sciences and Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of New Mexico, USA.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Sanitized Research Descriptions and Messy Realities: A Story of Contrasts

Chapter 2: The Wheels of Bureaucracy Go Round and Round

Chapter 3: Research Methods for Reaching Urban Students from Groups Underrepresented in STEM Disciplines

Chapter 4: Chasing the Team: Participant Recruitment Strategies for Qualitative Research into Student-Athlete Writers

Chapter 5: Navigating Administrator-Researcher Roles: Developing Recruitment Strategies for Conducting Programmatic Assessment with Diverse Undergraduate and Graduate Writers

Chapter 6: The Predicament of 'Being There': Conflict and Emotional Labor

Chapter 7: Researchers or Service Providers? A Case of Renegotiating Partnership in a Research-Practice Partnership

Chapter 8: Representation and Emotion: Researching in the Rural U.S. in a Politically Polarized Time

Chapter 9: Criss-Cross Applesauce, "Where are you from?" and Other Intellectual Challenges

Chapter 10: Thinking Backward and Forward: Everyday Interruptions in School-Based Research

Chapter 11: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Obstacles and Progress in Conducting Research in Elementary Classrooms

Chapter 12: On Pursuing Quixotic Goals: What are Worthwhile Interruptions to Research?

Chapter 13: Excessive Peer Review and the Death of an Academic Article

Chapter 14: Broader Impact Versus Intellectual Merit in the Dissemination Process

Chapter 15: "There are Notable Linguistic Problems": Publishing as a Non-Native Speaker of English

Afterward: What Interruptions Can Tell Us About the Nature of Qualitative Educational Research