Qualitative research has extended the boundaries of legitimate knowledge by including the insights of "subjects", valuing the voices of groups that have been excluded from telling their stories, seeing the complex ways researchers may be positioned in relation to other research participants, and becoming more diverse in their views of validity and reliability. Gitlin argues that these extensions have been a powerful force in furthering a politics of inclusivity within the knowledge production process. While this politic is argued to be important and critical in the development of qualitative methodologies, Gitlin claims it is time to look at what might lie on the other side of a politics of inclusivity. He does so by using an emergent form of inquiry he calls educational poetics. Moving to the borderlands between the educational and aesthetic communities, this political humanist form of inquiry is centered on having commonsense become an object on inquiry with the purpose to fostering relations of freedom. (Contains 3 notes.)