Abstract
This paper contributes to the intersections of post qualitative methods, digital methods, and internet studies, by describing the becoming of a digital posthuman visual method. I use posthuman autoethnography to argue that in the production of this method, the “auto” or my academic selfhood is decentered and entangled amidst an assemblage of material, discursive, and affective forces such as neoliberalism, Trump era terror, and dataism. I introduce a multitude of data points typically not made to matter but through which these material, discursive and affective forces importantly flowed in this production of this method: emails, personal correspondences, restaurant conversations, self-reflection, conferences talks and responses to conference talks. I focus specifically on the moments where the values and principles of feminist posthumanism were jarred and destabilized or where I was made to choose between foregoing my values or redesign my method and myself as methodologist. I argue academics have a response-ability to show both the forces at play behind the becoming of qualitative methods and knowledge in academia.
Highlights
In this paper I provide a feminist posthuman autoethnography of the becoming of a research method
Since the term autoethnography is premised on the humanist notion of the “self”—an “auto” upon which we can reflect and write—and posthumanism is premised on a decentered subject or the becoming of the subject, the classic mode of autoethnography in qualitative inquiry looks significantly different from a posthuman perspective
I will show that the material machinery of novel qualitative methods is never distinct from the political of the situated everyday because the research method is never separate from the complex, decentered subjectivity of the methodologist
Summary
Postqualitative research methods begin with certain claims that are similar to posthumanism more broadly. Subjectivity is not a singular bounded, fixed, and static phenomenon, but rather, it is always a threading and knotting of historical and imagined future material-discursive entanglements This rethinking of subjectivity forces a rethinking of the researcher’s subjectivity, and not that of the participants in the research. It may slip backward in time to former situated and knotted moments of subjectivities where different material, discursive and affective forces flowed It may reflect on research reflexivity in a posthuman manner, incorporating thoughts on the forces of production of the text itself—a sort of posthuman cracking of the 4th wall as the text itself comes to reveal its own becoming (Lenz Taguchi, 2012; Warfield, 2018). Since agency emerges no longer from the singular self, space must be made for other “things” to speak: vital matter (Bennett, 2010), what we may call objects, spaces, multiple media broadly (the materiality of discourses), like scripts and mass media, songs, poetry, visual and performance art, memories (Fox, 2016), diaries and memoirs, bodies and body parts (Raun, 2016), technologies (Warfield, 2018), text messages, social media posts, online forum postings, and all sorts of ways that feelings (Kuntz and Presnell, 2012) entangle with, through, and in relation with these material and discursive assemblages
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