Collective, Vulnerable, Nascent (Post) Qualitative Inquiry-Writing

Abstract

As a group of multidisciplinary postgraduate research students and teachers emerging as a “we,” we read, discussed, and then, without planning to do so, responded in writing to the textual provocations of three post qualitative texts. We picture ourselves as a “classing,” a “becoming class” (Meirieu, 2020, para. 1.). We are a study-group-thinking-writing experimentation; vulnerable, wobbling and joyously grappling to (re)shape (our) post qualitative inquiries. The experiment offered a scholarly place to critically, creatively, and softly curate post qualitative questions and wonderings. The writings below offer a lure into our nascent post-qualitative vulnerabilities. The purpose of this paper is to offer an exploration of what it means “to do” post qualitative research. This includes both feeling-out what post qualitative research “is” and understanding that there is no extant single powerful definition and that post qualitative writing is likewise without set generic rules. In this paper we experiment with both the definitional boundaries of post qualitative research and the conventions of how to understand and come to write it. This paper is an incipient materialisation from a pedagogical event.