Post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialist turn: implications for sport, health and physical culture research

Abstract

In this article, I examine the ‘turn to’ post-qualitative inquiry (PQI), new materialism and post-humanist theories to consider the challenges of, and implications for, doing research in sport, health and physical culture. The term ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ indicates a decisive departure from the ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions that have informed the humanist interpretive tradition of qualitative research. Moving beyond a theory/method divide, PQI draws its methodological inspiration from critical post-humanist debates concerned with how ‘matter’ is thought and constituted through entanglements of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects and practices. Such a shift reorients thinking around relational questions about the material-discursive forces co-implicated in what bodies can ‘do’ and how matter ‘acts’, rather than a concern with what ‘is’ a body or the agentic meaning of experience. I discuss how these new styles of thought reorient our onto-epistemological assumptions and theory–method approaches through engagement with PQI within (and beyond) sport, health and physical culture scholarship.