Qualitative Inquiry in the Making: A Minor Pedagogy

Abstract

This article builds on Mazzei’s concept of minor inquiry to advance the concept of a minor pedagogy. We do so by folding poststructural theory into the evidence of experience, spotlighting a collective enunciation of the pedagogical event among individuated concepts, speakers, and moments. These pedagogical events are at once quotidian and more than one. In this spacetime individuation falls away, and the production of qualitative research expertise becomes a function of the entanglement of human and more-than-human pedagogues. At the level of the everyday, we recount our experiences in a doctoral program as professor and advisor (Lisa) and student and advisee (Laura). These experiences are selections from our (continuing) joint encounters with qualitative inquiry instruction. Enfolding these everyday pedagogical-theoretical practices of qualitative inquiry produces minor pedagogy, and minor pedagogy produces these folds. As such, minor pedagogy is a pedagogy of the ontological turn.