Theorizing voice: toward working otherwise with voices

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the ways in which ‘voice’ has been engaged, defined and valorized in qualitative research and argues that alternative imaginings and conceptualizations of ‘voice’ are needed if we are to engage seriously with the material, embodied and contradictory dynamics of qualitative research encounters. In the paper, I argue that new materialist reconfigurings enable a productive reconceptualization of voice as a transindividual process that is not located in individual bodies but is fundamentally relational. A key focus is on how such a reconceptualization of voice can be translated into modes of qualitative praxis which allow the sociomaterial, embodied and ideological overdetermination of voices, stories and accounts to be foregrounded. I argue that analytic and representational strategies that preserve contradiction, heterogeneity, performativity, dialogicality and fleshy embodiment are central to efforts to engage and work otherwise with voices. To this end, three strategies are outlined, namely: (1) embodied listening, (2) multivocality tools and (3) tracing viscous voices. These strategies are shown, via worked examples, to be productive analytic strategies that can be utilized when trying to work otherwise with voices in qualitative research.