Post-qualitative Research Research Articles

Disruptions of Post-Qualitative Education Research: Tensions and Openings

This article speaks up for those who are feeling unheard as post-qualitative inquirers. It also speaks with hope, helpfully, to those in positions of supervision and mentorship to help student researchers work across post paradigms, becoming allies with those who are attempting to experiment with new theory, figurative forms, and processes. Addressing some of the tensions we have experienced between traditional qualitative and emerging post-qualitative researchers enables us to specifically name disruptions that block, silence, and misalign. We also share openings as possibilities that remain with the tension and do not offer advice or recipes to follow. This is exactly the type of reductive process that post-qualitative research is trying to circumnavigate. In the hullabaloo, this article is a clarion call for the academy to open up education research and make room for researchers who are unbounded by the invented rules of humanist tradition and familiarity.

The Unsettlement of Tourism Studies: Positive Decolonization, Deep Listening, and Dethinking Today

Recent years have witnessed the rise of many new and/or corrective approaches across the social sciences that have challenged the received assumptive frameworks through which the world is inspected and interpreted methodologically. Late decades have brought the rise of a new generation of scholars who work through "resistance politics" approaches in pursuit of, for instance, social justice causes or posthumanist convictions. The purpose of this article (and its two companion articles in later issues of Tourism, Culture & Communication) is to capture the possibilities and the tensions in the development and cultivation of such "disruptive" or "promiscuous" research acts, and to conceptually situate them within Tourism Studies—the domain that covers the "worldmaking"/"declarative power" of tourism to interpret and inscribe the peoples, places, pasts, and presents across the globe. In principally mining the neoteric and landmark text Disruptive Qualitative Inquiry (Brown, Carducci, and Kuby), an attempt is made to locate the interruptive craft of such unfolding disruptive thinking of and about tourism as rising numbers of Tourism Studies researchers themselves seek to decolonize their methodologies from the stranglehold of Western Modern Science and reverberate more positively with populations that have been subjugated or suppressed through tourism. In building up to the provision of a 30-term glossary (cumulatively provided across the said three companion articles) delineating the fresh thinking that is involved in such disruptive inquiry, this first article targets approaches that beckon forms of interpretive plural knowability, which demand the fluid acumen to map the less-fixed/fast-changeable populations of our time, and which are thereby decent yet rigorous in their critical multilogicality ; hence, this first article glossary covers terms such as "reversing the binaries," "promiscuous methodologies," and "working the hyphens." In this innovative light, the second companion article glossary identifies conceptualizations such as "guided wandering," "postqualitative research," and "survivance" in order to expand the ontology and epistemology of Tourism Studies, while the glossary in the third article offers conceptualizations such as "uncrossable methodolodies," "helicopter research," and "stuckness," which—in their different ways—speak to the transformative rhetorics of futurity for tourism and the peoples and places of the world.

A performative paradigm for post-qualitative inquiry

In this article, the authors explore and contribute to producing a performative research paradigm where post-qualitative as well as artistic research might dwell and breathe. Entering a thread of discussion that started with Haseman’s A manifesto for performative research in 2006, and building on their own friction-led research processes at the edges of qualitative research, the authors plug in with performativity, non-representational theories and methodologies, post-qualitative inquiry and post approaches. A performative paradigm for post-qualitative inquiry is proposed, where knowledge is viewed as knowledge-in-becoming as the constant creation of difference through researcher entanglement with the research phenomenon and wider world. A performative paradigm produces a space for movement, (artistic) freedom, (post-qualitative) experimentation and inclusion. A performative research paradigm also offers provocations that shake long-established notions about what research is and should be. Within a performative research paradigm, learning/be(com)ing/knowing is always in-becoming – as is the performative paradigm itself.

Immanent cinematic girlhoods: the ordinary affects in/of Eighth Grade

ABSTRACT This article engages an immanent ontology to theorize how the film Eighth Grade produced affective intensities for me through the detailed, fluid rendering of a teen girl. Drawing on Kathleen Stewart’s concepts of worlding and ordinary affects, I analyze how Eighth Grade resists the representational stasis of an autonomous protagonist to produce a teen girl embedded in and contingent on wider social and material cultures. As Kayla is not reduced to a “type,” movement is maintained through her relationality to a world enlivened beyond a static subjectivity. Eighth Grade thus escapes the oversimplifications common to many teen girl films in the twenty-first century, offering a singular example of immanent cinematic girlhood, or a girlhood in motion. I employ post qualitative inquiry to analyze two scenes that show how movement is generated through a vivid worlding produced by ordinary affects. I conclude with a discussion of the film’s feminist potential. If stasis creates homogeneity, then Kayla’s movement promotes heterogeneity, not only showing girlhood to be an irreducible, relational experience, but also opening space for unimagined girlhoods to emerge.

Rehumanizing Education: Teaching and Learning as Co-Constructed Reflexive Praxis

Teaching and learning are profoundly personal experiences, yet systems of education often prioritize ubiquitous agendas that alienate rather than engage. Creating space for individuals and their lived experiences has the capacity to transform the classroom from a place of containment to one of expansiveness. Resisting the tendency of education to think dichotomously about teaching/learning, theory/practice, and self/other, we engage here as two learners who happen to have shared a graduate program, one as teacher and one as student. Influenced by post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2017a; St. Pierre, 2017b) and post academic writing (Badley, 2019), we engage reflexively to consider the experience of this shared learning journey.

Commercialization processes within Swedish child and youth sport – a Deleuzioguttarian perspective

In the Nordic countries sport has a particular connection to civic society, and this is reflected in the Nordic governments ‘sport for all’ policies. The region also includes large voluntary non-profit sport organizations with an implicit monopoly on competitive sport. During the last decade scholars in Sweden have noted that commercial entrepreneurs have emerged in the child and youth sports landscape. However, empirical research on this phenomenon is scarce. Hence, in this article the aim is to map different commercial businesses and the services they offer on their websites. We make use of a Deleuzioguttarian inspired theory and method and a post-qualitative research practice, which is informed by an ontological (re)turn to realism(s) in social theory. We present four different commercial de-territorialization processes and discuss how they affect the Swedish Sport Confederation in different ways.

Radical Uncertainty Is Not Enough: (In)Justice Matters of Post-Qualitative Research

How can (post-)qualitative inquiry do justice in uncertain times? Post-qualitative inquiry, in its embrace of radical uncertainty, held promise for ethical and political responsibility in an entangled, hardly knowable world. Lately, we (authors) are doubtful of that promise. For over a year, through in-person and Zoom conversations, before and during the global pandemic, punctuated by weekly protests of a resurging Black Lives Matter movement, we reckoned with our hopes, doubts, dreams, and disappointments of justice in qualitative and post-qualitative inquiry. We reconstituted our dialogue in this paper around the topics most pressing to us: coming to justice, being wary of idols and ideology, and deciding what matters in post-qualitative inquiry. We came to the uneasy conclusion that, with no one to blame yet everyone responsible, the veneer of justice is peeling away from post-qualitative inquiry; that post-qualitative inquiry has, largely against its will, become a stable, divisive, and totalizing methodology; and that post-qualitative inquiry’s radical uncertainty has created the enabling conditions of indifference, apathy, and triviality. We urge (post-)qualitative inquirers to keep talking about justice and to balance a desire for post-theory with the responsibility for praxis, action, and decision-making.

“This Wave in the Mind”: Resonant Becomings in Reading-Writing Inquiry

How might one situate oneself in and respond to research literature in a way that does not assume traditional humanist research paradigms? In response, I engage in poetic inquiry through my readings of certain scholarly articles published in the field of postqualitative inquiry. I present two of them here, based on two articles that strike a rhythm in me; evocations are created and my voice merges with the existing voices in creating further lines of flight. The poetry helps me attune to inquiry and in turn inquiry is revealed as a sensitive attunement to the rhythms of life.

The grass is moving but there is no wind: Common worlding with elf/child relations

Drawing from the post-qualitative research in the dissertation, Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children’s Storytelling (Molloy Murphy, Animal magic, secret spells, and green power: More-than-human assemblages of children’s storytelling. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.7318, 2020), this article mobilizes common worlding pedagogies (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507–529, 2015) to research elf-child relations in an early childhood community. Informed in part by an assemblage of 1970s animated holiday specials, a cherished classroom book coauthored by an elf, (Fróði, What does it take to see an elf? The Elf Garden, 2018), and the popular commercial figure “Elf on a Shelf,” the 2–5 year-old child participants in this study practiced thinking and playing with elves using storytelling as a method of research and knowledge production. In this 12-week study, children’s elf figurations and stories offered a window into the complex and shifting more-than-human assemblages that constituted their everyday school life. The children’s relational encounters with elves were complexified at the nearby Children’s Arboretum where we discovered evidence of elves both living and dead. In the arboretum’s meadow, the children signaled the presence of elves to one another by saying, “the grass is moving but there is no wind.” These elusive and compelling figures came to be vital participants in the more-than-human socialities (Tsing, Anthropology and nature (pp. 27–42). Routledge, 2013) of our school community. Though entangled with Eurocentric/Euro-Western ideations in ways that deserve interrogation, the children’s process of attuning to elves generated new ways of “becoming witness” (Rose & van Dooren) to the land and its past/present inhabitants and envisioning just and caring relations with the more-than-human.

Implementation of balint group for a team who care patients with head and neck cancer in a service in Brazil: A proposal post qualitative research

IntroductionThe Balint group emerged at the Tavistock Clinic in London in the early 1950s. Its creator was a doctor and psychoanalyst Michael Balint. It consisted of a group process, with meetings among general practitioners, in which non-conscious aspects of the professional-patient relationship were approached. We present how a proposal for implementation of a Balint Group has emerged, specifically for physicians and nurses who care for cancer patients. Is is a consequence of results obtained from a qualitative study conducted by a student of the professional master’s degree linked to a Clinical Oncology.ObjectivesTo present a technical product, as required in a Brazilian professional master’s degree, as a result of research that studied reports of doctors and nurses who deal with usual difficulties of handling patients with HNC.MethodsThe group work is triggered by the report of a case brought by a participant, presenting a problem-situation in the management of his patient. The meeting leader seeks to understand the reactions reported by the presenter in the light of a psychodynamic approach.ResultsExpected results: the holding of a Balint group, perhaps monthly, in charge of a colleague who has knowledge in applied psychoanalysis, will allow insights to the participants who will bring them conditions to perceive “neurotic elements” in the relationship with their patient.ConclusionsFinal consideration: having accumulated decades of positive experience, Balint Groups must remain as an updated proposal for the work on emotional issues of professional teams, with emphasis on clinical services with the management of so-called “difficult patients”.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Caring In-Between: Events of Engagement of Preschool Children and Forests

This paper draws on process philosophy to imagine “care” as a collective practice of children and the forest in the context of Finnish early childhood education. By locating care in movement rather than an individual, the author challenges the notion of caring subjectivity and employs postqualitative inquiry to conceptually focus on an impersonal production of care. The author shows how care emerges in the between of children and forest in an outdoor learning environment and highlights what it continually produces. She concludes by discussing the need for a conceptual evolution of “care” in the philosophies of environmental and outdoor education.

“What happens in the fort, stays in the fort!”: Awakening Embodied Play Literacies through Fort Building in an Early Childhood Methods Classroom

Background/Context Neoliberalism has both feet firmly planted in educational contexts around the globe (United States, Australia, United Kingdom). Due to the precarious nature of unstructured play and its unwillingness to fit neatly into a neoliberal framework of quality and high returns on investments, play for play's sake has taken a backseat to standards, “evidence-based” curriculums, and high-stakes testing. These changes are often justified as a way to “mind the gap” or as a way to build a quality workforce in years to come, however, there is a large body of research (including a call from the Pediatrics Association) that suggests play for play's sake is necessary for wellbeing, humanization, and learning itself. Focus of the study In this study, I considered how teachers might get reacquainted with play as a practice in early childhood methods courses through engaging in fort building pedagogy. Specifically, I consider the ways an attunement to embodied play literacies opens up possibilities beyond the commodification of schooling associated with the affective forces of neoliberalism. This essay tries to better understand the ways fort building in particular, moves bodies away from stories of neoliberalism through experimentation and playful practice. Participants and Setting The teachers represented in this study range from soon-to-be teachers to practicing teachers in undergraduate and graduate methods courses in three different university classrooms across the Southeastern United States. The events that produced this data were part of weekly face-to-face class meetings. Research design This article uses narrative writing and thinking-with-theory as a postquali-tative research approach to better understand the ways fort building as an embodied play practice can work against the affective forces of neoliberalism in educational practice. Using action research, this article analyzes the happenings that took place during fort building pedagogy in several early childhood methods courses across the span of five years and three states. Data sources included: observational fieldnotes, written reflections, videos, audio recordings, and photographs. Conclusions Analysis illustrates the importance of teachers (preservice and inservice) getting reacquainted with playful practices from their early years (such as fort building) to unearth and reawaken embodied literacies of play. These reawakenings suggest that when teachers engage in such practices, they actively begin to resist neoliberal ideations of schooling through the process of making forts collectively with peers. The article concludes that fort building is a vital practice in making way for new stories in education and in remembering why play for play's sake is important in early childhood settings.

Introducing postqualitative inquiry in sport and exercise psychology

ABSTRACTIn recent years, qualitative research has gained popularity and legitimacy in sport and exercise psychology. However, this scientific discipline has not yet paid attention to postqualitative inquiry (PQI), despite the possibilities it offers for producing different knowledge and producing knowledge differently. The present article is the first attempt to rectify this lack of attention by offering a brief and partial sketch of PQI in the context of sport and exercise psychology. To start with, three of the basic propositions that enable PQI are described. These are: adopt a posthumanist view of ontology and the subject; engage with poststructuralism (necessarily) and new materialism (possibly); and think with concepts. Potential reasons for turning to PQI are then highlighted. Following from this, some perils and horizons for PQI are identified and discussed. The article concludes by presenting several reflections and recommendations to facilitate a progressive introduction of PQI in sport and exercise psychology.

Commentary for SI on Postqualitative Inquiry

Commentary for SI on Postqualitative Inquiry

The sociomaterial in archivist practices from post-qualitative research perspective

Life in society shows that we are made up of several elements that shape us and associate us with the world. Thus, it is necessary to study theoretical perspectives that are able to highlight the role played by a diverse range of actors, configuring themselves as an assembly of things. However, it is quite common to consider that in archival practices, humans are generally perceived in a hegemonic way, whose objects/things, documents, are always passive to the action of these humans. I bring performativity and post-qualitative research to the theoretical debate, because I understand that objects/things must also be included in the analysis of a phenomenon, as they make up the process by which a given phenomenon unfolds. Methodologically I presented post-qualitative research, based on a non-anthropocentric view, unmasking the ways in which we are rooted in humanist ideologies, post-qualitative research offers a way of being in the world that fits and can engage the tangle that the world is. I believe that non-humans can be carriers of practices and have performances, just like humans. We need to show how the things that people do, make people do things. I do not intend to place objects/things above humans, or vice versa, but between them and vice versa. These objects/things can be used by us humans, but they can also use humans and influence, change an archival social practice, which then is no longer particularly human. Społeczno-materialny aspekt praktyki archiwalnej z perspektywy badań postjakościowych Życie w społeczeństwie pokazuje, że składamy się z wielu elementów, któ­re nas kształtują i wiążą ze światem. Konieczne jest zatem badanie per­spektyw teoretycznych, które są w stanie uwypuklić rolę, jaką odgrywają różnorodne podmioty, konfigurujące się jako zbiór rzeczy. Dość powszech­nie uważa się, że w praktyce archiwalnej ludzie są zazwyczaj postrzegani w sposób hegemoniczny, a przedmioty/rzeczy, dokumenty są zawsze bier­ne wobec działań ludzi. Autorka wnosi do debaty teoretycznej performa­tywność i badania postjakościowe, stawiając tezę, że przedmioty/rzeczy muszą również zostać włączone do analizy zjawisk, gdyż są elementami składowymi procesu, w ramach którego dane zjawisko się rozwija. Od strony metodologicznej przedstawiono badania postjakościowe, oparte na nieantropocentrycznym punkcie widzenia, obrazujące sposoby, w jakich je­steśmy zakorzenieni w ideologii humanistycznej; badania postjakościowe oferują sposób bycia w świecie, który wpisuje się w skomplikowany sys­tem, jakim jest świat, i umożliwia angażowanie się w jego działanie. Autorka stwierdza, że nie-ludzie mogą być nosicielami praktyk i odgrywać role, tak samo jak ludzie. Pokazuje, w jaki sposób powstaje interakcja między ludź­mi a przemiotami, które wykonują. Nie stawia przedmiotów/rzeczy ponad ludźmi, ani odwrotnie, ale w relacji pomiędzy nimi. Przedmioty/rzeczy mogą być używane przez ludzi, ale mogą też „używać” ludzi i wpływać na archi­walną praktykę społeczną, która wówwczas nie jest wyłącznie wytworem ludzi.

Post Qualitative Research - Reality through the Antihierarchical Assemblage of non-Calculation

This paper presents an overview of the post qualitative research paradigm, tracing the main concepts that underpin it, and the way it opens up research to include the experiential. Research that tends to affect and the totality of existence. The cornerstone of post qualitative is its flat ontology—researcher, theory, and subject matter, form a non-hierarchical assemblage. The human and the non-human, material and immaterial, merge in a liminal entity. Nothing is considered as tainting, bar from the introduction of power relations. And this is the snare commanding caution. Academic approval is conducive to the misinterpretation of the theoretical pieces on post qualitative, of morphing them into authoritative theory, fixed points. Autonomy and the assemblage of theory from, and under lived experience, are the institutional elements of post qualitative. The introduction of any form of closure constitutes a lapse into the doppelgänger of what it set out to surmount.

The hidden labours of designing the Objective Structured Clinical Examination: a Practice Theory study.

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have become ubiquitous as a form of assessment in medical education but involve substantial resource demands and considerable local variation. A detailed understanding of the processes by which OSCEs are designed and administered could improve feasibility and sustainability. This exploration of OSCE design is informed by Practice Theory, which suggests assessment design processes are dynamic, social and situated activities. The overall purpose is to provide insights that inform on-the-ground OSCE administration. Fifteen interviews were conducted with OSCE academics and administrators from three medical schools in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. Drawing from post-qualitative inquiry, Schatzki's Practice Theory was used both as a sensibility and as an analytic framework. OSCE design was characterised by planning activities, administration activities, negotiation activities and bureaucratic activities; it involves significant and resource-intensive effort in negotiation and coordination. There was considerable local variation but at the same time activities were remarkably consonant across national boundaries. There was a tension between general understandings such as reliability and validity that underpin the OSCE and the improvisational practices associated with design and administration. Our findings highlighted the role of blueprints as a key coordinating artefact but with too many rules and procedures prompting cycles of bureaucracy and complexity. Emphasising coordination rather than standardisation might ease workloads, support adaptation to local environments and prevent an overly reductive approach to this assessment format.

Giving up and getting lost in Hanoi: playing with creative research methods in transnational contexts

ABSTRACT In this paper we share our experiences of working with creative research methods to explore HE teacher ‘becomings’ across a transnational education partnership between four universities, three in Vietnam and one in the United Kingdom. The work forms the qualitative phase of a two-year British Council Vietnam funded project. This phase of our research was concerned with HE teachers’ stories about their career trajectories, their concept making about professional learning and the value of post-qualitative research methods to collaborative research across substantially contrasting social, cultural and economic settings. Drawing on ideas from post-qualitative research practices we read, talked, walked and made together in a range of face to face and digitally mediated events that opened up conversations about methodology and generated a common body of shared empirical material about HE teachers ‘becomings’. We ‘followed the contours’ after Brinkman’s concept of ‘abduction’ and Maclure’s notion of ‘hot spots’ to interact with our materials in ways that challenge more orthodox approaches to qualitative research that centre on the primacy of data and coding. This approach encouraged us to relinquish the certainties, the ‘giving up’ in our title, of orthodox qualitative research traditions and disorientate ourselves, getting purposefully “lost„, in ways that foregrounded the socio-cultural and linguistic diversity of our research partnership. We share the outcomes, on-goings and provocations of our work and the significance for both HE workforce development and international teaching and research partnerships.

More Just Futures are Possible: Connecting Post Qualitative Inquiry and Social Movement Organizing

In this article, I explore how post qualitative inquiry can connect with social movement organizing in the United States to expand the scope of what’s possible for thought, action, and justice. I briefly review social movement organizing’s alignment with emancipatory theories and gesture toward the promise and importance of a collaboration between liberation struggles and theories that critique humanist and modernist thought. Poststructuralism, in particular, enables an exploration of that which might be but is not-yet and a deconstructive ethic of unsettling normalized categories, offering generative heuristics for thinking about power and justice without falling into descriptions that essentialize and homogenize. Post qualitative inquiry offers a starting point for considering how social movements might operationalize poststructural theories and theories of the ontological turn. It encourages experimentation and the creation of different ways to think/act in the face of not knowing what else to do. I argue that features of post qualitative inquiry can be useful not just in conventional research settings but also in the community organizing settings from which social movements often emerge.

A Politics of Witnessing: Definitional Ceremony as Social Justice Work in Academia

The work outlined in this article has in part evolved as a response to Mr. Behrouz Boochani’s call to academics to engage with his work. First, I propose academics consider a form of public engagement drawn from narrative practice as social justice work in academia. In the next section, I illustrate my argument with an Australian case by discussing (a) a peaceful resistance undertaken by the refugees on Manus Island through the lens of definitional ceremony, (b) a public witnessing response by Dr. Surma to the written account of Mr. Boochani of the resistance, and (c) his reply to this act of witnessing. I complement this with my own response to both scholars on account of witnessing their exchanges. In the final section of this article, I articulate in more detail how this proposition of conceiving social justice work in academia is based on a politics of witnessing and acknowledgment. I argue that its epistemological and ontological dimensions hold promise for post-qualitative inquiry and that narrative practices more generally, can assist us in performing relationally situated research.