Post-qualitative Research Research Articles

Conventional and Postqualitative Research: An Invitation to Dialogue

This article explores a question that was left mostly unanswered in a recent special issue of Qualitative Inquiry surveying the field of postqualitative research: How can conventional and post qualitative research coexist within the qualitative community? The importance of addressing this key question is first highlighted. Then, a possible answer is offered, which is: By promoting a new paradigm dialogue grounded in the principles of agonistic pluralism. Challenging the idea of consensus and harmonious coexistence, agonistic pluralism allows casting researchers with competing paradigmatic positions as adversaries or “friendly enemies,” which exist together in the same space without each sacrificing its beliefs about knowledge production. We invite members of the global qualitative community to explore this possibility.

Narrativa y Universidad: Aportaciones al debate desde un posicionamiento postcualitativo

Iniciamos este artículo describiendo cómo hemos llegado a la investigación postcualitativa, nuestro compromiso investigador en un mundo en permanente cambio y transformación, y cómo esto nos influye y afecta en nuestro devenir narrativo persiguiendo superar el binarismo docente/investigador. Dos interrogantes orientan nuestra indagación, el primero relacionado con la búsqueda del sentido a nuestra práctica narrativa con la apertura ontológica del giro postcualitativo y los debates tan interesantes que se están produciendo a su alrededor en el ámbito de la investigación educativa. Para dar respuesta al primero de estos interrogantes, a lo largo del texto presentamos y dialogamos con lo que ha supuesto para nosotros el giro postcualitativo y lo relacionamos con la investigación narrativa. El segundo interrogante está centrado en cómo reimaginar nuevas formas de comunicar nuestras investigaciones, conocimientos y experiencias. Por lo que más adelante, adoptando un estilo más rizomático, exploramos nuevas formas comunicativas con las audiencias, para conseguir, con la presentación de diferentes ensamblajes, implicar a las posibes lectoras y lectores como participantes activos en la búsqueda del sentido del texto y compartir lo que esta apertura ontologica nos permite pensar de nuestro compromiso narrativo: deconstructivo, democrático y decolonial.

Tensions, knots, and lines of flight: themes and directions of travel for new materialisms and environmental education

In this introduction to a special issue of Environmental Education Research on New Materialisms and Environmental Education, we begin with a brief overview to this publishing project and to scholarship on new materialisms and environmental education. Against this backdrop, we then discuss various themes of significance arising from the broader tumult of thought that occurs in the 17 papers that bring these areas into conversation. In brief, papers gathered in this collection illustrate a series of engagements with: (1) new empiricism and post-qualitative inquiry; (2) the meeting of politics, ethics, and decolonial theory with new materialisms; (3) conceptions of nature, environment, sustainability and the human subject; and (4) new materialisms as environmental pedagogy. We recognise that readers will imagine, detect and respond in diverse ways to the papers and the thematics on their own terms too, noting that other inclusions in the collection would likely have generated different patterns and affordances for insight, challenge and debate. Thus, we argue that in some senses, the collection must remain open rather than closed, while we also invite further contributions on the topics, that engage with what the collection does and does not offer, and to rework it. In other words, we trust our introduction underscores the immanent performativity expected of many of the new materialisms, and highlights their potential to forge axiological pathways away from dominant onto-epistemologies of environmental education research.

Flipping Methodology: Or, Errancy in the Meanwhile and the Need to Remove Doors

This article ponders two questions: What does “postqualitative” mean to you? Why do you think the “postqualitative” movement is important to the field of qualitative inquiry? In response, it poses a method/ology of errancy—a flipping methodology—that locates postqualitative research as an ethico-onto-epistemological political project of opening theory-practice spaces for differential matterings. Postqualitative flipping is not an individual undertaking, it is an ecology of practices, a resonation across bodies, a navigating of movement for a politics of change, in which even barely perceptible shifts possibilize new modes of thinking and unthinking, doing and undoing.

Post-Intentionally Considering Post-Qualitative Inquiry

I wrote this article during and immediately following what I have deemed a serenity quest, where I traveled quite aways from home, by myself, with not all that much pre-planning to “be with” myself. I use this particular moment I am living right now and some of what has been provoked and produced to work through the two questions this special issue is taking up: What does “post-qualitative” mean to you? And why do you think the “post-qualitative” movement is so important to the field of qualitative inquiry?

Labors of Reading in Post Qualitative Inquiry

This paper considers the role reading plays in post qualitative inquiry, arguing that because post qualitative inquiry is a derivative of poststructuralism, the philosophies of reading that are foundational to poststructuralism are then axiomatic to post qualitative inquiry. This is evidenced by Elizabeth St. Pierre’s relentless reminders to become students of poststructuralism before using post qualitative inquiry in one’s scholarship. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s philosophy of reading, this paper deconstructs post qualitative inquiry’s deep relationship to reading in order to critique the way this genre at times risks falling for glamour of high theory and foundational misconceptions about poststructuralism’s interrogation of subjectivity.

Landing in the Post Qualitative

This essay considers the field of postqualitative inquiry alongside Bruno Latour’s arguments for a new political landscape in his book Down to Earth. The postqualitative movement and Latour provide insight into what inquiry might look like in a postanthropocentric world, yet leave much unaddressed in terms of social justice and Western colonialism. These are challenges that this essay works through in an attempt to “land” social inquiry in a more sustainable and equitable fashion.

Making macaroni: classroom improv for transformative embodied critical literacy

PurposeIn this paper, the authors engage with embodied critical literacies through an exploration of the possibilities provided by the use of improvisational comedy (improv) in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to extend understandings of critical literacy to consider how embodied critical literacy may be transformative for both individual students and classroom assemblages. The research question asks: how might improv, as an embodied literacy practice, open up spaces for critical literacy as embodied critical encounter in classroom assemblages?Design/methodology/approachThe authors used case study methodology informed by post-qualitative research methods, and in particular, posthuman assemblage theory. Assemblage theory views the world as taking shape through the ever-shifting associations among human and more-than-human members of an assemblage. The case study took place in a sixth-grade classroom with 28 11-year-olds over a four-month period of time. Audio and video recordings provided the empirical materials for analysis. Using Bruno Latour’s three stages for rhizomatic analysis of an assemblage, the authors mapped the movements of participants in an assemblage; noted associations among those participants; and asked questions about the larger meanings of those associations.FindingsIn the sixth-grade classroom, the dynamic and emerging relations of the scene work and post-scene discussion animate some of the ways in which the practice of classroom improv can serve as a pedagogy that involves students in embodied critical literacy. In this paper, the authors are working with an understanding of critical literacy as embodied. In embodied critical literacy, the body becomes a resource for that attunes students to matters of critical importance through encounter. With this embodied attunement, transformation through critical literacy becomes a possibility.Research limitations/implicationsThe case study methodology used for this study allowed for a fine-grained analysis of a particular moment in one classroom. Because of this particularity, the findings of this study are not considered to be universally generalizable. However, educators may take the findings of this study and consider their application in their own contexts, whether that be the pedagogical context of a classroom or the context of the empirical study of language and literacy education. The concept of embodied literacies, while advocated in current literacy research, may not be easy to imagine, in terms of classroom practice. This paper provides an example of how embodied critical literacies might look, sound and unfold in a classroom setting. It also provides ideas for classroom teachers considering working with improv in their language arts classrooms.Practical implicationsThe concept of embodied literacies, while advocated in current literacy research, may not be easy to imagine, in terms of classroom practice. This paper provides an example of how embodied critical literacies might look, sound and unfold in a classroom setting. It also provides ideas for classroom teachers considering working with improv in their language arts classrooms.Social implicationsThe authors argue that providing students with critical encounters is an important enterprise for 21st-century classrooms and improv is one means for doing so. As an embodied literacy practice, improv in the classroom teaches students to listen to/with other players in the improv scene, become attuned to their movements and move responsively with those players and the audience. It opens up spaces for critically reflecting on ways of being and doing, which, in turn, may inform students’ movements in further associations with each other both in class and outside the walls of their school.Originality/valueIn this paper, building on work conducted by Author 1, the authors extend traditional notions of critical literacy. The authors advocate for developing critical learning opportunities, such as classroom improv, which can actively engages students in critical encounter. In this vein, rather than viewing critical literacy as critical framing that requires distancing between the learner and the topic, the posthuman critical literacy the authors put forward engages the learner in connecting with others, reflecting on those relations, and in doing so, being transformed. That is, through critical encounter, rather than only enacting transformation on texts and/or material contexts, learners themselves are transformed.

Post-Qualitative Inquiry: Four Balancing Acts in Crafting Alternative Stories to Live By

Post-qualitative inquiry can be seen to challenge—not fix—at least four elements of what Elizabeth St. Pierre calls conventional humanist qualitative inquiry: the nature of data, the role of methods, the quest for increasing clarity, and the idea of an individual “voice.” In conducting post-qualitative research rather than offering replacements for these or completely renouncing them, I outline four key balancing acts. Unless understood as continuous acts of balancing, post-qualitative inquiry runs a risk of being identified as yet another isolated fortress of righteousness.

Standing at One’s Post: Post-Qualitative Inquiry as Ethical Enactment

In this article, I advocate for a reading of the “post” as a type of watchful cartographic practice that bears productive similarity to Foucault’s project of building a “history of the present.” I then consider the implications of such mapping practices for post-qualitative inquiry, which I understand as a type of ethical enactment desperately needed given the inequities and systems of exploitation that govern our contemporary moment. I end with a call for post-qualitative inquirers to articulate an overt ethical orientation toward change.

Post-Qualitative Projects: Exhilarating and Popular “Fashion”?

The purpose of this article is to “do something less intentional” with post-qualitative inquiry while thinking about scholarship and “methodologies” as hesitant moves and uncertain stances always in necessary and immanent flux. Coming from hesitation and uncertainty post-qualitative inquiry does not mean anything specific or particular to me. Rather, I focus on the potential embedded in post-qualitative projects while I also worry about creating boundaries around immanently shifting practices.

Postqualitative Inquiry: Or the Necessity of Theory

In this article, the author presents postqualitative inquiry not as a method with a script, but as that which emerges as a process methodology. This type of inquiry happens in the middle of things, in the threshold, as theoretical concepts and data constitute one another in an analytic practice of thinking with theory.

Why Post Qualitative Inquiry?

This article explains that post qualitative inquiry is not a pre-existing humanist social science research methodology with research designs, processes, methods, and practices. It cannot be accommodated by nor is it another version of qualitative research methodology. It refuses method and methodology altogether and begins with poststructuralism, its ontology of immanence, and its description of major philosophical concepts including the nature of being and human being, language, representation, knowledge, truth, rationality, and so on. Its goal is not to find and represent something that exists in the empirical world of human lived experience but to re-orient thought to experiment and create new forms of thought and life.

Plural Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Postqualitative Inquiry: Two Questions for the Field

What is the Work of History in Postqualitative Research? and Who is Seated at the Table? This brief invited commentary focuses on these two questions generated from the articles in David Carlson’s special issue about the postqualitative turn in qualitative inquiry. These questions aim to ask those interested in postqualitative inquiry to thoughtfully consider the work of making the multiple in postqualitative inquiry.

Relational Engagements With Post-Qualitative Inquiry: There Are No Blank Pages

In this article, I call for engaging in the post-qualitative “turn” with a sense of relationality to the past; that is, a commitment to turning traditions with care. In doing so, I point to the situated and constructed nature of methodology, theory, and even the post-qualitative “turn.” I also offer several questions (or cautions) for the field of qualitative research to consider in moving toward what St. Pierre has called the “next next.” I conclude by highlighting the importance of defining post-qualitative inquiry in relational rather than oppositional ways.

Possibles and Post Qualitative Inquiry

St. Pierre describes post qualitative inquiry as something that “must be created, invented anew each time” and as residing on an ontological plane of possibles. What we present below are a series of possibles.

Post Qualitative Research: An Idea for Which the Time Has Come

Post qualitative research is an idea for which the time has come. How long will this last? These pages represent a tentative exploration of the (im)possibilities of post qualitative research. Tentative biography Tentative contours (Dis)Order? (Im)possibilities?

Proliferations of Post-Qualitative Inquiry and Academic Debate

In this commentary, we consider the evolving and ongoing debate regarding post-qualitative inquiry as evidenced in this Special Issue. We suggest that the debate is productive and that concretizing what post-qualitative inquiry could and should be might foreclose the potential richness of the field.

Introduction: Working the Tensions of the Post-Qualitative Movement in Qualitative Inquiry

In this introduction, the authors briefly survey the field of post-qualitative inquiry, outlining innovations, tensions, and questions that reside within the current field. The authors follow this survey with a review of the special issue, detailing the call and the individual contributions.

Learning with vital materialities: weather assemblage pedagogies in early childhood education

Early Childhood Education in general, and Early Childhood Education for Sustainability in particular, have dominantly relied on an ontological framework that privileges children’s agency. This paper challenges this dominant narrative by attuning to the everyday ways in which children are moved by the weather within a multitude of weather assemblages. It attempts to illustrate how ‘learning’ could be achieved when bodies come in relation with, and are able to be affected by, other bodies. Drawing on ideas from post-qualitative research orientation that highlights weather-generated data, the paper elucidates how the weather acts on and comes into relation with humans and non-human bodies. It contends that noticing and engaging with the vitality of weather offers possibilities for creating affects and that this potentially leads to an attunement towards ecological sensibility. Notions such as ‘vital materiality’ and ‘lively assemblages’ are discussed as a possibility to go beyond an anthropocentric understanding of the weather, which could pave the way towards a more relational ontology as a basis for emphasizing human’s ‘inter and intra-dependence’ with non-human nature, and hence, arguably, sustainable living.