Post-qualitative Research Research Articles

Teaching, Troubling, Transgressing

The authors (teacher and doctoral students) seek to illuminate the transgressive experiences of teaching ↔ learning in a poststructural (PS) theory and research methods course. They aim to (a) illustrate teaching practices that open spaces for students (and faculty) to rethink, critique, unlearn, and ultimately un-inhabit dominant concepts and principles of qualitative research (QR) and the theory/method divide across research disciplines more broadly and (b) convey how thinking with PS theories become methodologies of post-qualitative inquiry (PQI). They used PS theoretical concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s scholarship to work with co-produced data (e.g., memories, artifacts from class, notes from meetings, and written responses after the semester) to demonstrate our learning in terms of assemblages of desire, becoming, lines of flight, and smooth and striated spaces. The examples shared demonstrate how they tackled essential, assumptive attributes of QR and attempted to embody discourses and practices against (post)positivist, interpretive, and constructivist sciences.

Post-qualitative line of flight and the confabulative conversation: a methodological ethnography

This paper is a methodological ethnography aiming to highlight the difficulties in using conventional methods in connection with an explorative philosophy; Deleuze and Guattari’s. Taking an empirical point of departure in conversations about the future with students in upper secondary school, the struggle to find a scientifically valid label through the focus group interview is outlined. However, combining the particular philosophy with a conventional qualitative method turned out to be an impossible aim since the ideals of the focus group interview departures in the image of stable subject simultaneously as the method is blemished by positivistic language and standards. By turning to post-qualitative research, which encourages new concepts and methods, the confabulative conversation was produced. Within these confabulative conversations, the aim has been to create a methodologically smooth space in order to enable movements beyond manifested knowledge in favor of the virtual and the not-yet-seen, and thus producing possibilities for something new.

“Do the next thing”: an interview with Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre on post-qualitative methodology

Professor Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre’s work focuses on critical and poststructural theories of language and the subject and what she has called post qualitative inquiry or post inquiry. She asks what might come after conventional humanist qualitative research methodology. She’s especially interested in the new empiricisms/new materialisms as well as new research practices enabled by the ontological turn. During St. Pierre's visit to the Finnish Educational Research Association (FERA) Conference in Oulu in November 2014, we had the opportunity to talk with her about post qualitative research around some questions we had sent her beforehand. We then transcribed, edited, and translated the interview, and published it in the Finnish journal Kasvatus (Education) in spring 2015. In this interview St. Pierre talks in the US context, where qualitative methodology is turning—or being pushed to turn—back to positivism with normalized and formalized practices, St. Pierre encourages researchers to constantly question the prevailing truths and the traditions they have learnt too well.

"Slow food" post-qualitative research in psychology: old craft skills in new disguise?

The present paper addresses several aspects discussed in the special issue on the future of qualitative research in psychology. Particularly, it asks whether in light of the overhomogenization of the term "qualitative methods" researchers actually can still assume that they talk about the same thing when using this terminology. In addressing the topic of what constitutes the object of psychological research and what accordingly could be a genuinely psychological qualitative research it acknowledges the need to return to the study of persons' unique experience. In light of the risk of "McDonaldization" in present qualitative research, it argues that we need to return to learning research methods as craft skills. It will then give an outlook on how recent developments in discursive and narrative psychology offer a fruitful avenue for studying unique psychological experience as people manage to 'move on' in a material world and in irreversible time.

Spatiotemporality, Anthonomasia, and Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Although many qualitative researchers have rejected modernism as a guiding theoretical framework, they continue to work within a space/time binary. Space and time represent two of our most fundamental concepts, and the associated binary operates essentially unquestioned. The concepts of spacing, temporalizing, and spatiotemporality are introduced to show how time is irremediably contaminated by space and vice versa. A strange space is opened up by the deconstruction of space and time, one in which every “now” is also a “point” and every “point” is also a “now.” This properly differential and original space constitutes one important aspect of a post-qualitative inquiry. Derrida’s work, Glas, is then introduced as an example of a text in which a spatiotemporal reinscription is attempted. Anthonomasia as a writing strategy is then discussed as a way in which a spatiotemporal reinscription can occur more deliberately. Examples are also presented to illustrate this writing strategy.

Collage as Analysis

In this article, the authors take up the question of what they do when they do analysis in post-qualitative research contexts. Working as a/r/tographers who see their artist/researcher/teacher practices as simultaneous and non-hierarchical, they use theory, writing, and collaging to think beyond work produced by “positivist, scientific storytellers.” Art-making within inquiry becomes a rigorous articulation process through which sense (rather than meaning) is tentatively fabricated. The article includes a three-part assemblage that conveys how the authors articulate thought through pieced fragments of data in ongoing movements of hoarding, mustering, and folding, the aim of which is not to conclude with answers but to pause, gather energy, and invite comments until questions spur them on again.

Challenges of ‘thinking differently’ with rhizoanalytic approaches: a reflexive account

Growing numbers of educational researchers are using rhizoanalytic approaches based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to think differently in their research practices. However, as those engaging in debates about post-qualitative research suggest, thinking differently is not without its challenges. This paper uses three complex challenges encountered in the author's doctoral research – concerned with the early childhood education workforce – to reflexively explore some of the implications of thinking differently with rhizoanalytic approaches. In particular, the author discusses ways of making correctives to: repetition and thinking differently, ways that subjects are produced as-and-in-assemblages, and, immanent ethics. The paper concludes with some possible implications of these challenges and correctives for research practices, and for debates about post-qualitative research.

On rhizomes, lines of flight, mangles, and other assemblages

This commentary offers an outsider’s perspectives on this Deleuzian- and Baradian-inspired constellation of ideas on “post-qualitative research.” My perspectives engage three primary issues: First, is this way of thinking about post-qualitative research still research? Second, the “post” part of the “post-qualitative research” label suggests movement and trajectory, but from where and, perhaps more importantly, to where and to what? And third, what is being accomplished by this shift to a post-qualitative framing of the social world, and what is being lost?

A voice without organs: interviewing in posthumanist research

In keeping with the editor’s call for this special issue, this paper discusses how a posthumanist stance has enabled me to materialize a different conception of the interview and interview data in postqualitative inquiry. More specifically, I am thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, the Body without Organs, one they use to enact thinking without a subject and to liberate thought from overcoded images in order to confront a reliance on objects or material representations to understand and explain. Using this concept, I theorize a Voice without Organs (VwO) as a voice that does not emanate from a singular subject but is produced in an enactment among research-data-participants-theory-analysis. The article concludes with an analysis of data from a recent interview project that illustrates how VwO is both produced by and producing different knowledge and suggests implications for thinking interviewing and interview data differently.

Methodology-21: what do we do in the afterward?

This paper asks “after what” and situates qualitative research in the present moment in the midst of various “deaths” and “returns.” With a focus on fleshing out post-qualitative research, it first sketches efforts to discipline qualitative research via standards and rubrics as a part of neoliberal govenmentality and then elaborates what post-qualitative might mean via four exemplars. The first is from Sweden, a focus on relational entangled data analysis in the feminist classroom; the next two exemplars are collaborative studies from Australia at the intersection of Western and Aboriginal knowledge systems; the final exemplar is from Egypt, a feminist post-colonial study of the women’s mosque movement. The paper concludes with a call to “imagine forward” out of troubling a narrow scientificity and enacting an “after” of neoliberalism.

Post-qualitative research

There are three aspects of this special issue that we as co-editors want to draw to your attention. The first is that we are, finally, “after” the decade of SRE able to ask what comes next for qual...

Posthumanist data analysis of mangling practices

In this paper, I argue against traditional coding in interpretive data analysis and offer a posthumanist alternative that offers qualitative researchers a new way to create ontological becomings in their reading of data. I begin with an overview of how humanism enables us to think qualitative data analysis as coding, and then counter human-centered inquiry with a description of Pickering’s mangle and its potential as a both a figuration and a different tool for analysis. I then give an example of a reading of data as/in/of the mangle. I show the agentic features of both human and non-human elements of the mangle to move away from epistemological representations of the “real” to practices of decentering the human in social science inquiry. I conclude that using Pickering’s posthumanist ontological theory of agency is one gesture toward the becoming of what the editors of this issue call post-qualitative research.

Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology

The article imagines a materially informed post-qualitative research. Focusing upon issues of language and representation, under the influence of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, it argues for research practices capable of engaging the materiality of language itself. It proposes the development of non- or post-representational research practices, drawing on contemporary materialist work that rejects the static, hierarchical logic of representation, and practices such as interpretation and analysis as conventionally understood. The article explores the ontological and the practical implications of this state of affairs, via a re-reading of a fragment of what would have been called data. Offering relief from the ressentiment and piety that have characterised qualitative methodologists’ engagements with scientific method, the ‘post’ could therefore be read as signalling the demise of qualitative research. Or at least, as inaugurating a qualitative research that would be unrepresentable to itself.

Recognition and difference: a collective biography

This paper opens the space of post-qualitative research through an exploration of how acts of recognition and non-recognition work on and through the bodies of individual subjects. Using stories generated in a collective biography workshop and drawing on concepts from Foucault and Butler, and also, in contrast, Barad and Deleuze, the paper explores the way these different epistemologies intra-act with ways of seeing/reading/being recognizable subjects.

Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

Wars. Somanywars.Wars outside andwars inside.Culturalwars, science wars, and wars against terrorism.Wars against poverty andwars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm?What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? Quite simply, my worry is that it might not be aiming at the right target. To remain in the metaphorical atmosphere of the time, military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, theirmissiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are wenot like thosemechanical toys that endlesslymake the samegesturewhen everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids—yes, young recruits, young cadets—for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for whichwe are so thoroughlyunprepared? Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late— especially French generals, especially these days. Would it be so surprising,

Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography

Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography

Possibilities and the Unintended and Unanticipated Post Qualitative Researcher

Inspired by Toni Morrison’s Sula (2004), this paper thinks through the use (broadly imagined) of literary texts that are experimentally read beside and through theoretical texts in order to prompt unexpected thinking. This approach places literature beside traditional research texts, rather than subordinate to such texts. The thinking and doing that occurs in relation to the tangle of texts, literary and otherwise, is already happening, even though often unrecognized. Differently attending to the jumble created by the multitude of texts that make up our reading lives might snag us in ways that open paths to new ways of thinking, resulting in novel approaches, or tangles of approaches, to post qualitative research. While literary texts are what is of interest here, the argument might extend to film, art, and other cultural texts not usually imagined as directly related to post qualitative inquiry.

Encountering Bodies, Prosthetics, and Bleeding: A Rhizomatic Arts-Based Inquiry

Once a resolute constructivist, new readings, new theories, new onto-epistemologies nudged me into an unfamiliar and frightening, yet familiar and generative, space during my first years on the tenure track. I found myself in an ambiguous and fluid space between the paradigms of interpretivist and deconstructionist posthuman and ‘new’ materialism theories, and turned to arts-based research to research-create and think-with new scholarship. This paper, artmaking, and video of my artmaking entangle and provide lines of flight through art-text encounters with what became three interconnected concepts that emerged in and, thus, guide this inquiry: bodies, prosthetics, and bleeding. These concepts emerged as generative entanglements of becoming different through artful doing. Inspired by the concept of rhizomatic assemblage, this work seeks to move through various openings, creating various slippages between bodies (of writing, of making, of images) to explore what artistic research-creation might become through post-qualitative inquiry.

Editorial: Postqualitative Curations and Creations

This special issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology offers a series of curations and creations from emergent scholars within the equally emergent field of postqualitative research.

Post-qualitative mo(ve)ments: Concluding remarks on methodological response-abilities and being wounded by thought

Post-qualitative research methodologies require us to work within, against, and beyond our methodological inheritance to respond to the world’s ongoing becoming. It is our responsibility; yet do we have the ability to respond to that which is beyond and yet-to-come? This article begins by asking this question of the process it engages in: concluding. Following an exploration entangled practices of textual closure, (fore)closure, and the clôture of metaphysics, the article expands outward through the relation between closure and responsibility. Specifically, the lived concept of response-ability as an engaged practice of (re)opening the lines of closure (beyond knowledge already known) to respond to and enact responsibility for that which is not-yet and/or to-come. Drawing from Kuokkanen, Spivak, and Barad, response-ability is explored respectively as necessary homework, as (not) hearing the call of the other, and as account-ability toward co-constitutive relationality. The article concludes with further lines of questioning as to what it might mean to responsibly inherit (post-)qualitative methodological pasts and futurities.