Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Resistance

Possibilities, Performances, and Praxis

Norman K. Denzin, Michael D. Giardina, Norman K. Denzin, Michael D. Giardina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367321451
• eBook ISBN: 9781000037722
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Psychology

We are global citizens trapped in a world we did not create. Our public institutions are under assault. Academics, media members, and everyday folks critical of the shifting public order are branded as "enemies of the state" by right-wing media and elected officials alike.

Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Resistance takes as its mandate foregrounding, interrogating, imagining, and engaging in new ways of doing critical qualitative inquiry in these troubling times. Internationally renowned contributors write to resist, to celebrate community, to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, and to advance new ontologies and materialities. Together they seek to develop new understandings and exemplars concerning advocacy, inquiry, and social justice concerns. And they share a commitment to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference. Topics include: embodiment, subjectivity, border crossing, positionality, praxis, and performance, as they relate to multiple understandings of resistance.

To that end, this book represents part of a global project committed to a politics of active and passive resistance. It is a politics of non-violence: one that bears witness to injustice; that refuses to be silenced or accept assaults on critical, interpretive inquiry; and ultimately refuses to abandon the goal of social justice for all.

1

POST QUALITATIVE INQUIRY,
THE REFUSAL OF METHOD, AND
THE RISK OF THE NEW¹

Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre

I’m especially happy to be here at the University of Illinois with you today on the occasion of the 15th meeting of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. I emailed Professor Denzin earlier and asked him how many people attended that first Congress in 2005, and he reported there were 550 registered attendees. I imagine this year’s registration is double that number. I was here then, and I wonder if anyone else here today also attended the first Congress in 2005? Does anyone have perfect attendance—has anyone attended the Congress every year?

I must say that we qualitative researchers surely needed a place to gather in 2005. Those of us in education had, for several years, been battling the scientifically-based, evidence-based police who determined that qualitative research could not be “scientific” because it was only descriptive and used narratives (see, e.g., Shavelson, Phillips, Towne, & Feuer, 2003). If you remember, in 2000, the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act mandated in federal law that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of educational research, though an article in the current issue of the American Educational Research Association journal, Educational Researcher, reported, almost 20 years later, that rigorous large-scale educational randomized controlled trails are often uninformative (Lortie-Forgues & Inglis, 2019). I wonder if we’re surprised? So we desperately needed to come together and decide how to defend qualitative inquiry from neopositivism. Norman organized that first Congress, and we came to Illinois in 2005, to the campus of this distinguished American public land grant university and to the Illini Union, this beautiful building from another era, to help each other think about the future of qualitative research.

And we’ve continued to come, year after year for 15 years. I, for one, come knowing I’ll find my people here, knowing that Norman and his colleagues who do the hard work of organizing the conference and are committed to inclusion and diversity, will once again make all of us, from all over the world, welcome, whether we’re mainstream qualitative researchers doing what Sven Brinkmann (2015) called “good old-fashioned qualitative inquiry” or whether our work seems “too way out there,” barely recognizable to the mainstream. Of course, the Congress welcomes seasoned and new researchers. Quite a few of my students have presented their first conference papers here, have met the senior scholars they call their academic crushes, and have returned to the University of Georgia with plentiful evidence that qualitative research is strong and vibrant, no matter what they may hear to the contrary. So many thanks at this 15th Congress to Norman and his colleagues who host us each year, to those who’ve served as officers of the Congress, those who’ve served on Congress committees, those who’ve organized and chaired sessions, and to everyone else who’s made all these Congresses possible.

Again, I’m very happy to be back in Illinois in May with my people—with those of you here this week who helped to invent qualitative inquiry decades ago and those of you who are new and perhaps can be reminded that it was, indeed, invented in journal articles, book chapters, handbooks, textbooks, in university methodology courses, and in conference papers like those we’ll hear this week. Perhaps it’s good to remind ourselves that we did, indeed, invent qualitative methodology, we made it up, and we’ve repeated it again and again so it seems normal, natural, and real. The onto-epistemological arrangement of what I’ve called conventional humanist qualitative methodology has been able to accommodate interpretive, emancipatory or critical, and even post-positivist inquiry that relies on a particular description of human being. In this way, qualitative methodology has been a big tent, supple enough to serve as a methodology for different kinds of research that begins with the humanist subject.

But I’ve argued for some time that neither humanist qualitative nor quantitative nor mixed-methods social science research methodologies can accommodate the posts—postmodernism, poststructuralism, posthumanism, and so on. Two of the scholars we now call postmodern or poststructual engaged the human or social sciences very early in their careers and found them problematic. In 1966, Foucault (1966/1970) published his best-seller, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences and, that same year, Derrida (1966) presented his famous lecture on deconstruction, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” So poststructuralists have not been strangers to the human or social sciences. As Derrida explained, one must know intimately what one critiques. Why are the human sciences and their methodologies problematic in poststructuralism? There are several reasons, but I’ll mention two today. The first and most obvious, I think, is that they are inevitably human-centered. Second, poststructuralism refuses pre-existing method and methodology. Foucault (1997/2003) for example, wrote,

I do not have a methodology that I apply in the same way to different domains. On the contrary, I would say that I try to isolate a single field of objects, a domain of objects, by using the instruments I can find or that I forge as I am actually doing my research, but without privileging the problem of methodology in any way.

(pp. 287–288)

So Foucault wrote that he used no pre-existing methodology which he then applied in his research. Instead, he made it up as he went.

Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts, such as the rhizome, are deliberately anti-method, and Deleuze (1962/1983) argued that “thought does not need a method” (p. 110), that method will, in fact, shut down thought, capture it, and consign it to the strata, to the normal, to what everyone knows, to the dogmatic image of thought (Deleuze, 1968/1994) that prohibits experimentation and creation. Furthermore, as they explained, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1991/1994; St.Pierre, 2017b) philosophical concepts are composed of specific components which change when the concept is taken from its specificity on the plane on which appears, so those concepts don’t travel. That is, they cannot be taken from Deleuze’s plane of immanence, which is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and pre-conceptual and then be sprinkled throughout a conventional humanist qualitative study that’s grounded in an onto-epistemology and an empiricism that are not Deleuzian. Deleuze and Guattari also made it clear that their philosophical concepts cannot be applied to organize, contain, and describe human experience as do concepts in the applied social or human sciences, like the concepts role in sociology and culture in anthropology. DeleuzoGuattarian concepts are philosophical, not intended for application to lived human experience but for re-orienting thought.

Derrida (1967/1973), another scholar we’ve called poststructural, wrote that deconstruction, one of his major philosophical concepts, “is not a method and cannot be transformed into one” (p. 3). For Derrida, a thinker with a method has already decided how to proceed and is simply a functionary of the method, not a thinker.

And Lyotard (1979/1984), who wrote that he found postmodernism in America, explained that postmodernists work without pre-existing methods or rules to create what does not yet exist.

Given these examples, it seems pretty clear that those poststructural scholars refused pre-existing methods and methodologies. But it took me some time to really understand that because of my training as a qualitative methodologist. One of the lessons I’ve learned is how very hard it is to escape our training. We academics come to the university for our doctoral studies at a particular time in our lives and learn the truth about this or that from the professors who happen to be there at the time. If you study with a pragmatist, you’ll likely be a pragmatist. But if you come to the university the year after the pragmatist professor retires, you might study with a Marxist, and you’ll likely be a Marxist. If you learn quantitative methodology, you’ll likely use that methodology in your research and teach it to your students. We learn what we’re taught, and then we teach what we know.

People often ask me where post qualitative inquiry came from, and I tell this origin story. When I was a doctoral student in the early 1990s, I studied conventional, humanist qualitative research methodology, on the one hand, and, on the other, I studied postmodernism and poststructuralism. It didn’t occur to me that the two might not work together, that they are, in fact, incommensurable. From the beginning of my doctoral research, my methodology training in qualitative research trumped my theoretical training in poststructuralism, which I confined to the literature review chapter of my dissertation, and I automatically leaped to methodology and implemented the qualitative research process. In other words, I began with methodology and not poststructuralism. It didn’t occur to me that methodology might not be thinkable in poststructuralism. It didn’t occur to me there might be a way to inquire without using a pre-existing social science research methodology. But my choices seemed to be either qualitative or quantitative methodology. I certainly didn’t want to do a quantitative study, and mixed methods had yet to be invented. Why methodology is so powerful is a political question for another day, though the feminist, Mary Daly, in 1973, warned us about methodolatry, the worship of method. In 2016, Erin Manning wrote that “method is an apparatus of capture” (p. 32), and I agree.

So I did a qualitative study for my dissertation research that really didn’t require theory. I just followed the process. I’ve learned one can do a qualitative or quantitative or mixed-methods study without much theory at all—and I didn’t actually use poststructuralism until I began to write my dissertation, taking very seriously Laurel Richardson’s (2000) belief that writing is thinking, that writing is inquiry. So it was in the thinking that writing produces that I first understood that poststructuralism and conventional humanist qualitative methodology are incompatible.

As I wrote the methodology chapter of my dissertation in 1995, poststructuralism finally kicked in, and qualitative methodology failed. As Derrida (1994) explained, deconstruction is not necessarily intentional—it is what “happens” (p. 89)—and categories like the research process, the interview, the field, data, data collection, and data analysis simply fell apart. I can’t overestimate Deleuze’s influence on my thought from the beginning. I’ve said that I read Deleuze too soon, so early in my academic career that any pre-existing research methodology could not survive his ontology of immanence and his philosophical concepts like the fold and haecceity that de-stabilized whatever certainty methodology promised me.

By the time I finished writing that methodology chapter of my dissertation, I had deconstructed so many concepts and categories of qualitative methodology that it was in ruins for me. Near the end of the chapter, I wrote this sentence, “I believe the persistent critique urged by poststructuralism enables a transition from traditional methodology to something different and am not too concerned at this time with naming what might be produced” (St.Pierre, 1995, p. 209).

But by 2003, I had a name for that “something different” and developed and taught a new doctoral seminar I called Post Qualitative Research to support students like me who studied poststructuralism and then could not use the big three social science research methodologies—even the supple qualitative methodology. For example, they’d study Foucault’s archaeologies and come to my office saying, “Dr. St.Pierre, I just can’t do an interview study.” And I’d respond, “Of course not,” because Foucault (1971/1972) made it very clear in his book, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, that he was not interested in the speaking subject because he worked in the order of discourse.

In 2010, I presented my first conference paper about post qualitative inquiry here at the Congress. In 2011, I finally used the phrase “post qualitative inquiry” in print and published a handbook chapter called, “Post Qualitative Research: The Critique and the Coming After,” and I’ve continued to invent post qualitative inquiry in my reading, writing, thinking, and teaching. I’ve written a dozen or so papers about post qualitative inquiry (Lather & St.Pierre, 2013; St.Pierre, 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2018a, 2018b, 2019; St.Pierre & Jackson, 2014; St.Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016; St.Pierre & Lenz Taguchi, 2017; Wyatt, Gale, Gannon, Davies, Denzin, & St.Pierre, 2014). I’ve presented many conference papers about it, and I’m writing a book about it now for Routledge.

It’s important to remember that, following Derrida, deconstruction does not reject what it deconstructs. Rather, it overturns and displaces a structure to make room for something different. So post qualitative inquiry is not a rejection of qualitative inquiry or any other pre-existing social science research methodology. It’s something different altogether and cannot be recognized and understood in the same grid of intelligibility as those methodologies.

So what, then, is post qualitative inquiry? Though the label “post qualitative inquiry” will always be inadequate and cannot contain the thought it gestures toward, it began, as I just said, as a poststructural deconstruction and displacement of conventional humanist qualitative research methodology in my dissertation in 1995, and, over many years, it enabled me think to something different. It’s certainly not another research methodology. It’s not a methodology at all. In fact, it refuses methodology. Notice that I use the phrase post qualitative inquiry—I don’t use the word methodology. So I want to be very clear that post qualitative inquiry does not begin with or use any pre-existing social science research methodology.

It begins with the onto-epistemological arrangement of posts...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New
• 2 Resistance Is Becoming Not Possible: Philosophical Inquiry and the Challenge of Material Change
• 3 Multiplicity of “Quality” in Qualitative Inquiry (Re-Imagined)
• 4 How Is Qualitative Data?: An Interrogation and Puppet Show Dream
• 5 Absurdity and Exaggeration as Forms of Inquiry: De/Colonizing Gendered Whiteness in U.S. Higher Education
• 6 Social Justice in a More-Than-Human World (Or, Growing Tomatoes)
• 7 Sitting at the Kitchen’s Table: The Accented Cowboy or the Straight Masculine “Boy/Girl of the Night”?
• 8 Towards a Performative Ethics of Reciprocity
• 9 Deleuze, Derrida, and Post-Qualitative Inquiry: Experimentation and Creation Versus Fundamental Powerlessness
• 10 You Say You Want a Revolution: On Resistance, Justice, and Changing the World Through Critical Inquiry and Methodology
• Coda: Trump and the Legacy of a Menacing Past
• Contributors
• Index