Post-Qualitative Research and Innovative Methodologies

Matthew K. E. Thomas, Robin Bellingham, Matthew K E Thomas, Robin Bellingham

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350062061
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Research in Education

This book explores the possibilities of the relationships between theory and method as enacted in post-qualitative research. The contributors, based in Australia, Canada, the UK and USA, use theory and method to disrupt established traditions and create new and alternative possibilities for research in identity, agency, power, social justice, space, materiality, and other transformations. Using examples of recent and highly innovative research practices which meaningfully challenge taken-for-granted assumptions in education and social science, the editors and contributors open new ground for other ways of thinking about doing research in these fields. Major theoretical perspectives explored and applied include: posthumanism, poststructuralism, feminist theory, ecofeminism, new materialism, SF, and critical theory and the theorists drawn on include: Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mikhail Bakhtin, Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Rosie Braidotti, Anna Tsing and Stacy Alaimo.

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The vitality of theory in research innovation

Matthew Krehl Edward Thomas and Robin Bellingham

The vitality of theory

We (the editors) use the opportunity of producing this text to provide a place for early career authors to conduct theoretically rich experimental work that contributes to conversations about the generativity and possibilities of post-qualitative research. Because ‘[m]aking knowledge is not simply about making facts but about making worlds, or rather, it is about making specific worldly configurations’ (Barad 2007, p. 91), theorizing has a generative role that cannot be overstated in conversations about making a difference through research inquiries and outcomes. We use an acknowledgement of the role of theory in research to place at the forefront of our minds, the unfixed nature of knowledge and the fact that theorizing is a boundary-making practice that is both limiting and productive of knowledge categories and processes. The vitality of theory in the making of new knowledge is a movement sustained across this text. Theory is vital, that is, it is both alive and essentially entangled with life. In this volume, theoretical premises and methodological designs are given life in real-world applications in schools, offices, ecologies, the margins of texts and the flutters of birds in a playground. This theory ‘has to be aware of the state of things in order to acknowledge current challenges and be open to possibilities’ (Ferrando 2012, p. 11). It is a premise of this text that its uses of theory should be capable of both directing nuanced attention to people, contexts, conditions, and relations and problematizing or transforming them, bringing ‘an energising, catalytic role’ (Lather 2018a, p. 74), and meaningful new opportunities for disturbance and/or coherence in life. Attention to the possibilities of theory means asking, how does theory provoke ethical onto-epistemological shifts (Barad 2010) that enable methodology, methods and data to be seen and enacted anew?

The authors of this volume are, in the main, Early Career Researchers (ECRs): those who are within four to five years of finishing a PhD. They come from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Some are more experienced academics who work closely with ECRs in reciprocal and theoretically generative relationships. Their choice to do this tentative and provocative work indicates something about their interest in what they might contribute to shaping the shifting and uncertain social, academic and chronopolitical times in which they are already entangled. This work creates an assemblage of the research of ECRs and those who stand with them in their projects, as a way of vitalizing the generativity of these early career works and their dispersive connections, outward and onward through the future. As ECRs, editors and contributors, Matthew and Robin came to the creation of this book via a strong pull towards the testing of new thinking and imaginaries and what they might offer to larger projects for better education, democracy and wider notions of planetary ethics. Equally, we came to this project through experiences as secondary teachers and then as tertiary educators with shared responsibility for the curriculum and direction of postgraduate Initial Teacher Education programmes. This has meant that while attracted to what have been sometimes termed ‘the posts’, as we negotiate these roles and feel the creeping influence of reductive, competitive and economically driven education, academic and research agendas, we are concerned at the magnitude of the task of reimagining these differently in ways that might not only provoke spectres of democratic hope but also manifest as forces for change. We are mindful that communicating not just why but also how this might be done is important (Apple 2013; Barad 2007; Bauman 2005; Bellingham et al. 2019; Lather 2018b).

The authors of this volume differentially and iteratively demonstrate a forward tilt – a future orientation. In brief and overt terms this is signalled in the authors’ desire for an ‘interrogation of the normative status quo’ (Vargova 2007, p. 417), in particular to present challenges to humanism and humanistic notions of identity, power, agency and education in research, but also in broader interrogations of normative notions of environment, place, space, time, history, technologies and materiality and the relations between these. Future orientation is also seen in the willingness of the authors to turn the interrogations on themselves; to consider the ethics of the ways in which we participate in life, relations, learning and research; and to channel this into the temerity to take meaningful risks and to experiment in order to seek new horizons. As St. Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei (2016, p. 100) state, ‘an ethical imperative to rethink the nature of being’ and ‘a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation’ are two of the enabling conditions of experimental projects that might help us consider ways of living different existences. Additional forms of future orientation offered in this book include a chief aim of the text, which is to engage others in the spirit of hopeful connection and democratic participation. Authors have aimed to use chapters as open invitations to readers to share in their theorizing, questioning, vocabulary and pedagogical tools and as encouragements to ‘leave sight of shore’ as Jennifer Charteris and Marguerite Jones (2020, p. 188) advocate; to suggest readers engage in their own research with courage, compassion and originality.

If you have found yourself thumbing this particular text, hoping to glean a neat summation of trends in the history, present and future of post-qualitative research practices, we are sorry to disappoint. Many fine authors have attempted to delineate such trends and should this be your need, you might see Lather (2013), McKenzie (2005), Preissle (2011), Rosiek (2013), Somerville (2016) or St. Pierre (2013). This book is for those unsettled by the discourses and agendas of these testing times and by unpredictable environments and their implications for democratic research, education, society, and the globe; and who want to explore theory as a transformative force in these contexts. If this volume is itself considered a particular kind of becoming space (Kristeva 2002) creating particular kinds of possibilities, a question raised in this rubble is: What is provoked or generated by this assemblage of theorizing and practice and how might we understand the potential for theory to make a difference in research and the future?

Post-Qualitative Research and Innovative Methodologies is structured around three distinct but interwoven concerns:

1. subjectivity, agency and identity;

2. time, space and materiality;

3. entanglements of innovation and methodology.

Our first concern centres around disruptions to notions of subjectivity, agency and identity. Agency and identity politics are well-established areas of concern in post-qualitative research. But where are research innovators and ECRs using theory to differently tackle these discussions and to transpose them into new applications of social theory and method? Such transposition creates new possibilities for established theoretical designs and for emergent ones. Differently theorized, the reconfiguration of the borders of subjects and identities, and of the nature of subjectivity, agency and identity vitalize new concerns and implications. These include bringing new life to understandings of what ‘participation’ in education, in research, and in life does or could mean to the multiple parties involved, and what might be productive in thinking about participation differently in this and coming eras.

Our second concern turns to material and spatial frontiers and thresholds of research possibility. On the broad but shared premise that humanism has provided certain problematic limits to our capacity to engage seriously, vitally and ethically with the range of ontic phenomena and the processes with which they manifest, the collection of chapters in this section explore time, space and materiality, through alternative space-times, digital worlds and ruptured metaphors. Notions of matter, corporeality, temporality, context, embodiment and virtuality blur and adumbrate. The material/immaterial nature of the landscape of which schools and schooling, teachers and teaching, society and environment are a part is troubled. Considerations of how these things come to matter, in all senses of the word, are opened up to new possibilities.

Our final concern is to explore the embodied and entangled nature of theory, methodology, method and practice. A diverse set of case studies of how authors have drawn on entanglements of theory and experimentation and discovered how innovative research methods then co-emerge are offered. These discussions of negotiations in uncharted terrains illustrate how theory can vitalize in unlikely directions and with new sensibilities and subtle changes in emphasis, opening other doors to understanding how difference and repetition work in the (re)making of the world.

The disruption of categories and thematic imaginings is a manifest pattern in the theorizations which follow, and has been argued for explicitly and enacted performatively as one of the ways in which theory is alive and may be given life. To begin with, conventional categories of disciplinary research work are eschewed. This book embraces theory from the fields of anthropology, youth studies, communication, pedagogy, education, literature, science, ecology, cultural studies, feminism and psychology. As Barad argues, the ‘cordoning off of concerns into separate domains’ makes it almost impossible to notice generativity. Patterns of resonance and dissonance are ‘elided’ (Barad, in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, p. 50) and the possibilities of entanglements are obscured. Intra-disciplinary research is research that is co-emergent, in which disciplines, theories and methods are not fixed constructs or practices, but are continuously co-emerging in relations together with research and the world. Consequently, dualisms and hierarchies of valued knowledge are also challenged, in particular the separation of the rational and the imaginative. Speculation and imagination are marked by many of the researchers in this volume as integral to the research thinking that needs to be undertaken. In addition to these common disturbance patterns, the authors’ work with theory as a vital force imprints certain other patterns of resonance in this volume, discussed as follows.

Glows of vitality in open-ended research practices

In the chapter assemblage in this volume are patterns highlighting particular glows of vitality enabled by new theorizing or new applications of theory. These enable insights about theory and research methods as ‘open-ended practices involving specific intra-actions of humans and nonhumans’ (Barad 2007, p. 171). In these open-ended practices, the acknowledgement of the entangled and relational nature of theory, methods, and data (Barad 2007; St Pierre 2013) means that what counts as ‘data’ and why and how data are attended to are matters of interest and importance. The ‘glow of data’ (MacLure 2010; MacLure 2013) describes the sense of frisson and possibility emitted as connections and details emerge in the research. MacLure suggests that ‘we are obliged to acknowledge that data have their ways of making themselves intelligible to us … On those occasions, agency feels distributed and undecidable, as we have chosen something that has chosen us’ (MacLure 2013, pp. 660–61). ‘(S)ome detail – a fieldnote fragment or video image – starts to glimmer, gathering our attention’ (Ma...