Introduction to Special Issue—Norwegian Voices: Postmethodologies Becoming Imperceptible

The rise of posthuman and new materialism/s has stirred up something both within academia and the worlds within and around us, thus these articles and writings also from the outskirts of Europe. We are from a small country but part of the world, and attempting to approach the imperceptible becoming/s and/or the in/accessible plasticity, the un/intended effects, and the im/materiality of social formations as, for example, gendered, cultured, racialized, and/or classed relations; epistemic bias and/or injustices ultimately calling for epistemic shifts.

We try through rethinking thought in qualitative inquiry, or challenging our thinking within, against, and beyond methodology opening to complexity. The aim is to exceed what we already know, creating layered-upon-layered thinking as entanglements, connections, and bifurcations of lines; all sorts of possible relations. Producing tensions that everywhere propels thought toward inventiveness; opportunities for knowing through continual, ever uncertain self-becomings; mattering processes that are poetic, political, and substantial.

There are eleven articles. They differ in scope, themes, and contents. Social and economic justice, leadership issues, biopolitics, governmentality, democracy, racialization, feminism, education, inclusion, art and arts-based work with children and students are the topics which are in one way or the other worked with and elaborated on. Research processes of producing data, killing data, and noninterpretive and not representative results are discussed. As far as methods are concerned, there are interesting suggestions: writing as method, poetry as method, pluralism as method, experimentations as method, philosophy as method, sensational methods, intensity methods, interviews as method, observations as method, shadowing, and so on. Potentially, all are transforming both thought and praxis.

This article introduces encounters between the researcher and toddlers, in which the interaction is performed and data primarily constructed through the arts. The aim is to exemplify, explore, and discuss such an arts-based data gathering, and to elicit its understanding as interviews may put forward other nuances of such a methodology. The article questions the dominance of the verbal language in interviews and discusses the core of the interview as a relational interchange of views, dialogue, interaction, and aesthetic habits of mind.

In this article, Anne Ryen discusses what institutional frames do to our immigrant students or how such frames may open or close opportunities. As the text unfolds, the students speak. What stories do they bring, and what stories passes unnoticed? This text is also about voice and academic texts as muted lives, or as flat versions on a felt board.

This is an articlepoem about educational justice and research. It is about writing as slow walking and seeing as spirit through wicked and uncomfortable topics and what they might produce. Through animating so-called Pikettydata on inequality ultimately inequity, the aim is to expand on notions of the learning self and expanded social contracts. Poeticization is seen as both a political and ethical imperative and method activating differences building in perhapses and never “is-ness” constantly possibilizing becomings and/as learning and justice. Natural-, human-, and social sciences and research are process-ontologically written together.

This is about writing for well-being of a former employee and leader at an ECEC, now on long-term sick leave. Her story and poem; her writings/Sis. Our stories and theory/practice/data/interpretive poems; our writings/Merete and Anne: Our companionship, company and compassion: Sis/Merete/Anne. Com. We aim at Deleuze and Guattarian safespace writing. In modern working life participation, empowerment, governance, and self-leadership are considered vital for creating good psychosociological work environments. We think with poetry to open up, explore, and fabulate. We call it poeticalization and storying and work and worlds and words or rather work/world/word/making/melding/mattering/Sis/Merete/Anne: www.mmm.com

The interest of this article is complex and multifaceted. Otterstad elaborates on the politics of critique as well as experiments with matters of methodology. To critically address critique, she uses seven previously copublished articles as data material. She wonders what an articleassemblage might generate inventively and relationally, also as critique. Resisting an idea of (re)presenting a summary of the articles, her wish is in line with feminist materialist diffractionists experimenting with what the concept symbiogenesis (Haraway, 2016) might offer together with critical affirmative thinking. Sympoiesis is making-with, and according to Haraway—nothing is making itself, which invites to think of evolution as co-evolution opening for intraentangling and becoming-with potentiality and change.

This article is an attempt to explore new concepts or try to reconceptualize leadership. Moe wonders how diffractions and leadership productions in smooth and striated rooms affect and are affected by bodies, work environments, and events. The research is based on thinking, talking, and wondering with glowing events after shadowing director Maria in the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) center Dandelion. As an encountering thought, a glowing event is challenging our beliefs and basis for discussion on how leadership is both smoothing and striating the space, sometimes creating turning points. The event is glowing as an example of leadership production affecting relations and well-being.

The aim of this article is to investigate experiences of shadowing as a method. Because shadowing comes in a wide variety of understandings, this article gives the reader a short overview of research fields and topics connected to shadowing. Knutas focuses upon shadowing teachers at a multigrade school in rural Norway investigating the research question: in what ways has shadowing arisen thoughts on challenges as well as contributed to preliminary results?

This article is based on an artistic research project reflected through analyses and experiences of performance events, filmmaking, and theory. The artistic research process itself, moving from a theater performance toward an installation concept, and in the end an improvised dance concert, was challenging in terms of methodology. The multitude of perspectives, focuses, and shifting movements urged Hovik as both director and researcher to search for new understandings of the whole event. With Henk Borgdorffs theories on artistic research, she could move between an interpretive, an instrumental and, a performative research perspective.

This article is an overview of methodological perspectives and theoretical approaches in a project called “Global musicking,” an ethnographic and a/r/tographic study at Romsås, a suburb in Oslo with a multicultural population. “Global musicking” investigates 14-year old’s relation to music practices, their musicking in their everyday lives, and what kind of hierarchies they navigated from/in. The aim is to establish new ways of analyzing global complex musical affiliations, identities, and practices.

In this article, Holdhus shares a journey of research on student–teacher reports on creativity pedagogies. The empirical material comprises of student reports on teaching creatively. The text draws on the literatures of creativities, creativity pedagogies, and professional improvisation, inspired by the backdrop of literature on narrativity and narrative writing. The text aims to discuss how creativity pedagogies can take place in different practical surroundings and to provide an example of how teaching in higher education can both contribute to research and be research based.

In the article, Andersen explores what emerges when encountering a processual art project European Attraction Limited, not as an art critique but as an educational researcher in Norway interested in race and racialization and how to create different ways of creating more livable worlds. The art project was designed as a human zoo at a jubilee exhibition in the capital city of Norway by Mohamed Ali Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner. The human zoo was set up as a “Congolese village” including 20 (primitive) huts built of reeds covered with palm leaves. Within the “village,” 80 presumably Congolese children, woman, and men were performing “authentic African life” as a partly entertaining display to spectators.