Abstract
This is the editorial introduction for the special issue “Unsettling Traditions: Reimagining the Craft of Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Inquiry.”
In composing this editorial introduction for a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry that reimagines the craft of phenomenological and hermeneutic inquiry, we are flooded with a sense of excitement for this moment in qualitative inquiry. There are a plethora of ontologies and methodologies to learn about, engage and wrestle with, and practice. There are innumerable opportunities to discuss, debate, and challenge our understandings and perspectives about what counts as qualitative inquiry; for whom qualitative inquiry should serve; and the politics, ethics, and purposes of qualitative inquiry, to name a few. As guest editors, the work of bringing together a diverse body of scholarship that unsettles our understandings of phenomenological and hermeneutic inquiry became an opportunity not only to examine what qualitative inquiry was or is but also to further explore how such traditions invite and provoke something new.
In this special issue, readers will encounter the work of scholars engaging with the craft of phenomenological and hermeneutic inquiry across various fields, traditions, and methodologies. These papers were selected for the different perspectives offered toward the following aims: (a) to explore new ways phenomenology and hermeneutics are being taken up in qualitative inquiry; (b) to reframe the possibilities and limitations of phenomenological and hermeneutic inquiry; (c) to entangle different theories, ideas, and methods with phenomenological and hermeneutic practice to craft new methodological understandings; and (d) to grapple with how posthuman, new materialist, and object-oriented ontologies might move and unsettle (rather than refuse) phenomenology and hermeneutics going forward.
Before introducing the individual contributions in greater detail, we pause to offer readers a sense of the philosophical commitments that guided our editorial curiosities and perspectives. Given that phenomenological and hermeneutic methodological traditions bear the same name and commitments as the ontologies from which they emanate, this special issue is equally interested in exploring the complicated ways in which ontology and methodology are bound up with one another. We further considered how the post-structural turn (post-intentional phenomenology, post-hermeneutics, alien phenomenology, hermeneutical injustice, queer phenomenology, digital hermeneutics, feminist phenomenology, radical hermeneutics) produces the phenomenological as something that shifts and moves, bringing about methodological innovation from philosophical tradition. Recognizing that both phenomenology and hermeneutics are concerned with the hyphen (Freeman & Vagle, 2013)—or that which takes place between the subject-object, subject-subject, or object-object rather than the subject alone—has created a new space for phenomenology and hermeneutics within qualitative research. The post-structural turn has called us to study the phenomenological as something that shifts and moves rather than an “essence” or fixed definition, a partial understanding that is both conditional and temporal (Vagle, 2011).
As editors—as well as researchers and practitioners—we see a critical need to move forward productively with, in, and through philosophical traditions. Perhaps “the foundations of what we think it means to ‘be,’ to ‘know,’ and to ‘study”’ need to be . . . displaced” (Vagle, 2011). Our interest was to seek what new movement might be created in the wake of unsettling methodological constructions that underpin phenomenological and hermeneutic inquiry, such as “embodiment,” “essence,” “bracketing,” or “interpretation.” What do we hold onto and what do we let go or reconfigure? What new productions, theorizations, and concepts are made possible through the unsettling?
Although a strong case can be made for the need to refuse one ontology to imagine another, we were not interested in such a project. Rather, we desired to explore the ongoing becoming of ontologies—an active process of creating where ontologies are consistently played with, stretched, made and unmade “within” their respective traditions and in complicated entanglements with and among “other” ontologies. In this way, our curation reflects that we do not think phenomenology begins and ends with Husserl, nor does hermeneutics begin and end with Heidegger. Instead, we were inspired by new materialist commitments to not add yet another specialized epistemology to the tree of academic knowledge production . . . New materialism says “yes, and” to all of these intellectual traditions, traversing them all, creating strings of thought that, in turn, create a remarkably powerful and fresh “rhythm” in academia today. (Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012, p. 89)
One of the most important and interesting debates, catalyzed by posthumanist, new materialist, and object-oriented ontologies, recently has focused on the centrality and stability/instability of the human in qualitative and postqualitative inquiry. This debate has significant implications for anyone interested in learning about human experience, including those drawn to phenomenological and hermeneutic-inspired traditions. Our special issue offers some ways to engage posthuman, new materialist, object-oriented concepts and insights, without refusing some phenomenological and hermeneutic concepts and insights. To do this work, we avoided embracing either-or ontologic dualisms and ontologic incommensurabilities—choosing instead to demonstrate important attempts and experimentations with yes, and thinking.
With new theoretical and conceptual understandings comes new methodological innovation. Haraway (1992/2004), Barad (2007), and Van der Tuin (2011) call upon us to diffractively read texts one through the other. Specifically, van der Tuin writes, “reading diffractively breaks through the academic habit of criticism” (p. 22). Furthermore, Barad asserts that “knowledge comes from the ‘between’ of natureculture, object-subject, matter-meaning” (Barad, 2007, p. 188). As editors, we wondered what knowledge can come from the “between” spaces of methodological thinking. How are these new theoretical conceptions manifesting in qualitative research? How are these philosophies being put to work to reimagine new methodological possibilities? What do these new conceptions open up for research design, practice, and analysis? What differences do these new conceptions make?
Given these aims and questions, we invited potential contributors to engage with these provocations and others, offering methodological insights and new potentialities for unsettling hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions in qualitative inquiry. Researchers who work “inside” and “outside” the traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics were encouraged to weigh in. Our invitation opened up a space for scholars to engage with how phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophies are currently being put to work to reimagine new methodological possibilities as well as creating generative spaces for research design, practice, and analysis. Each contribution explores new ways phenomenology and hermeneutics are being taken up in qualitative inquiry and reframes the possibilities and limitations of phenomenological and hermeneutic inquiry toward new potentialities. In what follows, we introduce the set of papers that co-create these potentialities together.
Specifically, the contributions that comprise this issue are as follows:
Contemplate the role of the researcher in relation to the craft of research.
Consider how phenomenology and hermeneutics are taken up as philosophies and research methodologies.
Evoke new hybrid forms for research design, practice, and analysis.
We have organized this special issue somewhat like a piece of music, with a prelude, a series of movements, and a postlude. Our editorial introduction is serving as the prelude. Each movement contains a group of contributed papers and closes with one invited “insight” paper. The papers in each movement do not cohere around a common theme. Rather, the papers are very purposefully grouped together because they are different—they each unsettle in different ways and we want each separate movement to collectively unsettle in unique ways as well.
In addition to the papers selected through our call for submission process, we also invited a small group of qualitative scholars to write what we termed “insight papers” or short pieces that invite pausing and considering by pointing to the most recent (and even future) theorizing and puzzling about the questions raised by this special issue. Jasmine Ulmer, Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, Michael van Manen, and Kakali Bhattacharya were not asked to serve as “discussants” in the traditional sense. That is, they were not asked to read the contributions and respond. Rather, they were asked to consider the purpose of this special issue, engage it, and discuss it in relation to some of their own work. We close the special issue with a postlude written by Mark.
To provide some grounding, we briefly preview each contribution.
First Movement
Laura Trafi-Prats thinks retrospectively with art and passages of writing produced as part of a study on aesthetic activity and urban nature with fifth graders attending school in a city in the American Midwest. She takes on the art philosophy of Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, and Deleuzian scholars to discuss how aesthetics and processes of art making can inform empirical gestures based on distance from and invention of worlds, offering valuable practices to attune toward the affectivity of post-phenomenological lifeworlds.
Jon Wargo takes us through a series of stacked stories, each highlighting how sound becomes a tool to illuminate and amplify the onto-epistemological nature of post-intentional phenomenological inquiry and researcher reflexivity. He talks across his own experiences at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s (MoCAD) homage to John Cage’s “How to Get Started,” highlighting the material ←→ discursive embodiment or what being in-resonance-with may entail.
Meredith Sinclair engages in hermeneutic phenomenology to challenge traditional transcription practices. She answers this call by developing a process of writing through transcripts, what she calls Event Memories, to create passages of narrative text that are incorporated into transcription.
Jasmine Ulmer reminds us that while there are many ways to frame how and why we go about research, the prevailing norm most often is to situate our contributions within gaps, or deficits, in the existing literature. In her insight paper, Ulmer wonders how scholarship might turn on its own merits, instead—suggesting that care and gratitude offer two important possibilities.
Second Movement
Helena and Karin Dalhberg, renowned Swedish phenomenologists and coauthors (with Maria Nystrom) of Reflective Lifeworld Research, compel us to remember that the perceived demarcation between descriptive phenomenological philosophies and methodologies—and hermeneutic philosophies and methodologies is not as clean as many have argued. Furthermore, they demonstrate that a wide range of phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophers offer valuable insights that do not line up with either camp—thus unsettling a descriptive–interpretive binary.
Bill Muth’s reflection on his experience with political resistance provokes us to consider whether intentional and post-intentional perspectives-in-play generate new ways of understanding the potentiality of political (and philosophical) resistance and whether their incompatibility might preserve the impossibility of a coherent account and a humility toward the claims we make about “our” experiences.
Tyson Lewis and James Owen explore a lived practice of philosophy that is embodied and entangled with other, non-human animals to question how performing posthuman/animal phenomenology can provide an opening to a new, deeper ecology that unsettles phenomenology located solely within a human-centric research paradigm.
Zitong Wei provides an Eastern perspective on the fusion of phenomenology and hermeneutics, advocating for cross-cultural dialogues that extend understandings of relational being to create new possibilities for qualitative inquiry.
Michael van Manen’s insight paper points to phenomenological philosophical roots and walks us through how the philosophical nature of phenomenology makes it quite unique in the social sciences. He helps us see that the “rules” of the social science research game do not apply in the same ways in phenomenology as they might in other “-ologies.”
Third Movement
Jaye Johnson Thiel and Brooke Hofsess invite digression to work on methodology, specifically through one phenomenological tradition: post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2010, 2018) and the premise that “(m)ail art is a catalyst” (Chambers, 1985, p. 15). This premise allows the authors to consider methodologies as joyfully and generatively digressive (Massumi, 2002) while also unearthing possibilities to abandon the confines of hypercapitalism found within academia.
Sheena Elwick and Bill Green return to the writings of Merleau Ponty as they co-theorize “moments of wonder,” or interruptions in the flow of things, and when something catches the attention and makes researchers think again and anew about the implications and challenges inherent in early childhood educational research.
Kristidel McGregor questions the provocative tensions gained by rethinking the tradition of phenomenology within a new materialist theoretical framework and seeks what new possibilities are opened in thinking the Husserlian concept that consciousness is always of something—how subjects meet the world.
A Phenomenology Collective considers a very important question in their article: How could we, as post-intentional phenomenologists, find ways to conduct research and cultivate activism in which we do not absent ourselves from the phenomena and the possible impacts of our efforts?
Kakali Bhattacharya puts post-intentionality in dialogue with de/colonizing onto-epistemologies to identify where these perspectives converge and diverge. Her insight paper explores the possibilities of hybridized, interdisciplinary work that crosses various borders, and argues that certain post-structural ideas have become so well established in her discipline (and others), that they have become a given, which has prompted Bhattacharya to immerse herself in exploring the role of nonsense and play in de/coloniality.
Fourth Movement
Melissa Freeman engages us in a substantive consideration of Gadamer’s ontological question about the mode of being of understanding and how it opens up a hermeneutics of engagement that alters the flow of history itself. Freeman asserts that an understanding of this dynamic process is crucial to how qualitative researchers engage with the theories and methodologies that guide their work—especially as the field incorporates an ever-growing range of philosophical concepts from past as well as contemporary scholars.
Stephen Smith and Rebecca Lloyd draw inspiration from Michel Henry’s (2000/2015) life phenomenology and radical reversal of world-referenced intentionality to explore flow affects, flow moments, and flow motions as a way to investigate when and how we feel most fully alive and, therefore, a radical shift in how phenomenology is practiced.
Jeannie Kerr explores the opportunities and limitations of engaging Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics in interpretation of Indigenous scholarly texts and the complications of a non-Indigenous scholar doing this work. Through highlighting the challenges of her Settler positionality and colonial dynamics in a specific inquiry project, she argues that Gadamerian hermeneutics provides opportunities for self-reflexive textual analysis.
Mirka Koro-Ljungberg poses a number of important questions throughout her insight paper, all of which give us important pause as we navigate a posthuman, postqualitative era. For example, she wonders whether it might be thinkable to imagine how inquiries without exclusionary strategies might operate in the shared and relational spaces of uncertainty and hesitation—and whether the critique of interpretivist, humanist, and experiential (phenomenological) projects have promised to deliver too much.
Postlude
Mark Vagle draws on an idea from the hit HBO series Game of Thrones to play with some of the key and foundational concepts and ideas that have animated the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions—suggesting that we can “know” some things and continually reimagine and recreate this knowing.
In closing, we offer our sincere gratitude to each of the contributors and insight authors and to Norman Denzin, James Salvo, and the entire Qualitative Inquiry team for bringing this special issue to fruition. We look forward to the generative conversations we anticipate unfolding from this collection of papers.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biographies
He has published his work widely in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Critical Studies ↔ Cultural Methodologies, Educational Researcher, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Field Methods, The Journal of Curriculum Studies, Curriculum Inquiry, Teaching Education, and Pedagogies: An International Journal. He is principal author and editor of Not a Stage! A Critical Re-conception of Young Adolescent Education, coeditor of Developmentalism in Early Childhood and Middle Grades Education, and he published Crafting Phenomenological Research (Routledge, 2014), which won the 2016 American Educational Research Association’s Qualitative Research Special Interest Group’s Outstanding Qualitative Research Book award. The second edition of the book was released in 2018. He is currently writing his next book, Post-Intentional Phenomenology for Social Change (with Routledge). Which is scheduled to be released in Summer 2019.
Jaye Johnson Thiel (Part-time Instructor and Research Scholar/University of Georgia) is deeply committed to studying issues of social class and educational equity in the context of early childhood studies. Her scholarship explores the intellectual lives of children and adults to work against deficit discourses about young people and their families, theorize place-based and socially engaged art practices for community research and spaces of formal and informal learning, and explore the production of embodied literacies in the everyday lives of children. Overall, she rethinks how educators, families, and communities might work together to develop practices and policies that work to expand pedagogical approaches and understandings of the constructions of childhood. Her work has been recognized with the Literacy Research Association’s Outstanding Research Award, the Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood AERA-SIG’s Emergent Scholar Award, and the Out-Of-School Learning Time AERA-SIG’s Scholar of the Year Award. Jaye’s print-based scholarship has been published in many research journals including the American Educational Research Journal, Language Arts, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Teaching Education, and Gender and Education as well as in multiple book chapters in edited volumes. She recently co-edited the book: Posthumanism and Literacy Education: Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies as part of the Routledge Expanding Literacies in Education series.